The robots were ready. Their weapons were primed. The battle was raging, and in need of new infantrymen — even if those troops weren’t necessarily human.

But in the summer of 2007, the U.S. Army decided not to send its trio of armed robots onto the streets of Baghdad. Partially, it was out of safety fears; no one wanted the blue screen of death to actually become lethal. Partially, it was a nod to appearances; a robot grunt shooting a little kid would have been a public relations disaster.

But there were technical reasons, too — reasons that continue to plague U.S. development of ground robots, and may hamper the development of the unmanned infantry for years to come. Communications between the robot and its human operator remain spotty, at best. The machine still isn’t particularly good at executing orders on his own. Perhaps most importantly, the robots have poor eyesight; the machines still can’t see as far as they can shoot.

“If I’ve got a robot with a machine gun that’s got a max range of 800 meters, and a camera that can only see a couple meters, well, that’s a problem,” Lt. Col. Stewart Hatfield, chief of the lethality branch of the U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center, told an audience at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington on Tuesday. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel of my own there, as well.)

“Are we gonna get to the point of a Terminator in the [infantry] squad?” Hatfield asked. “Maybe. But we’ve got a long way to go in terms of trust and confidence and autonomy.”

The U.S. military is looking give munitions to more and more unmanned aerial vehicles; even the relatively-small Shadow drone is getting armed. These UAVs have, in many ways, become replacements for more conventional forces; just look at the drone war over Pakistan. On the ground, it’s a different story. The Defense Department continues to be gung-ho about ground robots for reconnaissance and bomb-handling. But weaponizing those ‘bots? It’ll be years and years before the Pentagon is ready to seriously pursue that.

At one time, the Marines had their own formal “requirement” — an official statement of military need — for a weapons-toting robot. The Corps filled it with a fearsome, grenade-launching machine called Gladiator (pictured above). The robot could deal out all sorts of destruction. But not necessarily with any confidence: “the optics didn’t work,”said James Lasswell, with the Marine Cops Warfighting Lab. As a result, the program was cancelled, and now, “there’s no requirement for an armed robot.”

There’s also the question of control. Ground robots have become easier for people to remotely operate; many ‘bots now rely on an XBox-style controller. But a human still has to work the d-pad in order for the machine to go anywhere. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advanced sensors, robots still have a tough time seeing and navigating uneven terrain. Which means you can’t just give Johnny Five an order, and he’ll carry it out.

In other words, ground robots, as currently configured, don’t help the military get its job done with fewer soldiers. They don’t save the military money, either. No wonder the Pentagon isn’t particularly excited about mechanical grunts.

“It’s a burden on the infantry,” Lasswell said. “The problem is not the lethality issue. It’s in control of the [robot's] movement.”

On the other hand, ground robots are proven life-savers; ask any bomb squad technician, who now can dismantle an explosive by moving a joystick, instead of standing over the thing himself. That’s one of the the reasons why Ed Godere, with the robot-maker Qinetiq North America, believes that America has a “moral obligation” to field these unmanned infantrymen. “If the capability exists, we should deploy it.”

A remotely-operated, gun-toting ‘bot gives the flesh-and-blood soldier some distance from the battlefield — allowing him to make decisions without being scared or nervous. That “emotional environment,” Godere argued, “is a bigger threat than an armed robot.”

Godere is hardly an impartial observer, of course. His company made those weaponized robots that were shipped to Iraq in 2007, and Qinetiq’s machines continue to be the robots of choice for many military bomb squads.

So Godere knows his robots’ limitations. One of the biggest continues to be communications between human and machine. Radio frequency jammers are among the many things that continue to cause interference. Plus, the flesh-and-blood operator has to be within “line of sight” of his radio-controlled robot. That means if a bomb-bot has to go into a culvert to hunt for an explosive, the soldier has to hover over it — and put himself right in the blast radius.

Ground robots has proven themselves to be invaluable to troops in places like Afghanistan. But they won’t be replacing those people any time soon.

Photo: DOD