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From http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4258103.html
... Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.” In other words, the SWORDS swung around in the wrong direction, and the plug got pulled fast. No humans were hurt, but as Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” 
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Hmm, I remember reading about a hardware accident recently on a test range, where people were shot by a similar robot that, as I understand it, got jammed in the fire position and swung around. As it was reported, it wasn't a software glitch.
There probably needs to be a lot more fail-safe devices, redundancy, and "killswitches" (no pun intended) in such robots, than with normal guns, so that "trust issues" would be more easily resolved. IMO, the final decision about pulling the trigger should be undertaken by a sufficiently experienced intelligence - be it human or machine. Which raises the question about who would be held responsible if a machine intelligence opened fire and innocent people were killed.
I'm reminded of the scene in the first Robocop movie, where a spookily similar robot ran amok.
I must say that - somewhat hypocritically in a way - machine intelligence will probably be judged a LOT less leniently that human - especially given the propensity for humans to kill innocent people in the name of war. But here, I'm digressing to political discussion, and perhaps this forum should not be a place for that.
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