Cutting Edge

FORT HOOD, Texas--Soldiers and civilian contractors braved the heat here this week for the first Robotics Rodeo to view and interact with a long lineup of robot systems and to give feedback on which ones could potentially find a place in the U.S. Army's robo stable.

Despite the hundreds of military robots that show up in concept or as prototypes on company Web sites and corporate reports, humans still do the fighting on the ground and it's likely to stay that way for a while. However, there's a growing niche for "the dirty, the dull, and the dangerous" jobs where robots could take over. In fact, it's the law. The 2001 Senate defense authorization bill mandates that "one third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the armed forces will be unmanned by 2015."

The Army wants robotic researchers, developers, and manufactures, many of whom have collected millions in government seed money and grants over the years, to get off the dime and start delivering (PDF).

"If you're not fielding, you're failing," said Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, Fort Hood commander and co-host of the Robotics Rodeo.

Lynch cites the rapid advancements made in fielding unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

"Most folks are familiar and comfortable with (UAVs), and we've shown over eight years of combat just how critical those systems are to the warfighting effort when properly used and integrated," Lynch said. "There are hundreds of other robotic concepts that could also be useful to our Army and this Robotics Rodeo will showcase some of those--it's a great educational opportunity."

The U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Fort Hood III Corps invited more than 40 vendors to attend the rodeo and show off their wares.

In terms of priorities, clearance of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) tops the general's wish list. Other needs include programmable unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to patrol and make deliveries on planned routes or conduct "persistent stare," i.e. long-term surveillance missions.

"The enemy often places IEDs in the same locations that he has used in the past. A robotic system that can observe these locations for a prolonged period of time and alert us of a significant change would be of great value," Lynch said. One of true tests would be a UGV that acts as a robotic wingman or can assume a role as a member of a squad.

However, most UGVs in service today are limited to detecting and defusing IEDs. Concepts to broaden their uses are many, but it's unclear how practical and feasible they are. In any case, much of the technology on display at the "rodeo" is commercial off-the-shelf--some of it already in use in private industry.

So what's keeping the stuff on display from becoming standard issue? Three letters--ONS--according to vendors.

If there's an urgent need for equipment, a general officer may step forward and submit an ONS, or Operational Needs Statement, to get the ball rolling. No one is willing to do so, vendors complain. For example, the Qinetiq rep says his modular advanced armed robotic system (MAARS) could be ambushing IED-planting bad guys right now, but for the paperwork (PDF).

The true test: be the first to sign off on a M240B machine-gun-mounted UGV.

Best known for its Roomba vacuums, iRobot also counts the U.S. Army as a top customer. And the latest Army deal is the company's single biggest.

iRobot said Tuesday it has received an order from the U.S. Army for $35.3 million for robots equipped to help soldiers safely evaluate dangerous conditions.

The order, made by the U.S. Army TACOM Contracting Center in Warren, Mich., calls for 486 iRobot PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit robots by March 31, 2010. This single order is part of an overall larger contract worth $286 million, of which $125 million has been earned by iRobot to date.

"This order is truly a significant milestone for iRobot," Joe Dyer, president of iRobot government and industrial robots unit, said in a statement. "Not only is it the single largest order we have ever received from the military, but it also proves that there is strong and continuing support for our PackBot FasTac platform that was introduced just last year."

The PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit lets soldiers view and evaluate dangerous locations from a safe distance, says iRobot. The PackBot can then clear those areas, allowing troops to proceed.

Controlled by a laptop with a game-style controller, the robot can move at up to 5.8 mph and run for up to four hours at a stretch. A compact arm and gripper lets soldiers pick up and examine suspicious objects from a distance.

"One of the robot's strengths is its adaptability," Dyer said. "It is well-suited for use by combat engineers, route clearance companies and infantry brigades. This is important as our troops continue to fight wars on multiple fronts, each possessing its own unique mission types and challenges."

iRobot has been a top supplier of combat-related robots to the military for a couple of years. The Army's current contract, put in place a year ago, allows it to buy equipment, training, and services from iRobot over the next four years.

The PackBot has been a popular model, serving in locations like Iraq to dispose of roadside bombs and other hazards. Another variation of the PackBot can sniff out nerve gas and other dangerous chemicals.

The British Army is currently considering a new vehicle that features an interior "survivability" capsule strung from the ceiling and "tunable" armor, both designed to cushion soldiers against improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other blasts.

In addition to the cushy interior, the Ranger sports the now-popular boat-shaped hull, armored belly plates, floating floor, and energy-absorbing suspended seats, providing soldiers with an unprecedented level of protection, according to the producer Universal Engineering.

Hoping to land a sale, Universal is pitching the Ranger as a solution to other problems, which it identifies as redundancy and over-specialization.

