Russia’s ‘Fake’ Robot Gun Dog — And The Real Armed Robots

One of the unexpected stars of Russia’s Army-22 trade show was a robot dog dressed as a ninja and carrying an RPG-26 rocket launcher. However, the Twittersphere quickly spotted that the outfit looked like an attempt to conceal a Go-1 robot made by Chinese company Unitree, and the killer robodog was quickly labeled as a fake. But there is more going on here than you might think.

Firstly, the Russian makers of the “M-81 robot” seem to be open about the fact that they use Chinese hardware, though they say they hope to produce a Russian version. The company, Machine Intellect, is based in St. Petersburg, and says their robot dogs could transport supplies, act as scouts, and carry out attack missions.

On the face of it then, we have a company adapting commercially available robotic hardware to take on a new role, with no reason not to believe that far from being a fake, it is a viable combat platform.

But there are some red flags.

Machine Intellect does not seem to have any internet presence at all. In fact, the only reference online, apart from their appearance at Army-22, seems to be a publicity video posted last month called ‘Robot Dog Hunt’ showing exactly the same robot supposedly stalking two soldiers in a forest. The company has no visible background or track record in this area.

Independent Russian newspaper The Insider notes that Intellect Machines was only registered as a company in April this year, with a legal address at a residential property. They note that the CEO, Alexey Aristov, “previously acted as a director and head of firms that the tax service liquidated, recognizing as inactive.”

Meanwhile Russian technology news site IBXT reports that the M81 is priced at 1 million rubles ($16,000). This is interesting because the Unitree Go-1 only costs about $2,700.

This sounds remarkably similar to what happened during the production of Russia’s Orlan-10 drones. It turned out that the Russian suppliers were buying Chinese electronics cheaply, then selling them to the Russian army at vastly inflated prices.

“There is no question at all that someone stole 446 million rubles,” according to an investigation into the affair published in 2021.

So the rocket-toting robot dog looks less like Russia trying to impress the world with its advanced technology, and more like Russian defense contractors engaged in their customary occupation of trying to get the military to pay outrageously inflated prices for off-the-shelf technology.

However, there is a more serious issue. The Ukraine conflict has seen the large-scale use of bomber drones, consumer quadcopters adapted to drop improvised munitions made from grenades. Ukraine in particular has made effective use of this technology, and their drone operators are good enough to drop grenades through open vehicle hatches and into trenches. They even use racing drones as loitering munitions able to strike through open windows and doorways.

If you can put a grenade on a commercial Chinese drone and get a new capability, can you stick a weapon on a commercial Chinese robot for a similar benefit?

The question was been partially answered by YouTube channel I Did A Thing fronted by Alex Apollonov, in an episode where he fitted a Unitree robot dog with an assault rifle. Their setup had the weapon high above the robot’s center of gravity, so it had real trouble dealing with the recoil, which kept knocking it over during sustained firing.

“The dog really can’t handle the gun and always ends up on the ground,” Apollonov concludes.

The weapon is extremely inaccurate even at very short range and Apollonov suggests that the setup is not practical. However, the test may have been arranged more for comic effect than a serious study of effectiveness. Burst firing is always going to be inaccurate and create a lot of recoil, and the jury-rigged design looks inefficient.

A more serious effort to mount a sniper weapon on a robot dog in the U.S. – a Ghost Robotics platform with a 6.5mm rifle pod from Sword Defense — is reportedly accurate at several hundred meters.

In any case, a rocket launcher, which does not produce recoil, will cause less trouble for a lightweight platform. Nammo recently showed off their seven-pound M72 rocket launcher being test fired from a small drone, so firing one from a robot dog may not to be too difficult.

Unlike a drone, the robot dog offers the possibility of crawling forward into an ambush location and staying there for several hours, while the operator stays well back. Quadruped robots like Boston Dynamics’ Spot, the Ghost Robotics machines currently being tested by the U.S. military and others are favored over wheels or tracks for their mobility over rough terrain….but the Chinese version is likely to be cheaper.

Robot dogs with rocket launchers may well turn up on the battlefield in the near future. But do not expect Russia to be early adopters. Given their proficiency with drones, it seems more likely Ukrainians will be using them against the Russian first.