"United States Army is working to develop a full..." Topic

… autonomous tactical vehicle.

"The U.S. Army is working toward developing a fully autonomous tactical vehicle, a robotics expert said. Autonomous vehicles will be able to operate without direct human supervision and are a step up from unmanned vehicles, which are typically controlled remotely. Today, unmanned aerial systems, for instance, have remote operators. In contrast, autonomous vehicles would be operated robotically.

"When you start looking at the mid-term, five to 10 years, we start talking about tapping into external systems," said Mark Mazzara, robotics interoperability lead for the Army's Program Executive Office – Combat Support and Combat Service Support at Detroit Arsenal, Michigan.

Mazzara was a panelist, April 8, at the National Defense Industrial Association Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference and Exhibition in Crystal City, Virginia, where he discussed the path toward autonomous capabilities…"

Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

And if someone can jam the vehicles then they are rendered useless. Just like planes without humans. It will be the defense used to counter these weapons.

no, it's the other way round, you could jam a remote operated vehicle… an autonomous vehicle would be less vulnerable to it as it would just keep following its original orders.

And considering the research already done to give the Mars rovers autonomous movement (due to the HUGE transmission lag), I'd say we have a bit a headstart on this.

Exterminate! Exterminate!

For some reason, that photo looks like some of the better model dioramas appearing on TMP.

The main danger with this sort of technology is an enemy that can access the programming and change the target and mission parameters rather than just disabling the vehicle – changing 'IFF signal = don't shoot' to 'IFF signal = shoot' would be the source of all sorts of fun.

The mars lander is still given commands like move this way or that. It is during those periods jamming will be most effective. A battlefield changes, sometimes rapidly, and adjustments have to be made. Autonomous vehicles will either be vulnerable or be forced into situations where they increase the likelihood of being shot down. Even worst, the target moves and these system miss the them because they cannot receive adjustment/changes.

Google has self-driving cars already. It took a bit before the processors got fast enough and threaded enough to handle traffic rules, but the cars exist.

Proper encryption and frequency-hopping of the command datalink can minimize the chances of a low-skill/backing hacker from causing trouble. It's not perfect, of course, but a basic command of "Go to the enemy and shoot them" backed up by datalinks of where the enemy is at any given time is likely to be pretty simple.

Machine intelligence and reactions are not going to be superior to human intelligence for a long, long time, if ever. The better mousetrap has already been invented -- it's just that it bleeds and dies, too.

I'll believe this is workable when I see truly workable self-driving cars, and I'm not getting into one of these any time in the foreseeable future.

I dunno. If warfare got this mechanized and artificial, would it be a good thing, or would there just be more of it? Or does it become a bloodless game fought by machines? (In which case the human controllers become the biggest targets of all.)

T2s are coming ! When I was a PL and later Co. Cdr waaay back in the '80s. I would have liked a T2 in each squad … many even more !

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

This all reminds me of an old Sci-Fi movie I saw about the Government not being able to rely on humans to operate the nuclear missles. They developed a huge computer with impenetrable defenses to operate their Nukes. The computer took over and decided to Nuke the humans if they didn't obey the computer. They obeyed.
If a human can invent something another human can un-invent it, no matter what the movie said. Autonomous vehicles can be disabled / captured and turned against their owners. In either case it is an absolute that you can't trust any machine that eliminates the human factor completely. IMHO.

Über?

This all reminds me of an old Sci-Fi movie

Colossus, the Forbin Project. It was the only computer takeover movie that had believable tech stuff. Worth another viewing.

But how can the Shooty bits work? How does it ID good guys bad guys and civilians?

"Machine intelligence and reactions are not going to be superior to human intelligence for a long, long time, if ever".

Umm, I hate to tell you this, but machines beat humans hands-down, in some cases, and have for quite some time, e.g. the computer chess player, automatic braking and collision avoidance in those outrageously expensive new autos they sell now, etc.

Those are just a few examples of stuff released in the public domain.

I suspect the secret, and top secret stuff is far better, and as a number of people have pointed out, the robots are scary, and not in just a Sci-Fi movie, or TV series sort of way.