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Rather than teach it to fetch, roll over or play dead, the owners of a high-tech robot dog apparently want it to kill people.

If you’ve been around the internet this morning, you may have come across this footage of a robot dog wielding an assault rifle.

Firing indiscriminantly, the ‘bot totters around without any human input at all with the video occasionally shifting to a Call of Duty-style first person angle.

So far, so terrifying. But all may not be as it seems.

Although this looks like one of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs, famous for dancing and strolling around Pompeii, it isn’t.

Instead, this is a Unitree ‘Yusu’ knock-off obtained from China with a Russian PP-19 Vityaz submachine gun attached to it.

The team at Vice connected the dots on the video and found it was originally posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamanov, the founder of a Russian hoverbike company.

Other posts on Atamanov’s social media channels show him firing an identical gun at a similar-looking range and posting with the robot dog elsewhere. Which leads us to believe it’s a home-brew project rather than a shadowy Russian plot to equip robodogs with guns.

Sadly, the idea of strapping automatic weapons to robot dogs isn’t a new one.

A US-based company called SWORD International tried something similar last year.

It placed an assault rifle on the back of a Quadrupedal Unmanned Ground Vehicle (or Q-UGV for short) made by Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics.

Then it christened it the SPUR – or the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle – and uploaded pictures of it to Instagram.

Ghost Robotics said the SPUR can remotely chamber the first round from an unloaded state and, similarly, clear the chamber and safe the gun if necessary.

There’s an on-board sighting system and soldiers can control the creature via an app installed on military-issued tablet computers.

Although this particular weapon isn’t in use by the US military yet, several unarmed versions of the Q-UGV are in use by America’s air force.

So it’s probably that Russia will want to play catch up with or without Atamanov’s help.

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