Ukraine’s former defense minister launches ‘Manhattan Project’ for killer robots

LVIV, Ukraine — Ukraine needs a “new Manhattan Project,” former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told a standing-room-only crowd of self-proclaimed tech nerds on Saturday at IT Arena here, the country’s biggest annual technology conference. Then he played an AI-generated clip of what he meant: a robopunk mix of humanoid and crab-like ground robots skittering across a barren front line, doing work that is still too complicated for the robots Ukraine fields today. The video laid out Fedorov’s vision for an Army of Robots , a force of two-legged upright and other ground robots that would take…