"Currently, coalition forces operate over 30 different vehicle types in Afghanistan, each with more or less a single role each," project director John Scott told Jane's, a British defense journal. "Ranger would reduce the need for those."

The Ranger can haul up to a six-ton payload like a support vehicle, scoots around with the mobility of a Supacat 4X4 Jackal, and is as tough as Force Protection's 6X6 Mastiff, so the army would be getting an all-in-one, according to the British company.

"At the moment you can either have a vehicle that will protect you or a vehicle that is maneuverable," Jeff Little, Universal Engineering business development manager, toldthe DailyDorset. "This is a vehicle that serves both requirements." But the key feature remains the "floating" armored capsule.

"Currently vehicles are built by basically taking a truck chassis and bolting armour on to that," said Little, a retired brigadier who was previously in charge of buying vehicles destined for Afghanistan. "We started with the armored capsule."

This and the fact at the vehicle's armor can be precisely tuned to match specific threats makes it three times more blast resistance the comparable rides, the company claims.

Industry speculation is that the Ranger could provide a domestic alternative to the American-made Ridgback, which the British Army turned to after the top brass was accused of failing to provide adequately equipped vehicles for their troops in Afghanistan.

"Ranger has protection beyond the range offered by any other vehicle. It's a lifesaver," Scott said. And it's definitely "a better vehicle than Ridgback--no doubt about it."

While unmanned air vehicles are putting pilots out of business, a new U.S. Army-funded robot could do the same for rescuers and stevedores.

The humanoid BEAR (Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot) can locate victims in a mine shaft, battlefield, toxic spill, or earthquake-damaged structure. And then it can lift them up and then carry them over long distances to safety, according to the manufacturer Vecna Robotics. And it does this without risking any more lives (PDF).

The challenge was to enhance search and rescue while reducing the time military, police, and emergency response personnel have to risk their lives each day. More than half of the Medals of Honor earned by medics are awarded posthumously, according to Vecna.

So far there are nine incarnations of BEAR--each a little more capable than its predecessor. Improvements to date include explosion- and fire-resistant treads; a ruggedized, high-speed, high-energy drive system; explosion- and fire-resistant battery cells; and enhanced dexterity.

The current prototype features a powerful upper body controlled by hydraulics that can lift 500 pounds, according to the developer. A "mobility platform" featuring two independent sets of tracked "legs" allows it to balance on the balls of its "ankles."

But don't lay those firefighters off just yet. Vecna is still working on the BEAR's ability to navigate through complex environments and to elevate the level of human-robot interaction.

The project is sponsored by the U.S. Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, which is part of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command.

Can robots be more humane than humans in fighting wars? Robotics engineer Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology believes this is a not-too-distant possibility. He has just finished a three-year contract with the U.S. Army designing software to create ethical robots.

As robots are increasingly being used by the U.S. military, Arkin has devoted his lifework to configuring robots with a built-in "guilt system" that eventually could make them better at avoiding civilian casualties than human soldiers. These military robots would be embedded with internationally prescribed laws of war and rules of engagement, such as those in the Geneva Conventions.

Arkin talked with CNET News about how robots can be ethically programmed and some of the philosophical questions that come up when using machines in warfare. Below is an edited excerpt of our conversation.

Q: What made you first begin thinking about designing software to create ethical robots?
Arkin: I'd been working in robotics for almost 25 years and I noticed the successes that had been happening in the field. Progress had been steady and sure and it started to dawn on me that these systems are ready, willing, and able to begin going out into the battlefield on behalf of our soldiers. Then the question came up--what is the right ethical basis for these systems? How are we going to ensure that they could behave appropriately to the standards we set for our human war fighters?

In 2004, at the first international symposium on roboethics in Sanremo, Italy, we had speakers from the Vatican, the Geneva Conventions, the Pugwash Institute, and it became clear that this was a pressing problem. Trying to view myself as a responsible scientist, I felt it was important to do something about it and that got me embarked on this quest.

What do you mean by an ethical robot? How would a robot feel empathy?
Arkin: I didn't say it would feel empathy, I said ethical. Empathy is another issue and that is for a different domain. We are talking about battlefield robots in the work I am currently doing. That is not to say I'm not interested in those other questions and I hope to move my research, in the future, in that particular direction.

Right now, we are looking at designing systems that can comply with internationally prescribed laws of war and our own codes of conduct and rules of engagement. We've decided it is important to embed in these systems with the moral emotion of guilt. We use this as a means of downgrading the robots' ability to engage targets if it is acting in ways which exceed the predicted battle damage in certain circumstances.

