Sorry, you are quite wrong. Here is what we already have right now, well beyond testing. A solar-electric helicopter big enough to carry guns and missiles, that can fly for an hour every day if it can land and recharge its batteries. It can operate completely autonomously. This is a suggested mission profile as it exists today. Not conjecture, this exists today.
It will find its own secret hidey-hole to recharge batteries. Every day at a certain hour, when it “thinks” (based on its send-off programming) that enemy armored vehicles are usually on the move. It will go out and hunt for enemy vehicles that match its on-board profile, and kill them. Then it find a hiding place to rest in the sun until tomorrow.
If it doesn’t find any enemy vehicles in its target profile, it will adapt the times/tactics until it finds them. 23 hours of a day it resting, recharging from sunlight when available. Then it can go hunting again. On its own.
This already exists and is well past the testing phase, so don’t blather about wacko authors fomenting unrealistic fears.
The only thing preventing this from being operational is a political decision, in the end. It already exists. For now, it is run like a predator, with a team looking out of its camera eyeball and making the shoot decisions. But there is no technical hurdle to it being put into combat on a fully autonomous basis.
And the anti-armored-vehicle target profile is just one of many. It could just as easily be programmed to hunt enemy soldiers, or for that matter, any individual human. It would just land in the target area, and go hunting when it was charged up, then find a hiding place to rest.
It already exists. Sorry to burst your bubble. And if we have them, so do the Chinese and Russians. Using them is just a political decision.
People would be shocked at the sensor systems we already have in place. Adding a weapon systems to some of these platforms is trivial and has already been tested. AS you pointed out, the only thing keeping them grounded are political considerations. There are already loads of people, civilians and military, chomping at the bit to use them.
You have as much chance of banning those autonomous killers as you do banning warfare.
Amazes me that Mars Rovers have been working since 1997 with vast improvement at each new implementation by JPL and yet we see such comments,
Recently a Hungarian Univ. group working on a shoestring budget developed from cheap off the shelf components autonomous small drone swarm behavior. There’s a youtube video of it. Once that sort of work is done along with power source, platform, sensor, and weapons package add-ons are easy. And it’s scalable from mosquito size on up. I suspect that proven results are sufficiently advanced that red team are or have begun working on defensive measures and doctrine.
Now, about that Zika outbreak....mosquitos, really?
“A solar-electric helicopter big enough to carry guns and missiles, that can fly for an hour every day if it can land and recharge its batteries.”
Source? Who manufacturers this helicopter? How many kWhs would it take to keep a helicopter of this size in the air for one hour? Who makes the batteries, how many are needed in the helicopter, and how much does each one weigh?