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China’s military shows off rifle-toting robot dogs (www.cnn.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Coming soon to a western military near you...

all 36 comments

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

This looks awful. The rifle keeps going up and down while it is walking, no stabilization and they didnt show any accuracy data. You might as well ducktape a rifle to a roomba.

Aiming at targets far away is very hard. Even if it has to stop to shoot, how does it aim? By moving the body of a giant robot dog? That doesnt seem it has the sensitivity it needs. If the rifle is moving that much during walking, how can you accurately aim at anything, since you dont know where the rifle will be aiming when you stop? The camera seems to be on the robot and not on the rifle and everything is jiggling.

Also why even use a full goddamn rifle? You wont have a human holding it, you can just use a modified barrel basically. Are they not embarrassed by how bad this looks? Are they so clueless?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Check out what Onyx Industries is doing with MARSOC if you want to get a glimpse of something much more advanced than this. Threat detection, tracking and characterization, along with precision shots, autonomous operation, and capable of working in gps denied environments. Vs the spot knockoff with a go pro. I know who I'm betting on.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/304458/20240508/robot-dogs-ai-targeting-rifles-ghost-robotics-onyx-now-under.htm

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/robot-dogs-armed-with-ai-targeting-rifles-undergo-us-marines-special-ops-evaluation/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

The gun is basically duck taped to clone robot dog. Reloading mechanism is just human. Lousy propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So the Chinese military has caught up to 2018 American YouTubers?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Doesn't even piss beer I bet

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Y'all need to watch laowhy86 and serpentza on YT as well as their OG "The China Show" ( and not the Bloomberg copy-crap CCPPCC kowtowing ). China Fact Chasers on YT has clips if you dont have time for long form content.

Xi-BaoXe. Winnie the Pooh. 6489. Free Tibet. Free HK. Taiwan No.1 Country! :-D

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

From the country that houses DJI drones I expected something a lot scarier and more sophisticated.

This looks like a fraud to hide their real arsenal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

it's a Boston Dynamics robot dog with a Type-95 Chinese Rifle on it.

I wouldn't count on a hidden arsenal imho after staying more than a year in Mainland China they have certain things that are quite impressive but a lot of it is built quickly En Masse. They struggle terribly with innovation but honestly that's just down to their education. However they are quite capable at copying a certain design and improving on it quickly that's basically the greatest Mainlander strength at this point.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm no battle expert, but this seems entirely impractical in cost, ability, readiness, and effectiveness.

"Send out the gun dog!"

immediately incapacitated

"Fuck it, duct tape this grenade to the Wish drone..."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I know someone will say it's for standardization and/or cost savings, but I love how it's always the jankiest setup.

Go drill a hole for a camera mount to it's head and glue a PTZ setup to it's back for the gun. It's like they just asked the security camera guy if he had any extra parts in their equipment closet and just ran with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

ah sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It reminds me of a Black Mirror episode

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

See episode "Metalhead".

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't find that scarier than the cheap suicide quad copters we've seen in Ukraine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

You probably should. Cheap suicide quad copters have a much more difficult time getting into things like basements.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but you don't just do one or the other. You diversify. If you had all of these coming after you, which would you find more deadly, the dog or the drone? For me, I'd say the grenade drone. You can manufacture a lot of grenade drones for the cost of one gun dog.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I understand that, but my point was you should find it scarier because it is another tool that can be used, except this one has an even greater ability to get people when they are in hiding. The Chinese aren't going to give up on cheap drones just because of this, but this is a "there is nowhere you can hide" weapon. That's really the point of it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Sure, and I agree it's scary. I just find the drone scarier.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Okay, but this can't go through doors on its own either unless it brings an arm buddy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Or, you know, has a big gun on its back.

You can shoot through a door.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just fly it through the window. The concussion alone kills and has the added bonus of dropping the ceiling down and possibly the house if it's a big enough explosion

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not all basements have windows. Basement bunkers tend not to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Time for an anti-dog moat, I'd say. Full of robot sharks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Coming soon to a western military near you...

