The year? 2050.
The United States of America, French Republic, Japan, and the Republic of the United Korea have pooled their resources and technical knowledge to solve a problem:
Armed conflict is still, unfortunately, a very real thing. While the nations decide that human soliders should still remain the on-site face of their militaries to civilians, the nations would prefer to remove soldiers from traditional roles of warfare. Why? Well humans are imprecise, introduce issues of morality, and are progressively expensive as compared to robotic alternatives. Most importantly they simply think robots can do a better job than humans can.
While a great number of military tasks and roles have been automated (such as air drones, armored vehicle drones, unmanned ships, and many aspects of logistics) the world hasn't tackled the niche human soldiers fulfil until now.
Upon the decision to move forward, Isaac Asimov began rolling over in his grave for the blatant disregard of his laws, but... times change.
While some visionaries began to create sketches of androids, the engineers of the various nations realized that there's no direct reason for robots to look human (after all, humans will still interface with civilians), and the engineers decide that they should consider alternatives.
The robots should:
- Act semi-independently
- Be able to be grouped effectively to increase coverage and threat to any opposition
- Navigate human structures and devices (cars, doors, stairs, etc) capably and efficiently
- Operate human devices (machinery, cellphones etc) as the need arises
- Identify, engage, and kill threats as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible (enemy humans shouldn't have time to react before the robots take their lives, and it should be difficult for humans to gain advantage of angle of attack or element of surprise)
- Provide ground reconnaissance in urban environments
- Serve miscellaneous roles in their environments as needs arise (similar to the human soldiers they replace)
The nations are willing to deploy more than one design to the field simultaneously to provide specialization, but in order to keep the scope of this question sufficiently tight, answers should only provide a maximum of three designs to work together to replace human soldiers. A single design is prefered.
What design(s) and what form(s) would these soldier replacements take?