DARPA plans smart, tough, fighting robots

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to spend $7 million on a project named "Avatar" to develop interfaces and algorithms for robots that would work with soldiers, or what DARPA calls a "semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine," Katie Drummond writes in Wired's Danger Room.

The robots should be smart and agile enough to do “room clearing, sentry control [and] combat casualty recovery” at the direction of their human partners, the story also says.

The program seems to be the next logical step in DARPA's robotics research; the agency has already been investigating increasingly autonomous, lifelike robots, including AlphaDog, a giant, lumbering, four-legged beast meant to haul gear during combat, the article adds.