US Navy Developing App-Summoned Robotic Helicopter

Zothecula writes "We may be closer to the day when United States Marines will, within a matter of minutes, use a handheld app to summon robotic helicopters to deliver battlefield supplies. On Tuesday, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced its five-year, US$98 million Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System (AACUS) program, with the specific aim of developing 'sensors and control technologies for robotic vertical take-off and landing aircraft.'" Last month we covered NATO's robotic helicopter, the K-MAX.

Comments

Robots

[bonch]

Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people. But of course, these will only be used to "deliver battlefield supplies." Wink.

Re:Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Karmawhoring with veiled anti-war sarcasm is always effective on slashdot, so I don't blame you. But really though, war is about maximizing tactical and strategic advantages, be it the bow and arrow, be it armor, be it castles, be it gunpowder, be it airplanes. What's the alternative, stagnation? Relinquishing war while others do not?

Re:Robots

[peragrin]

*Iran Likes this*

Just remember drones can be jammed, intercepted, or hacked. It is a whole lot harder to hack mark one eyeballs remotely.

Re:Robots

[inhuman_4]

Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people.

It's also less likely to make mistakes and kill innocent people. For those of you who don't know most casualties in war are civilians. The civilian casualty ratio for recent wars has averaged 10 civilians for every combatant. The reasons are many but is basically boils down to who takes what risks.

When a soldier is in a combat zone he has to make a shoot/no-shoot choice for every person he sees. Now of course in a combat zone people are running on adrenaline, they are often exhausted, the situation is chaos, and the stakes are life and death. So if you are a soldier and you see someone, how sure are you going to be that they are not a civilian before you shoot? And remember if you are wrong, you die.

A good example is this story. It is easy to lay blame after the fact. But imagine you are in that chopper, you have had RPGs shot at you all day, and then you see someone in a van pointing a black tube like thing at you. What are you going to do?

But probably the biggest cause is long range weapons like artillery and air strikes. Sometimes sending in people on the ground would be suicide, so you have to use less accurate weapons like artillery and air strikes even though they cause more civilian casualties. This need to minimize your own casualties it just part of how war works, and it always has. The point of war is not to die for your side, but to make the other guy die for his.

With drones however the game changes because you can send a drone on a suicide mission instead of firing artillery. You can have a drone wait and verify that it is a camera and not an RPG. Yes drones will make mistakes, probably a lot of mistakes, but humans only get it right 10% of the time anyway. So please don't pretend that the bar is so high that it will never work.

The argument against drones is like an argument against smart bombs. They get the job done faster, cheaper, and with less casualties for all sides. But then some people will argue against it anyway because its popular to be anti-anything-military.

Re:Robots

[Ethanol-fueled]

It's called "fuzzing." In computing, fuzzing is throwing invalid data at a program to see how it responds. In social engineering, fuzzing serves to confound your mark, softening them, so that you can get what you want out of them.

One of the most familiar fuzzing techniques is saying absurd things with a straight face, often interleaving them with factual data. Parents could use the technique to see if their kids are paying attention to what they're saying, and slimy sales-types often use a similar trick to determine gullibility and susceptibility. When you call the latter on their bullshit, they can just say, "Haha, just messin' with you, man," and smile with a nudge or a pat on the back.

I fuzz naturally because I am a schizophrenic and use facial expressions, body language, and gestures that are all incongruent to each other. I can put people in a trance by glazing over my eyes while talking to them, leaving them to consciously forget every word I said to them even though I overflowed their buffer with suggestions.

Re:Robots

[inhuman_4]

So if you are a soldier and you see someone, how sure are you going to be that they are not a civilian before you shoot?

Yes, because it's so trivial to program such a quick response into a robot?

if (object == enemy) { kill(); } else { candy(); }

No actually it is quite a difficult task. How difficult depends on how how much time you have and how accurate you need the system to be.

Humans can be very accurate. Unfortunately in combat they have almost no time, if you wait too long to make a decision it could cost you your life. This means they get it wrong an awful lot of the time. Robots are not really that accurate (for now at least), but they have lots of time because they are expendable.

The reason robots can work is not because the task is easy, but because the bar has been set so low. The robot can have lot and lots of false negatives (ie. doesn't shoot enemies) because no one cares if the robots dies. On the flip side if its positive ids are wrong half the time (ie. 50% of the people it kills are innocent), that is still 5 times better than a human.

Re:Robots

[wdef]

The point of war is not to die for your side, but to make the other guy die for his.

Not quite right. The point of war is to maim and wound the other side's guys, not kill. This is because every maimed and wounded soldier sucks up many times his own resources in being evacuated and cared for. There are figures for this and it came up not long ago on /..

The following analogy occurs to me. The most effective disease does not kill its host, at least not too quickly, before it can spread to new hosts while burning out the original host's resources. So the best (worst) war is an effective disease.

Correct headline

[sakdoctor]

US Navy developing remote controlled robotic helicopter.

Let's not start pretending that an "app" is a real thing, distinct from technologies which already existed.

It never ends...

[fullback]

The technology of endless wars, one after another. How about a handheld app to deliver medical or other emergency supplies to accidents, natural disasters, etc.?

Ask an American to rattle off a chronology of American history and the time unit will be wars. War after war. Ask them to describe American culture and you'll get a blank stare.

Re:It never ends...

[ScentCone]

How about ... medical or other emergency supplies to accidents, natural disasters, etc.?

You mean, the way the US military regularly and directly does all around the world, and likewise supports/provides security as others do?

The technology of endless wars

All the technology does is make conflict less capriciously deadly in ways that don't get the job done. What you're really bitching about is the fact that the world isn't entirely done, yet, with having conflicts like those in the Balkans or the middle east impact the rest of the world. You're annoyed that places like North Korea would, in fact, immediately roll their special kind of socialist paradise right over South Korea if they weren't sure that Really Bad Military Things would happen to them. I'm sorry that annoys you. Do you have another proposal for containing them? Would you prefer a lower-tech approach, and just line up more troops on the ground, and perhaps some mounted cavalry, to confront their long-range artillery? Maybe some a nice four-mast wooden ship or two to confront the sub they used to sink a South Korean naval vessel?

Ask them to describe American culture and you'll get a blank stare.

How would you describe European culture? Thousands of years of war, there. Perhaps African culture? Eons of tribal butchery. The Far East? Central Asia? Please, do go on.

And the App Will be Called...

[IonOtter]

"Get to da choppa!"