Mumbai: Unmanned robots equipped with weapons being used by armed forces in battle should be banned since they lack the intelligence to distinguish civilians from combatants, a robotics expert said here.

"I intend to start working towards introducing a ban on these robots until they can show the robots can discriminate a civilian from a combatant," Noel Sharkey, an expert on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), told PTI.

Sharkey, a Professor of AI and robotics in the University of Sheffield, who was in Mumbai said robots unlike soldiers do not have the power to distinguish between persons found on a battle field.

"If the people we are fighting put a gun in the hand of a child and send him on to the battlefield, the robot would as per its programming kill or maim the child. A soldier in any Army is bound by rules of the Geneva Convention and can make an intelligent choice on what course of action to take," he said.

Sharkey pointed out that the US and UK armies were already planning to use robot soldiers and unmanned air vehicles in urban warfare like Iraq and Afghanistan and says it is a form of "riskless warfare", where there is no threat to one's own soldiers.

"The problem with this sort of riskless warfare is that it creates more danger for a civilian population and collateral damage will be higher," Sharkey, who has been in the field of robotics for close to 30 years, said.
Source : PTI