human soldier could identify with the mother’s fear and the children’s game and thus recognize their intentions as harmles
It's unlikely that a human would actually do this. They would have been trained to react quickly and to not take risk / chances with the lives of their fellow soldiers. Reports from Cold War era wars support this view. The ( possibly unreliable ) local reports in current war torn regions also support humans not making these distinctions, or at least not making them when things are happening quickly.
This rather serious report should be of interest to LW. It argues that autonomous robotic weapons which can kill a human without an explicit command from a human operator ("Human-Out-Of-The-Loop" weapons) should be banned, at an international level.
(http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity-0)