Military Robots--Reducing Human Casualties

The natural weapon for an advanced combatant to use against a less technologically advanced enemy--especially in a guerilla war--is robots. Muslim guerilla fighters hide behind noncombatants, and attempt to draw in as many enemy as possible for either an ambush or a suicide attack. By sending in robots equipped with telepresence, the enemy aim is foiled, and it becomes easier to separate the guerilla fighters from civilian noncombatants.

A recent VOA newstory discusses the use of robots on the modern battlefield:

"We're trying to keep the American troops out of harm's way. They do reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, so what we're trying to do is develop the technology to replace the soldier in those particular tasks".

And it is hoped the technology could reduce the carnage. One robot has taken years to develop. It is able to make its way through complicated terrains -- without being accompanied by a human -- using cameras, lasers and acoustic sensors.

"So we're replacing a soldier driving a vehicle with a robotic vehicle," says Collins. "They're performing very similar tasks but now, of course, the soldier is no longer directly in the line-of-fire for the enemy."

Robot Warriors
With the toll on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pressure is on to develop this technology quickly. But scientists say it could be 10 years before unmanned ground robots are used in actual war situations, because complex technology takes time to perfect.

The military is spending half a million dollars a year at this university developing an unmanned ground vehicle that uses similar technology to aircraft drones already in use. In 2004, the U.S. government spent more than $60 billion on this kind of research and development.

Source.

The Future Combat System (FCS) is being planned to integrate several types of robots together in the overall battlefield:

In the battlefield, FCS will link soldiers with manned and unmanned ground and air platforms and sensors. Ultimately, FCS will allow U.S. troops to be fast and versatile, as part of the Pentagon’s vision of the Future Force Warrior. For more information, see www.boeing.com/fcs.

The troops love UGVs in Iraq and Afghanistan for severe environments and want more combat-capable ones as soon as possible, says Brad Curran, senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan’s San Antonio office. Plans are being discussed to add weapons capability to UGVs-such as 0.50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers, he adds.

Down the road there will be even bigger UGVs that can form a supply route to reduce the risk of casualties from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are causing so many deaths in Iraq, Curran says.

“The National Defense Authorization Act of 2001 set the goal that by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the Armed Forces be unmanned,” Dyer says. Among the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)-funded projects iRobot is working on to help achieve this goal is iRobot Swarm.

The iRobot Swarm project was sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va. “It represents the state of the art in algorithms, hardware, and user interfaces for large swarms of autonomous robots,” Dyer continues. “The goal of the Swarm project was to develop distributed algorithms for robotic swarms composed of hundreds of individual robots. Our algorithms are designed to be completely scalable, and to function with groups of 10 to 10,000 robots, and the development platform is the world’s largest swarm, with more than 100 individual robots.”

A big advantage of UGVs is the amount of payloads-weapons and sensors-that can be placed on them because they are digital platforms, Dyer says. In this manner they are much like the “F-18 EF, which has about 30 different weapons and sensor payloads on a digital platform.”

Under FCS three types of revolutionary UGVs are envisioned: the iRobot Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV), the BAE Systems Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV), and the Lockheed Martin Multifunction Utility/Logistics Equipment (MULE).

Much more at Source.

This NewStatesman article looks even deeper into future military robot plans:

War will progressively cease to be the foggy, confusing, equalising business it has been for centuries, in which the risks are always high, everyone faces danger and suffers loss, and the few can humble the mighty. Instead, it will become remote, semi-automatic and all-knowing, entailing less and less risk to American lives and taking place largely out of the sight of news cameras. And the danger is close to home: the coming wars will be the "war on terror" by other names, conflicts that know no frontiers. The remote-controlled war coming tomorrow to Khartoum or Mogadishu, in other words, can happen soon afterwards, albeit in moderated form, in London or Lyons.

This is no geeky fantasy. Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the "new Manhattan Project". Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld's department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the "global south", and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment.

Only fragments of this story have so far appeared in the mainstream media, but enough information is available on the internet, from the comments of those in charge and in the specialist press to leave no room for doubt about how sweeping it is, how dangerous and how imminent.

Military omniscience is the starting point. Three months ago Tony Tether, director of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's research arm, described to a US Senate committee the frustration felt by officers in Iraq after a mortar-bomb attack. A camera in a drone, or unmanned aircraft, spotted the attackers fleeing and helped direct US helicopters to the scene to destroy their car - but not before some of those inside had got out. "We had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car," he said, "because we simply didn't have enough coverage available." So some of the insurgents escaped. Tether drew this moral: "We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers or IEDs [improvised explosive devices] . . . This is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but, just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data."

....Eight square miles of Jakarta have been digitised and simulated in three dimensions. That will not surprise computer gamers, but Urban Resolve goes much further: the detail extends to the interiors of 1.6 million buildings and even the cellars and sewers beneath, and it also includes no fewer than 109,000 moving vehicles and people. Even the daily rhythms of the city have been simulated. The roads, says one commentator, "are quiet at night, but during weekday rush hours they become clogged with traffic. People go to work, take lunch breaks and visit restaurants, banks and churches."

Digitise any target city and integrate this with the flow of data from many thousands of sensors and cameras, stationary and mobile, and you have something far more powerful than the regular snapshots today's satellites can deliver. You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.

All this brings omniscience within reach. The US web-based magazine DefenseWatch, which monitors developments in strategy and hardware, recently imagined the near-future scenario of an operation in the developing world in which a cloud of minute, networked sensors is scattered like dust over a target city using powerful fans. Directed by the sensors, unmanned drones patrol the city, building up a visual and audio picture of every street and building. "Every hostile person has been identified and located," continues the scenario. "From this point on, nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical centre."

Much more atSource.

Eventually, all the robots, sensors, controllers--even weapons--will be manufactured by robots--robot factories. When you factor in artificial intelligence, there will be no need to have a human finger on the trigger. Are you scared yet?

Guerilla fighters who hide behind women and children in order to perpetrate suicidal ambushes to kill as many soldiers as possible, are the main driving impetus for a lot of this frightening weaponry. If there were another way to impart civilised behaviour to these violent fanatics, this advanced robotic killing technology would not be necessary. Unfortunately there will be unforeseen consequences of this technology, as always.

The better alternative is to go to the next level.