Today's robot soldiers are tomorrow's robot police officers

Still largely a surveillance device, but moving towards the role of a soldier is this vehicle.  It's design doesn't look terribly well thought out.  The slope of the front of the vehicle no doubt provides the sensors with an excellent view of the road ahead, but it will also conveniently funnel dirt into what looks like a bank of sensors and also if someone shoots at the front of the vehicle then bullets are likely to deflect straight into the sensors, which might result in the vehicle being disabled.



The future of warfare on the ground is probably going to consist of a range of mostly teleoperated vehicles.  At the lower end you'll have the simple buggy or tracked platform with a gun strapped onto it, with something like a mobile phone at its heart.  These are essentially the disposable infantry of the future, and are the preferred modus operandi for terrorists or paramilitary organisations due to being cheap and easy to build in a hurry from commonly available materials.  At the upper end you'll have larger heavily armoured vehicles similar to the above, with a range of expensive sensors and having semi-autonomous navigation and perception for detecting other vehicles or people.

It's very likely that policing will follow the same trajectory, although lagging military development due to the many additional safety requirements.  Policing via UAVs is already beginning, but this isn't ideal for street level activities due to variations in weather conditions, obscuring trees or buildings and so on.  If the vehicle is capable of autonomously following a predefined patrol route then searching for suspicious activity can be crowdsourced via the internet, driving wages down to the lowest possible level and using labour from any geographical location.  Such a vehicle could be on patrol almost around the clock, stopping only to refuel or have its batteries changed, which provides the high availability/visibility which crime-ridden communities demand whilst also minimising labour cost, and could be armed with some non-lethal weapons such as sonic devices or water cannons.

In case anyone is worried about the accountability issues of say policing in England being carried out by teleoperators in Nigeria or elsewhere then a system of checks could be employed.  On the one hand you have the operators doing the policing, and on the other you have operators being paid to rate their actions as legitimate, according to some given rule set, or illegitimate.  If a teleopertor gains enough illegitimate points then they are excluded from the system, thereby losing their income (the equivalent of being fired in a teleoperated economy).  Also there would be the opportunity for communities to become self-policing by volunteering to do the teleoperation job on a part time basis.  If enough volunteers were available then the policing labour cost could fall to something close to zero.

Conventional policing would still be needed to do jobs which require the manhandling of suspects, but I expect that bundling people into the back of vans is a minor component of overall police expenditure and teleoperators could call in a dedicated (outsourced) squad to do this as necessary.