New | Shades of The Terminator: Dallas police use killer robot to kill gunman

Robots have apparently chalked up a new first — a deadly one.

Police rigged a bomb-disposal robot to kill an armed suspect in the Dallas police shooting , what appears to be the first time US police have used a robot for lethal purposes. As such, it may represent the latest escalation in the use of remote and semi-autonomous devices by law enforcement.

Police have been using such robots for decades for bomb disposal and in hostage standoffs and fires. Meanwhile, militaries around the world have come to rely on their robotic friends to disable improvised explosive devices — a need that only increased with the US occupation of Iraq in the past decade.

While there doesn’t appear to be any hard data on the subject, security experts and law enforcement officials said they couldn’t think of another incident where police have done this.

In the Terminator movies made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger, lethal robots slaughter the human race until the humans fight back.

In this case, such robots — which range in size from something as small as a dog bone to as large as a truck — are often just a mechanical arm mounted onto a vehicle and equipped with a video camera and two-way audio communications, according to William Flanagan, a retired deputy police chief from New York’s Nassau County who now does law enforcement and technology consulting.