this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 29 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Say, I'm writing a story with these things in them. If I wanted to make it realistic, what's the best, most practical way of disabling them besides a baseball bat or a shotgun? I was thinking spray paint to their little sensor dome thing.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Aluminium spray is multipurpose. If all else fails, hold a lighter at the nozzle.

[–] Lyudmila@hexbear.net 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I would suggest the characters of your story try to avoid the robot dogs, rather than try to fight them. These things are covered in cameras, the whole point of them at a protest or demonstration is to identify and deanonymize demonstrators, and to be a literally walking casus belli for the cops to start using violence once someone kicks or hits the robot. It's not the Terminator, it's a remote controlled camera.

Here are some handy recommendations for attack vectors that have actually worked against real robot dogs.


Spamming random code broadcasts on 433 MHz to shut them down. (Flipper zero, or even just a garage door opener depending on how shitty your robodogs are). However, most of them also have 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and LTE antennas, so good luck actually getting a deauth attack or other DoS attack. You might just get lucky and send the "off" rolling code, though.

Tripwires or bolas to trip and entangle them.

Cargo net, they cannot disentangle themselves.

Big magnet and some rope, just lift them up off of the ground or keep them chained to a certain spot.

Jam sticks into the leg joints to make the motors shred them up and then overload protection will shut the joints down to prevent them from burning out against the resistance of the wood chips stuck inside.


You're absolutely not going to be able to generate an EMP large enough or find a magnet strong enough to damage one remotely. A Carrington-like solar storm or nuclear weapon are the only options that would do this. The EM testing devices they use to inspect things like airplanes or military vehicles are orders of magnitude less powerful, yet very nearly as unobtainable as a nuclear warhead.

Kicking it or hitting it with a bat might dent its chassis but will absolutely not be an effective strategy for disabling it, they're specifically designed to resist that sort of attack. See: a hundred videos of Boston Dynamics employees kicking and beating the shit out of the robot as hard as they can, and the robot immediately recovering without any problems.

Shooting it is also a bad idea. Consider that most scenarios in which you'd want to try that would then involve significant collateral damage to you and your side when the lithium pack goes off. If you're close enough to shoot the battery of a moving robot dog, you're close enough to get severely injured by the battery.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I like the cargo net, will a fish net work?

[–] Lyudmila@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

Modern commercial fishing net or one of those sport fishing nets anglers use probably would be too fine. I think the older hand knotted style might work, but I haven't seen it done.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 22 points 1 day ago

Nets will defeat most robots pretty easily as a trap or area denial.

Sticky liquids with grainy shit in them (like sand) can gum up the joints.

Literally just a large enough quantity of water would do it to some of them because they're not waterproof.

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

After your net or whatever, then Faraday cage it and put it in a large box then pour concrete.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Idk bruh seems a little hard to carry around

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 3 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

TBH I see this as something a maker space does in collaboration with an ominous antifa-shaped organization, essentially they black bag the dog into a Faraday cage, it's driven off by someone to an undisclosed location for torturing robodogs, then it's brought to a mass graveyard of concrete blobs.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 2 points 15 hours ago

I have friends who have hacked the "micromobility" scooters. This too is a tool that can be adapted to different purposes.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 4 points 19 hours ago

I fuck with this energy. Take it to the room where all the robots scream for no reason.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 20 points 1 day ago

Punch the nerd with a laptop close to it

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] blunder@hexbear.net 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Wow I never knew that's how they killed the Dallas shooter guy.

Speaking to the police negotiator he said:

The talking is over. It's time for a revolution, brother. If you are my brother, turn your weapon on those behind you.

fidel-salute based-department waow-based

Edit the cops later said about the guy who was shooting them:

"We had negotiated with him for about two hours, and he just basically lied to us, playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many did he get and that he wanted to kill some more."

Holy shit can we get an emoji of this guy

Micah Johnson what a man

[–] Weedian@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

a net or a pit covered in leaves or whatever

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Distract them with a robot squirrel.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 3 points 21 hours ago

This made me chuckle IRL, good job

[–] Hohsia@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Any type of beverage or liquid I imagine

Wait actually I guess you’d first have to corrode the exterior which makes me think some kind of acid

I’d have to brush up on my very basic chemistry, but these are great things to think about

[–] Lyudmila@hexbear.net 9 points 1 day ago

Polypropylene and polyethylene are pretty chemically stable, if they spray a PTFE coating over the top, chemical attacks are kinda useless.

They're not all that enclosed though. Submerging the robot in water or spraying it with a high pressure spray would work well. Rather than trying to drench it repeatedly with benzene or aqua regia, just get a $50 cordless pressure washer and find a hose.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

metal wire/chain to legs or a net

more esoteric and slower - foam spray in joints/camera

[–] TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[–] Cruxifux 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Emp shockwave? I think there’s a way to make one from just power transformers around town. But I’m not sure, I could have just made that up because I can’t remember where I heard it.

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 2 points 19 hours ago

No way that's going to work without doing even more damage to every person's cellphone/laptop/TV, including whoever just happens to live in the apartment nearby.

[–] Lyudmila@hexbear.net 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Nope. There is no non-nuclear weapon device on earth capable of generating a weaponizable EMP.*

While power distribution systems can create smaller EM Pulses, they're way too small and weak to do much damage to anything that isn't wired directly to it. It could fuck up your computer, but only if it's plugged into the wall. It could maybe make some random wireless electronics act weird, too, but not something like these robots.

  • Edit: There are many devices that can create an EMP, but the pulses they create are not powerful enough to remotely fry most electronics at a useful distance.
[–] Cruxifux 6 points 1 day ago

Oh, interesting. I probably heard my thing from some shitty online sci fi story, because I went through a phase where I was super into absolute garbage short sci fi stories online.

[–] MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The US military claims to have one in the CHAMP missile, using high power microwaves.

Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project - Wikipedia

[–] Lyudmila@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So, CHAMP is an HPM weapon, which is not technically the same thing as an EMP. High Power Microwave weapons can also mess up electronics in the same way as an EMP, but they use a very specific chunk of the EM spectrum and are highly directional. Neat tech, but obviously upsetting in the context of being military technology.

CHAMP's follow-up successor HiJENKS is vaporware and since a demonstration in 2013, the ground-based version of CHAMP hasn't really gone anywhere. It was this massive 6m thing and HiJENKS was supposed to be the route to shrinking the tech I think. Right now it's packaged as a cruise missile, and is seemingly being deployed as an alternative to deploying nuclear weapons. I feel like that's pretty much just as much unobtainable as a nuke.

I dunno, maybe if we're all fighting the SkynetGPT paperclip maximizer after it starts building an army of infinite robot dogs, it'll come in handy?