Terminator Now: Robots Just Seized A Russian Position In Ukraine

But they have sharp limits on the types of terrain they can traverse, and not all enemy strongpoints are built at the end of paved driveways.

Even accounting for combat loads and the nature of the battlefield, human infantry can climb, jump, wade and otherwise traverse a large variety of obstacles unassisted, in ways that robots still cannot match.

The second major obstacle is the electromagnetic environment. While the term robot is often used to describe uncrewed ground vehicles, they are mostly still remotely operated, which means the operator must maintain a constant control link with the vehicle.

This can be done via radio link. However, these links can be interrupted by enemy jamming, or by unfavourable weather or terrain.

The operator can also control the robot by a fiber-optic cable, which cannot be jammed but limits how far the robot can travel from its operator. A cable can also be severed by a blast, shrapnel or just adverse terrain.

The alternative is autonomy, and these ground robots do increasingly have some autonomous capabilities. But so far, this tends to be for specific tasks such as highlighting identified enemy positions, rather than being autonomous in the sense of driving and controlling themselves.

Autonomous driving is a massive challenge. Residents of London may have seen Waymo autonomous cabs in recent weeks, moving through the city's streets ahead of their public rollout. But following traffic laws and (more-or-less) consistent road markings is still a huge and complex task.

Navigating a battlefield in a complex 3D environment is at least as complex, requiring a huge amount of processing power. That power can either be put aboard the robot itself, which significantly increases its cost and complexity, or done remotely and transmitted – which brings us back to the issue of control link vulnerability.

While these are serious challenges for ground robots in an infantry role, they pose less of an issue in a range of critical support tasks. Robots have, for example, been extensively used by Ukraine for battlefield casualty evacuation, front-line resupply, combat engineering, mine laying and mine clearing.