The Marine Corps infantry units might admit a new group to its infantry.
No, I’m not talking about women. I’m talking about robots. A four-legged, all-terrain, remote-controlled battlefield robots named Spot.
The Marine Corps tested Spot, the latest version of the battlefield robot developed by Google, at Marine Corps Base Quantico last week. To test its endurance and agility, Spot had to climb wooded, urban and mountainous terrain. In one scenario, Spot entered a building ahead of Marines to simulate securing the area before human troops were put in danger.
Spot can be controlled from 500 meters away. If Marines elected to send the robot ahead into a building, they would have plenty of leeway in case a trap was waiting inside. If the military adopts battlefield robots, it can also transport heavy equipment like robotic pack mules.
“Spot is great and has exceeded the metrics that we’ve provided,” Captain James Pineiro, head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab’s Quantico branch, told Defense Media Activity. “The Marines [working with Spot] have been very receptive to the new technology, embrace it and came up with new ideas we couldn’t even dream up. We see it as a great potential for the future dismounted infantry. We want to continue to experiment with quadruped technology and find ways that this can be employed to enhance the Marine Corps warfighting capabilties.”
See Spot in action in this introductory video: