The robot’s ability to autonomously transport cargo opens up prospects for its use as a “courier”, a warehouse worker, or to evacuate the wounded from the battlefield. This was announced by Aleksey Bogdanov, chief designer and head of the laboratory of the NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika.
“As part of the work on the” Marker “project, the technology of transporting goods in an autonomous mode is being worked out,” he told RIA Novosti November 15 last year. According to Bogdanov, cargo containers, specialized capsules for evacuating the wounded, equipped with a life support system, containers with fuel and much more can be used as cargo. The robotic platform can independently load and unload containers, as well as deliver to a designated point.
In the future, such systems can be used to automate warehouse operations and autonomously provide cargo to remote units of the Russian Ministry of Defense, as well as infrastructure facilities of state corporations and private companies.
The use of a group of percussion robots in an automatic mode makes it possible to achieve the so-called emergence effect, when the system acquires properties that are not inherent in its elements separately. “When we have a group of disparate robots, it’s just a set of machines, each of which has a certain efficiency that can be quantified. As soon as we combine them into a group, the efficiency of this group becomes higher than the sum of the efficiencies of its constituent elements,” – he explained.
In October 2021, Russia conducted field tests of five Marker percussion robots. The robots operated in an autonomous group without human participation, independently solving the tasks of distributing targets in the group and reaching optimal firing positions.
“A demonstration sample of a grouping of ground-based robotic systems was tested. The group involved five Marker robotic platforms – three on a wheeled chassis and two on a tracked chassis,” a source told RIA Novosti on October 19.
A group of robots, without human participation, conducted reconnaissance using equipment and technical vision installed on board. In the future, together with a group of robots, it is planned to conduct tests using unmanned aerial vehicles. As the source of the agency explained, “due to aerial drones, the quantitative and qualitative indicators of reconnaissance are significantly increased.”
Marker robots were first introduced two years ago. A Russian-made combat robot made its first demonstration trip at the Magnitogorsk test site.
