John Long - Darwin’s Devices

For the latest on autonomous robots in war: L. G. Weiss, “Autonomous Robots in the Fog of War,” IEEE Spectrum 48, no. 8 (2011): 30–57.

Silke Steingrube, Marc Timme, Florentin Worgotter, and Poramate Manoonpong, “Self-Organized Adaptation of a Simple Neural Circuit Enables Complex Robot Behaviour,” Nature Physics 6, no. 3 (2010): 224–230.

Two groundbreaking papers by Lipson that you simply must read: H. Lipson and J. B. Pollack, “Automatic Design and Manufacture of Artificial Lifeforms,” Nature 406, no. 6799 (2000): 974–978; and J. Bongard, V. Zykov, and H. Lipson, “Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling,” Science 314, no. 5802 (November 2006): 1118–1121.

Bongard explains his approach on his web page: www.cs.uvm.edu/~jbongard/research.html.

Penrose the Elder summarized their work in this article: L. S. Penrose, “Self-Reproducing Machines,” Scientific American 200, no. 6 (June 1959): 105–114.

You can watch the Penrose machines replicating in this film, made in 1961: http://vimeo.com/10298933.

MicroHunter was invented by Chuck Pell, Hugh Crenshaw, Jason Janet, and Mathieu Kemp and was assigned to Nekton Technologies, Inc., US Patent 6,378,801. C. Pell, H. Crenshaw, J. Janet, and M. Kemp, “Devices and Methods for Orienting and Steering in Three-Dimensional Space,” 2002. A great place to get an overview of MicroHunter is in J. Wakefield, “Mimicking Mother Nature,” Scientific American 286, no. 1 (January 2002): 26–27.

For more on MicroHunter, see M. Kemp, H. Crenshaw, B. Hobson, J. Janet, R. Moody, C. Pell, H. Pinnix, and B. Schulz, “Micro-AUVs I: Platform Design and Multiagent System Development,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST) , 2001.

For more on Navy SEALs, see their website: www.navyseal.com/navy_seal/.

US Army Field Manual (FM) 100–105, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office [GPO], 1993), 6.

R. H. Kewley and M. J. Embrechts, “Computational Military Tactical Planning System,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews 32, no. 2 (2002): 161–171.

L. G. Shattuck, “Communicating Intent and Imparting Presence,” Military Review 80, pt. 2 (March–April 2000): 66–72.

Ronald Arkin, an expert robotics engineer, is the leader in considering both the practical and philosophical aspects of the ethics of using robots in war. His first paper on the subject is a good place to start: “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture—Part 1: Motivation and Philosophy,” Proceedings of Human-Robot Interaction 2008 , Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2008.

Ronald Arkin, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009), 2.