Thursday, January 26, 2006
Robocop
Robot Cops to Patrol Korean Streets
The South Korean government has robot fever, and they're about to unleash a whole army -- literally -- of the mechanized creatures on their public. According to The Korea Times, the country will see the rollout of police and military robots within the next five years, thanks to a newly approved $33.9 million spending appropriation. Patrol bots will guard the streets at night, and even chase criminals, while horse-shaped combat bots will augment the country's fighting force. In both cases, the bots will communicate via Korea's vast mobile network.
To get things rolling, so to speak, Korea will debut a series of household bots in the private sector this October. Unlike domestic bots already released in Japan, the Korean bots will be relatively cheap, since they use the network to perform much of their computational work instead of internal hardware and software.