Cute, useful, or lethal, robot dogs are here to stay

People have been building animal-shaped machines for centuries, winding clockwork birds and gilded lions for the amusement of courts. The robot dog belongs to that genealogy more than its manufacturers tend to acknowledge. The desire to produce an artifact that appears, even in some limited sense, to move of its own will is old.

What has changed is the capacity. Servo-motors, reinforcement learning, whole-body control, lidar, thermal cameras, and four-dimensional sensing have replaced the balance spring and the escapement wheel. The modern robot dog’s gait is careful and deliberate, the way a living dog picks across a tile floor it does not trust. The machine lifts each foot with a kind of exaggerated prudence, sets it down, adjusts, proceeds.

The tension is political as well as commercial.

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