New Scientist article identifies two projects currently under development by Foster-Miller and iRobot that will enable their previous robot models Talon and Packbot, which were designed for defensive roles, to carry weapons. Both projects are currently human controlled and do not operate autonomously.

The article also notes that ”A research request issued in August by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) shows that military robots are one day going to be asked to make some important decisions on their own. The ONR wants to engineer mobile robots to “understand cooperative and uncooperative” people, and inform their operator if they seem a threat. It hopes to do this using artificial intelligence software fed with data from a “remote physiological stress monitoring” system, and by using speech, face and gesture recognition. From this it would draw inferences about the threat that person poses.”

Source: New Scientist (subscription required)