Defcon Is Bringing Back Its Contest for the Best Autonomous Shooting Robot

The annual hacker conference Defcon just announced it's bringing back its Defconbots shooting competition after a five-year hiatus. Contestants must design, build, and program a robot that is able to distinguish and shoot down moving targets without any human control. Check out the video; it's pretty awesome, really geeky, and somewhat ominous.

The Defconbots competition started in 2004, at which point the autonomous bots' task was simply to pick up a ping pong ball and carry it across the floor. The next year it progressed into picking up ping pong balls, carrying them across the floor, and shooting down cans with them. Then the robot weapons started shooting pellets, Nerf darts, and this year, lasers.

The rules:

- The robot must be fully autonomous. No secretly remote-controlled bots.

- It must have an aiming mechanism and a laser.

- It must fit in a 1x1 meter cube.

Each round, two bots will face off to shoot out illuminated, ping pong ball-sized targets, some of which will be moving, from about 10 feet away. The winner advances to the next round.

This year, the conference organizers want to put the emphasis on the coding part of the project, rather than physically building the machine. So they've published a reference design for the robot construction on github to use as a jumping off point. Programmers, get cracking; the event's set for early August.

Defconbots is one of many robot competitions held in the tech-nerd corners of society. When it was discontinued in 2008 it reappeared as the shooting gallery contest at Robogames, which are known as the "Olympics for robots." Robogames also hosts the popular Mech Warfare competition—robots fighting each other.

As the saying goes, it's all just fun and games—until it isn't. The bots showcasing their firing skills are programmed to be harmless. But give them a lethal weapon and train them to pick out humans instead of plastic spheres and you're not too far off from science fiction's dystopian depiction of robots capable of killing people. And really, with weaponized drones, computerized soldiers in combat, and the Defense Department building smart autonomous robots, the sci-fi fear of killer robots isn't really sci-fi anymore. The UN's even called for a moratorium on lethal autonomous robots and groups like the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and the Stop the Killer Robots campaign are making noise.

But at Defcon, hackers are learning how to program bots to aim and shoot down their targets. No wonder the military frequents the conference looking for recruits.