China is playing catch up here

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Innovate to stay ahead, or steal tech and be slightly behind but never need to innovate

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

If you're going to operate with a tightly controlled information space for security reasons, it's going to naturally stifle innovation. It comes down to prevailing attitudes, where a pattern of generally challenging old assumptions and ideas is either encouraged or discouraged. You can either be loyal to entrenched ideas, which slows progress but encourages stability and predictability, or you can not give a fuck about them, which speeds innovation at the cost of more instability and unpredictability.

You can't really do both at the same time though, since it all traces back to the core attitudes of an individual person and how they operate within some sort of organizational structure, where they have superiors. You can either challenge the superiors or bow, but not both.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago (3 children)

And naturally it's a reverse-engineered BD Spot, likely even down to the software. Why put money into R&D when your adversaries do it for you?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It's the Chinese way.

And TBF it does just make sense when you're a nation with huge manufacturing capabilities up against someone with far stronger research capabilities.

[+] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Because they produce it anyway for various companies and then have their specific product lines, equipment, everything they aren't ordered to destroy and can reuse? Because IP laws are in a weird place there and many international relations are decided by the party, that have local production interests' in mind? Because they are actually good at R&D but as an economy oriented towards global market they choose to play safe and instead produce X but cheaper, dumping the price, as most of us won't buy anything original coming from there with that rep you yourself state?

Forgotten Weapons channel (that has a dedicated c/ommunity on Lemmy) reviewed a couple of their old brandless Type-something guns and the thing with them wasn't that they were blindly copying soviet guns, but tested and mixed components and ideas from different ones to achieve their goals, with one of them being standartization, and using the factories that are already running with small correction to their work rather than starting from the scratch. They adapt what works and produce it in bazillions of units.

I'm not a China fanboy and dislike their regime, but there couldn't have been a strong chinese economy without western companies chasing after cheap labor there. This golem was on clay feet before, but after a while it gained some independence. Not many companies who entered there balls deep can pull it off without a significant loss.

I know nothing of Chinese, but there should be a common name for their vagina dentata politics that make even pronounced enemies been dependant on them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A lot of countries develop by copying. I mean, there was a point when Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. were “copying” and often making inferior products. But they eventually became innovative in their own right. China is already innovating in some spaces.

Actually, America even did that during the Industrial Revolution. Francis Cabot Lowell tried to obtain the designs for a power loom on a visit to England. He couldn’t get the designs so he memorized how one worked. The English even searched his bags when he was leaving to make sure he didn’t steal the designs. But they couldn’t search his noggin and that’s how America got a textile industry.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Good point. But the switch from copying to innovation takes a long time. The US was basically an agrarian society until 1900, 100 years after Francis Cabot Lowell. London and Paris were centers of invention and culture.

NYC and Boston were backwaters of ignorance and people in funny animal skin hats, Chicago was just an animal skin trading post, and San Francisco was a flea infested tent village with expensive rent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Well part of it is China was a severely underdeveloped country. They had to play catch up and so they traded access to their large labor market in exchange for technology transfers agreements.

That said, I think it would be incorrect to say their economy is currently based on copying. They publish more high impact research papers these days than any other country and are technological leaders particularly in green energy. This has been such a rapid change though that I think people’s perceptions of the Chinese economy lag the reality.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Many of the difficulties we westerners have understanding the chinese culture and mentality can be alleviated by learning about the Chinese concept of "face".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

Now this is fairly basic and often cited in discussions such as this one, but it still plays a huge role in the Chinese mindset and under which their subconscious decision-making is happening.

Interestingly this has a lot of parallels to Klingon culture and their understanding of honor, if you happen to be a trek nerd.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think Bungie was making an assessment of the Chinese or anyone else with this detail, but in the Halo series the leader race of the alien religious collective called The Covenant initially achieved their power by reverse engineering and then utilizing the technology of an ancient galaxy conquering civilization. The human species, which based on the time period likely is very analogous to the US military, found that to be a big weakness because once they acquired some of the tech they were able to use it to improve on their own tools and weapons, but the Covenant never did because the ancient aliens were viewed as gods by them.

Not sure if i had a point but I thought it was a fun connection

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yeah, except in this situation the covenant send their member species to school on Earth to learn how to adapt the technology too.