Ghost Robotics is today announcing a major upgrade for their Vision 60 quadruped: an arm. Ghost, a company which originated at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, specializes in exceptionally rugged quadrupeds, and while many of its customers use its robots for public safety and disaster relief, it also provides robots to the United States military, which has very specific needs when it comes to keeping humans out of danger.
In that context, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Ghost’s robots may sometimes be used to carry weapons, and despite the proliferation of robots in many roles in the Ukraine war, the idea of a legged robot carrying a weapon is not a comfortable one for many people. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Ghost co-founder and current CEO Gavin Kenneally to learn more about the new arm, and to get his perspective on selling robots to the military.
The Vision 60’s new arm has six degrees of freedom. Ghost Robotics
Robots for the Military
Ghost Robotics initially made a name for itself with its very impressive early work with the Minitaur direct-drive quadruped in 2016. The company also made headlines in late 2021, when a now-deleted post on Twitter (now X) went viral because it included a photograph of one of Ghost’s Vision 60 quadrupeds with a rifle mounted on its back.
That picture resulted in a very strong reaction, although as IEEE Spectrum reported at the time, robots with guns affixed to them wasn’t new: To mention one early example, the U.S. military had already deployed weapons on mobile robots in Iraq in 2007. And while several legged robot companies pledged in 2022 not to weaponize their general purpose robots, the Chinese military in 2024 displayed quadrupeds from Unitree equipped with guns. (Unitree, based in China, was one of the signers of the 2022 pledge.)
The issue of weaponized robots goes far beyond Ghost Robotics, and far beyond robots with legs. We’ve covered both the practical and ethical perspectives on this extensively at IEEE Spectrum, and the intensity of the debates show that there is no easy answer. But to summarize one important point made by some ethicists, some military experts, and Ghost Robotics itself: robots are replaceable, humans are not. “Customers use our robots to keep people out of harm’s way,” Ghost CEO Kenneally tells Spectrum.
It’s also worth pointing out that even the companies who signed the pledge not to weaponize their general purpose robots acknowledge that military robots exist, and are accepting of that, provided that such robots are used under existing legal doctrines and operate within those safeguards—and that what constraints should or should not be imposed on these kinds of robots is best decided by policymakers rather than industry.
This is essentially Ghost Robotics’ position as well, says Kenneally. “We sell our robots to U.S. and allied governments, and as part of that, the robots are used in defense applications where they will sometimes be weaponized. What’s most critical to us is that the decisions about how to use these robots are happening systematically and ethically at the government policy level.”
To some extent, these decisions are already being made within the U.S. government. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, ‘Autonomy in Weapon Systems,’ lays out the responsibilities and limitations for how autonomous or human-directed robotics weapons systems should be developed and deployed, including requirements for human use-of-force judgements. At least in the U.S., this directive implies that there are rules and accountability for robotic weapons.
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