"Right now, we are looking at designing systems that can comply with internationally prescribed laws of war and our own codes of conduct and rules of engagement. We've decided it is important to embed in these systems with the moral emotion of guilt."

--Ronald Arkin

You've written about a built-in "guilt system." Is this what you're talking about?
Arkin: We have incorporated a component called an "ethical adaptor" by studying the models of guilt that human beings have and embedding those within a robotic system. The whole purpose of this is very focused and what makes it tractable is that we're dealing with something called "bounded morality," which is understanding the particular limit of the situation that the robot is to operate in. We have thresholds established for analogs of guilt that cause the robot to eventually refuse to use certain classes of weapons systems (or refuse to use weapons entirely) if it gets to a point where the predictions it's making are unacceptable by its own standards.

You, the engineer, decide the ethics, right?
Arkin: We don't engineer the ethics; the ethics come from treaties that have been designed by lawyers and philosophers. These have been codified over thousands of years and now exist as international protocol. What we engineer is translating those laws and rules of engagement into actionable items that the robot can understand and work with.

So, right now, you're working on software for the ethical robot and you have a contract with the U.S. Army, right?
Arkin: We actually just finished, as of (July 1), the three-year project we had for the U.S. Army, which was designing prototype software for the U.S. Army Research Office. This isn't software that is intended to go into the battlefield anytime soon--it is all proof of concept--we are striving to show that the systems can potentially function with an ethical basis. I believe our prototype design has demonstrated that.

Robot drones like land mine detectors are already used by the military, but are controlled by humans. How would an autonomous robot be different in the battlefield?
Arkin: Drones usually refer to unmanned aero vehicles. Let me make sure we're talking about the same sort of thing--you're talking about ground vehicles for detecting improvised explosive devices?

Either one, either air or land.
Arkin: Well, they'd be used in different ways. There are already existing autonomous systems that are either in development or have been deployed by the military. It's all a question of how you define autonomy. The trip-wire for how we talk about autonomy, in this context, is whether an autonomous system (after detecting a target) can engage that particular target without asking for any further human intervention at that particular point.

There is still a human in the loop when we tell a squad of soldiers to go into a building and take it using whatever force is necessary. That is still a high-level command structure, but the soldiers have the ability to engage targets on their own. With the increased battlefield tempo, things are moving much faster than they did 40 or 100 years ago, and it becomes harder for humans to make intelligent, rational decisions. As such, it is my contention that these systems, ultimately, can lead to a reduction in non-combatant fatalities over human level performance. That's not to say that I don't have the utmost respect for our war fighters in the battlefield, I most certainly do and I'm committed to provide them with the best technical equipment in support of their efforts as well.

In your writing you say robots can be more humane than humans in the battlefield, can you elaborate on this?
Arkin: Well, I say that's my thesis, it's not a conclusion at this point. I don't believe unmanned systems will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced (at this point in time) that they can potentially perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of. I'm talking about wars 10 to 20 years down the field. Much more research and technology has to be developed for this vision to become a reality.

"So, if warfare is going to continue and if autonomous systems are ultimately going to be deployed, I believe it is crucial that we must have ethical systems in the battlefield."

But, I believe it's an important avenue of pursuit for military research. So, if warfare is going to continue and if autonomous systems are ultimately going to be deployed, I believe it is crucial that we must have ethical systems in the battlefield. I believe that we can engineer systems that perform better than humans--we already have robots that are stronger than people, faster than people, and if you look at computers like Deep Blue we have robots that can be smarter than people.

I'm not talking about replacing a human soldier in all aspects; I'm talking about using these systems in limited circumstances such as counter sniper operations or taking buildings. Under those circumstances we can engineer enough morality into them that they may indeed do better than human beings can--that's the benchmark I'm working towards.

Ok, what kind of errors could a military robot make in the battlefield in regards to ethical dilemmas?
Arkin: Well, a lot of this has been sharpened by debates with my colleagues in philosophy, computer science, and computer professionals for social responsibility. There are a lot of things that could potentially go wrong. One of the big questions (much of this is derived from what's called "just war theory") is responsibility--if there is a war crime, someone must be to blame. We have worked hard within our system to make sure that responsibility attribution is as clear as possible using a component called the "responsibility advisor." To me, you can't say the robot did it; maybe it was the soldier who deployed it, the commanding officer, the manufacturer, the designer, the scientist (such as myself) who conceived of it, or the politicians that allowed this to be used. Somehow, responsibility must be attributed.

Another aspect is that technological advancement in the battlefield may make us more likely to enter into war. To me it is not unique to robotics--whenever you create something that gives you any kind of advantage, whether it is gun powder or a bow and arrow, the temptation to go off to war is more likely. Hopefully our nation has the wherewithal to be able to resist such temptation.

