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South Korea Thursday unveiled a high-tech, machine gun-toting sentry robot that could support its troops in detecting and killing intruders along the heavily fortified border with North Korea. The weapons-grade robot can detect, raise the alarm, and provide suppressive fire, said Lee Jae-Hoon, deputy minister of commerce, industry, and energy. "The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot has surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition systems built into a single unit," he added. Lee said that hundreds of the robots could be deployed along the 155-mile-long (248 kilometer) demilitarized zone bisecting the two Koreas as well as along the country's coastline and at military airfields. With modifications, they could also be used to guard civilian installations such as airports, power stations, and oil pipelines. However, the government has made no decision yet on whether to deploy the robots along the world's last Cold War frontier. Equipped with visual and infra-red detection capabilities, the sentry robot can spot moving objects up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) away during the day and half that distance at night. Via "pattern recognition," it can distinguish between humans, cars, or trees at two kilometers in daytime and one kilometer at night. Suppressive fire can be provided by a machine gun on top. The robot was developed by a group of four institutions including Samsung Techwin Co. and Korea University over three years at a cost of some $10 million in government and private funds. Each costs 190 million won ($200,000) and the developers expect to sell around $200 million worth of them when they go on sale late next year. "The robot will also help cope with the expected decrease in conscripts in the coming years," Lee told journalists. South Korea has a largely conscript military of 650,000 against Pyongyang's 1.2 million-strong forces, but a falling birth rate means that Seoul will struggle in the future to maintain troop numbers.

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