LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Robots are increasingly taking over more soldier duties in Iraq and Afghanistan, with predictions that as much as 30 percent of the U.S. Army will be robotic by 2020, it was reported on Monday.

    Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction and they have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield, the American Association for Advanced Science (AAAS) said in a report published by its website EurekAlert.

    Two scientists at the Washington University in St. Louis -- Doug Few and Bill Smart -- are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology, but they aren't envisioning robotic soldiers from movies like "Star Wars" and "I, Robot", said the report.

    "When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots," said Smart, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

    All of the Army's robotic force is teleoperated, meaning there is someone operating the robot from a remote location, perhaps often with a joystick and a computer screen. While this may seem like a caveat in plans to add robots to the military, it is actually very important to keep humans involved in the robotic operations, according to the report.

    "It's a chain of command thing. You don't want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system. You want to have a human hit the button," Smart was quoted as saying. "You don't want the robot to make the wrong decision. You want to have a human to make all of the important decisions."

    While movies display robots as intelligent beings, Smart and Few aren't necessarily looking for intelligent decision-making in their robots. Instead, they are working to develop an improved, " intelligent" functioning of the robot, according to the report.

    "It's oftentimes like the difference between the adverb and noun. You can act intelligently or you can be intelligent. I'm much more interested in the adverb for my robots," said Few, who is Smart' s Ph.D. student.

    Few is also interested in the delicate relationship between robot and human. He is working to develop a system in which the robot can carry out a task while keeping a human in the loop and with the ability to create new goals for the robot. Few says that there are many issues that may require "a graceful intervention" by humans and these need to be thought of from the ground up.

    To work toward this goal, Few has incorporated what many would simply consider a toy into robotic programming, the report said. Using a Wii controller, Few capitalizes on natural human movements to communicate with the robot. Using something as simple and as common as this video game controller also has added benefits in a military setting.

    Rather than carting around a heavy laptop and being forced to focus on a joystick and screen, soldiers in battle can stay alert and engaged in their surroundings while performing operations with the robot, the report said.