The goal of the U.S. Army is be comprised of 30% robotic forces by approximately 2020.

"When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot," says Bill Smart, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

"You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots."

All of the Army's robotic force is teleoperated, meaning there is someone operating the robot from a remote location, often with a joystick and a computer screen. "It's a chain of command thing. You don't want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system. You want to have a human hit the button,"says Smart. "You don't want the robot to make the wrong decision. You want to have a human to make all of the important decisions."

While movies display robots as intelligent beings, Smart and Doug Few, who is Smart's Ph.D. student, are not necessarily looking for intelligent decision-making in their robots. Instead, they are working to develop an improved, "intelligent" functioning of the robot.

"It is often times like the difference between an adverb and noun. You can act intelligently or you can be intelligent. I'm much more interested in the adverb for my robots," says Few.

Few is also interested in the delicate relationship between robot and human. He is working to develop a system in which the robot can carry out a task while keeping a human in the loop and with the ability to create new goals for the robot. Few says that there are many issues that may require "a graceful intervention" by humans and these need to be thought of from the ground up. To work toward this goal, Few has incorporated what many would simply consider a toy into robotic programming. Using a Wii controller, the fifth home video game released by Nintendo, Few capitalizes on natural human movements to communicate with the robot. Using something as simple and as commonplace as this video game controller has added benefits in a military setting.

Rather than carting around a heavy laptop and being forced to focus on a joystick and screen, soldiers in battle can stay alert and engaged in their surroundings while performing operations with the robot.

Robots are already finding a place among deployed troops. For there is already a growing arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles as well as ground robots for explosives detection in use by the military.

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