There are all sorts of robots for military and civilian use under intense development and each new accomplishment in the field adds to the data to make new and more flexible units with widened capability. It might be interesting to present a challenge to the people in development to develop a “wild” robot that would seek to evade detection and capture and could be “shot” into immobility with a message modulated laser beam. There could be contests where hunters would try to capture the wild robots and retrieve them for a reward. They could then be re-activated for further sport. It might appeal to the people who might enjoy the contest but not like to actually harm a living animal in real hunting. It might also stimulate inventors to create more agile and adaptable machines for evading detection and the results could be applied to other robotic fields.
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Wow, cool concept! Robotic game animals. I suspect the hunters would want to shoot them with real guns though. The thrill of shooting a high-powered rifle is half the fun. You might be able to design it so that it could be shot in the "vitals" to "kill" it without doing damage to the real vital parts.
It shouldn't be much of a problem to devise a laser rifle that activated the beam with a pseudo cartridge like a real rifle and gave a convincing kick and perhaps a sound of a shot firing to simulate a real bullet going off. As a money making scheme the equipment could be rented or sold and there could be contests both amongst hunters to bring in deactivated robots and robot innovators to devise new ingenious robots that become more difficult to put out of commission.
Sand, I know you're not a gun fan, but most hunters are. While some hunters might be satisfied with a simulated gun, most of the hunters I've known wouldn't. Many hunters spend thousands of dollars and much of their spare time trying to put together the "ultimate" hunting rifle and mastering its use. They aren't going to want to use some mickey-mouse simulated rifle. One of the advantages of using a robotic animal is that you can shoot it with real bullets with actually killing anything.
Typo. That was suppose to say "...you can shoot it with real bullets without actually killing anything."
use real bullets, televise to pay for replacement - like robot wars.
I expect you're talking legged-robots like the Boston Dynamics Big Dog--very noisy, so not stealthy, but I've seen people shoot at RC planes--this idea can already come very close to 'hunting'.
With an RC plane, the radio and the engine are expensive-a couple-hundred dollars, though--the airframe is cheap. So armor the expensive stuff and make a fold-and-fly coroplast airframe and maybe this is already do-able.
It's not really a 'robot' if it's under human (radio)control, but maybe a person controlling it would make it more interesting?
Autonomous 'robot' planes that take off and land R/c are more common now, but I think to be interesting, someone would have to write some evasive-action software (sound sensitive?), but again, this is do-able.