No more human casualties.

Decade? The Russians already have autonomous ground combat vehicles as do the US.

But anyway. I'm not really sure what use cases these actually have. Drones sure, they make perfect sense but these really can only be used in proxy wars and maybe some certain circumstances. The Problem as I see it is thus, the idea these days is to have highly mobile mechanised infantry, infantry that can be mounted in an APC and sent rapidly to where it needs to go, in that case what role does an autonomous ground vehicle have? The Idea that many such as Rheinmetal have is that these will support the infantry but the Infantry already have the APC to support them and bringing along a land drone would take space if it's possible at all(their Mission Master is basically the size of a car, indeed one of it's roles is to carry things for the infantry which again they have an APC for) these land drones would need whole supply organisations all of their own and would get in the way of the fast and mobile nature of modern war, they are also going to take time to set up and are not always that fast.

>>459
That's not a bad way of going about but there are flaws, the biggest being how expensive that would be. You would also need to find a way to deploy it in hostile areas without being seen as well as what you mentioned with not always being fast.
I think the best approach would be to utilize heavy payloads one big enough to cause a mess so massive you wouldn't need to fire another but there's an issue with that too; something like that can't be fired to reach long distances and needs special launch pads but if we were to find a way to mobilize that like we do SAMs.
So imagine this a mobile robot that can cross any land mass would need only one pilot and a scout carrying a single massive payload, it could also hide from radar. That would make any nation carrying it a true super power.

>>459
Their main marketing line for Spot seems to be towards using it where humans cannot go; the one example video they have is targeted at industrial accidents, allowing for remote surveillance and limited troubleshooting with it's claw arm. As was also fairly publicized, a Spot was sold to a police department in NYC I believe.

>>460
One major sticking point in regards to mobility and usage as I see it, is that Spot likely cannot be used anywhere that has loose soil or mud. It's "feet" are very small, meaning a large amount of weight gets put on a small space rather than being spread out. In places with mud, or sand, Spot will likely get stuck quite easily. Ditto when it comes to light, uncompacted snow as well.

It does seem most likely that Spot will be best suited towards industrial accidents, since there are many unique robots used for such purposes, but all are fairly simple in operation and are often unable to traverse obstacles like rubble or stairs due to being tracked rather than having legs.

Perhaps it could be useful in military applications as a portable manpad launching system. Granted, with limited range and carrying capacity, it's hard to imagine circumstances where it would even be usable. Perhaps then it would be suited towards urban combat, building clearing, and EOD work?

more of a random topic not suited for qa

Boston Dynamics is owned by Toyota or something these days, so anything they make will certainly be looked at for Japanese domestic use. Robots don't need to be tools of war.