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The European Grand Challenge
An anonymous reader writes "A European version of the DARPA Grand Challenge is being held in Germany next month. Instead of a race through the desert, the EU challenge is split into three events. Urban, non-urban, and landmine detection will be the 'courses', with multiple winners in each event. Interestingly Sebastian Thrun, winner of last year's Challenge, has been forbidden from taking part despite being a European citizen." From the article: "The trials will take place in and around Hammelburg, a mockup of a town used by the German military for training exercises. In the non-urban course the robots will have to contend with a one-kilometer route containing ditches, barbed wire fences, cattle guards, fires, narrow underpasses, and inclines of up to 40 degrees. The urban and landmine 500-meter trials will require the robots to negotiate doorways, stairs, partially collapsed buildings, and poor visibility from smoke or partial lighting. Along the way, they will also have to search for designated objects and report their findings back to base."
Or could it be, I don't know, that the Europeans feel a bit uneasy with such a commercially and strategically important piece of infrastructure in U.S. hands? Funny, it's almost as if they don't trust the USA.
A few years ago, I doubt this would have been so much of a concern. But in recent years, the U.S. has belittled Europe as irrelevant ("Old Europe"), openly mocked countries that disagree with us, put aside the idea of pursuing international consensus in favor of a "We can do whatever the hell we want" foreign policy, and taken an increasingly hostile stance towards the rest of the world ("You're either with us or against us" for instance). The Europeans are asking whether we can really be relied upon to act as their friends- and rightly so.
hmmmm... could it have something to do with the fact that the USA has the ability to shutdown, jam, or otherwise incompasitate any technology that uses the US GPS system? I mean, if you really think about it, would you ever base any of your own military systems on something that you know another country can shutdown?
I mean it is just plain idiotic for them to not create their own GPS system if they want to use the full capabilities out of it. Otherwise piggy-backing on the US system is just begging for problems if it ever was a critical part of they systems (nothing like having a GPS guided missle told that the location it was aimed at is the launch vehicle itself...).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
While like both the darpa and the euro challenges, I also find that they are more a showcase for solving tasks of yesterdays war, with newer and modern toys. So far in warfare, robots are used much like human operated vehicles were used in WWI, for reconnaissance purposes and the fact that they're spending so many resources on maneuvering excersises, is more of a showcase for their limited vision, than the capabilities of robot technology. When they make these big expensive robots for warfare, they forget the primary reason robots are used in the first place; robots are expendable, and partially autonomous.
The last part is where the european challenge at least gets something right. There's no need for fully autonomous vehicles on the battlefield, because the decisions you make on the battlefield require human accountability, when the situation is grave enough to throw away accountability, that's the time you launch the nukes.
So how do we make a robotic system that takes those two benefits into account?
My suggestion would be to use swarming, and standby robots. For instance, if I were to launch a robot air assault, with say 500 human controllers involved, i'd use standard hobbyshop vehicles, with advanced communication, some computing power and a weapon on each, keep it cheap, And i'd use somewhere along the line of 10,000 robots.
The robots can be dropped from a plane, or send off from the ground, the later option will be cheapest the former will have greater range.
The controllers will take control or partial control when they arrive, in early versions full control of a single plane, if there's no available controller, they'll go on standby somewhere close to the battlefield, When a robot goes down, they're allocated a new one from the pool of robots on standby.
In a more advanced scenario the robots would create a 3d representation of the battlefield and the controllers will just point out targets, and possibly hit the fire button (for accountability reasons).
But that's just one version, I think that a cool competition goal would be to design a system that can: Take out targets as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and as reliable as possible (reduce collateral damage), the targets can be anything from target dummies, over vehicles to other robots, in scenarios including regular, urban and guerilla warfare, police assignments and terrorist attacks.
The reason i stop here is that i don't have the vision to go further, not that others should not try to think beyond it.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
One of the main military policies of the US is to be an early adopter and thus on the forefront of every military technology (pratically every technology, besides eco-related :-)) , therefore EU or any other will always be copying the US in some way
:-) (USSR first adopters) ... FYI: works like this: you activate beacon, signal picked up by sat. relayed to ground, emergency services signaled and confirmation to beacon is relayed back.
:-(
Some comments on the EU Galileo (GAL) project and differencies to GPS (Nav Sys / US):
- GAL - Civilian (public and pay services), GPS - (public and military services)
- GAL works in cojunction with GPS and GLONASS (Russia), GPS is not meant to work with other systems (first adopter)
- GAL and GPS both are augmented by overlayer system like WAAS and EGNOS
- GAL has a rescue service with return link (SAR Beacon), this is actually 'copied' from GLONASS
- GAL has an important integrity signal relayed with nav.signal, to tell uses if the system is actually performing, nice to know if your placing a 100 ton concrete slap (EU first adopters)
- GAL will work well over most of the globe, GPS has places where the constellation is sub-optimal (like nothern EU contries), GLONASS is very poor at the moment.
Basically there is some copying going on, but I would say it's more a re-working with a broader perspective. The main point is Galileo is non-military, not hooked up to an early-response-system, and not hooked up to an total-annihilation system
Yes, I'm European and work in the Galileo project, call me French if you like (but I'm not).