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If you think robot dogs and drones armed with deadly weapons are scary, how would feel about watching them duke it out against one another? Because that’s exactly what happened in a video that recently went viral on Chinese social media.
According to the South China Morning Post, the location where the video was taken in unclear, but the media outlet surmised that the robot dog was from the Go series produced by the Hangzhou-based robot developer Unitree Robotics, while the drone appeared to be a DJI T-series agricultural model.
In the brief footage, the drone and the robot dog can be seen squaring off in an empty field. The drone fires away at the robot dog, which dances around trying to avoid the fireworks. The robot dog returns fire as it attempts to evade the pyrotechnics, but the drone circles around and continues firing away.
The South China Morning Post could not determine if the drone or the robot dog were being controlled remotely or were autonomous. It does appear, however, at one point in the video that someone can be seen using some sort of remote control.
While the video is a terrifyingly dystopian look at how warfare could be conducted in the future, Missy Cummings, a professor of engineering at George Mason University in Virginia and director of Mason’s Autonomy and Robotics Center, told Live Science, “Surface-to-air missiles are highly automated ground-based systems and they already shoot at drones. But we are decades from anything like the video and even if that were a reality, all you would have to do is drop baby powder on all the robots and they would not be able to ‘see.'”
We just have to be careful to not let the robots lull us into a false sense of security with their sick DJing skills. As for the drones, we can always just shoot them down with one of our big frickin’ lasers.