Some argue it can't be done right, period--it's just too hard for machines to discriminate. I would agree it's too hard to do it now. But with the advent of new sensors and network centric warfare where all this stuff is wired together along with the global information grid, I believe these systems will have more information available to them than any human soldier could possibly process and manage at a given point in time. Thus, they will be able to make better informed decisions.

The military is concerned with squad cohesion. What happens to the "band of brothers" effect if you have a robot working alongside with a squad of human soldiers, especially if it's one that might report back on moral infractions it observes with other soldiers in the squad? My contention is that if a robot can take a bullet for me, stick its head around a corner for me and cover my back better than Joe can, then maybe that is a small risk to take. Secondarily it can reduce the risk of human infractions in the battlefield by its mere presence.

The military may not be happy with a robot with the capability of refusing an order. So we have to design a system that can explain itself. With some reluctance, I have designed an override capability for the system. But the robot will still inform the user on all the potential ethical infractions that it believes it would be making, and thus force the responsibility on the human. Also, when that override is taken, the aberrant action could be sent immediately to command for after-action review.

There is a congressional mandate requiring that by 2010, one third of all operational deep-strike aircraft be unmanned and, by 2015, one third of all ground combat vehicles be unmanned. How soon could we see this autonomous robot software being used in the field?
Arkin: There is a distinction between unmanned systems and autonomous unmanned systems. That's the interesting thing about autonomy--it's kind of a slippery slope, decision making can be shared.

First, it can be under pure remote control by a human being. Next, there's mixed initiative where some of the decision making rests in the robot and some of it rests in the human being. Then there's semi-autonomy where the robot has certain functions and the human deals with it in a slightly different way. Finally, you can get more autonomous systems where the robot is tasked, it goes out and does its mission, and then returns (not unlike what you would expect from a pilot or a soldier).

The congressional mandate was marching orders for the Pentagon and the Pentagon took it very seriously. It's not an absolute requirement but significant progress is being made. Some of the systems are far more autonomous than others--for example the PackBot in Iraq is not very autonomous at all. It is used for finding improvised explosive devices by the roadside, many of these have saved the lives of our soldiers by taking the explosion on their behalf.

You just came out with a book called "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots." Do you want to explain in a bit more detail what it's about?
Arkin: Basically the book covers the space of this three-year project that I just finished. It deals with the basis, motivation, underlying philosophy, and opinions people have based on a survey we did for the Army on the use of lethal autonomous robots in the battlefield. It provides the mathematical formalisms underlying the approach we take and deals with how it is to be represented internally within the robotic system. And, most significantly, it describes several scenarios in which I believe these systems can be used effectively with some preliminary prototype results showing the progress we made in this period.

Laser technology may yet yield the weapons of the not-so-distant future, but the future is certainly not now.

For the moment, it's all R&D business as usual. Earlier this week, both Boeing and Northrop Grumman put out statements about their ongoing work on U.S. Army's High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator, or HEL TD. And for Boeing, it was also a chance to crow about a contract win: $36 million to continue its work on a HEL TD design.

With that money, Boeing says it will first finish its design work, and then move on to building and testing a ruggedized beam control system on a heavy-duty truck (specifically, the Army's Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck). The defense contractor finished the preliminary design of the beam control system earlier this summer. Boeing also plans to develop the systems-engineering requirements for the complete HEL TD laser weapon system.

Northrop Grumman, for its part, this week said that it has completed all preliminary design review requirements for a rugged beam control subsystem for the HEL TD.

Testing of the beam control systems, with low-power lasers, is expected to take place somewhere around 2010.

Eventually, the HEL TD work will be joined up with the work being done separately on a high-energy solid-state laser--the namesake element of the laser weapon system. The SSL is expected to be in the 100-kilowatt class.

But the lead times are long on projects like this. "Due to resource constraints, we are targeting somewhere in 2016 time frame for a limited deployable system," said Bill Gnacek, HEL TD program manager for the U.S. Army.

The laser weapons platform that emerges from the HEL TD program is intended to target rockets, artillery shells, and mortar rounds.

Boeing is also working on a similar project called the Laser Avenger--a Humvee-mounted laser weapon system that would direct its light beam at more Earth-bound targets such as roadside bombs and other unexploded ordnance. The Laser Avenger, a variation on the existing, Stinger-missile-equipped Avenger air defense system, is internally funded by Boeing.

August has been something of a landmark occasion for Boeing and its laser weapons projects, which have been notable for their slow progress. Earlier this month, the company said it had done the first ground test of the entire weapon system in its Airborne Tactical Laser aircraft, which fired its high-energy chemical laser through its beam control system. Boeing expects to fire the laser in flight at a ground target before the end of this year.