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The Army Is Preparing To Send Driverless Vehicles Into Combat (vice.com)
The U.S. Army is getting ready to send driverless trucks into combat. "Next fall, [the Army's] 'Leader-Follower' technology will enable convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human," reports VICE News. "It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices that caused nearly half the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan." From the report: Much of the research and development of these technologies has been done at TARDEC, the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, in Warren, Michigan. Typically human-driven trucks are outfitted with sensors and cameras through a TARDEC-created applique kit. They're not exactly robots, just regular military trucks that have been made a lot smarter. The technology is expected to be ready for field use in September 2019.
This seems like an incredibly bad idea.
We just had the report last week about how easy it was to hack military equipment https://phys.org/news/2018-10-pentagon-weapons-easily-hacked.html
Now you're going to give them something to attach IED to and an autonomous delivery system. So the vehicle comes back from its patrol route and explodes in the maintenance bay or at the gate.
I mean... will a can of mud or paint thrown at the cameras sensors, and/or an rf jammer cause the driverless trucks to drive off the road?
Be really hilarious* if it were remotely hackable, and supply trucks just drove away.
* not remotely hilarious if you depended on the supplies of course.
The enemy simply has to target the first vehicle.
Would a better approach be to remotely control the first vehicle from any position in the convoy? Sure, it would be more complicated but less likely to lead to casualties.
When they saw how many people have irrational fear of driverless vehicles.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
All it can do is follow, it can't drive autonomously. It's a trailer, with an electronic hitch.
Other programs in development have significant autonomy. Those will, as you said, require a lot of attention to security. Fortunately, I've noticed a lot of the recruiting for security expertise comes is from companies with military contracts. Some of them, like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, are taking it very seriously.
"'Leader-Follower' technology will enable convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human, It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices that caused nearly half the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Umm...wouldn't it be smarter if the unmanned vehicles were in front of the one driven by a human? I mean, they'll hit the IED first...
It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices
Then shouldn't the driver-less cars be in front?
Warren Michigan is pretty close to Detroit. If they can test/drive them in Detroit, most middle eastern countries should be a cake walk.
All that's needed is some sort of electronic jamming tech to turn an entire convoy full of supplies into twisted metal and broken supplies. And yes, this can be a good thing -- anything that slows down imperialist wars doesn't make me feel all that sad.
Into the valley of Death drove the six hundred....
The lead vehicle will likely be armored and largely impervious to IEDs. Trucks cant carry armor without decreasing their load capacity to the point of uselessness.
In some ways, the U.S. government is the most violent in the world.
If Elon had built these they would just fly to th destination on their own, create a teleport pad and teleport all the goods through.
Right after he finishes saving the world.
just wait till they start using these for shipping on highways or even better on mars
"Just get the one with the driver in it, Achmed. The rest will stop and wait for us to unload them."
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I think them terrorists can figure this out.
Those geniuses at TARDEC even admit in the video that a human will be needed to do all the hard stuff because their LIDAR can't idenitfy craters and debris.
TARDEC sounds like a lot of geeks without any sense of the real reality of warzones.
convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human
So by taking out the lead vehicle, the entire convoy just stops?
Not only is the crucial vehicle now obvious (it's the one at the front), but all the firepower and bombs can be directed solely towards it. Once that is destroyed or disabled, none of the other vehicles in the convoy can follow it. They can then be eliminated at leisure.
While being a military driver has always made a person a prime target, this sounds like the job has become almost suicidal in the risks involved.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It would reduce the risk to army personnel.
The lead car sets the route for the rest, so it needs to be driven.... but perhaps the driver doesn't need to be in the lead car. He could be driving by wire.
Prediction: The drug used on Khashoggi was muscle relaxant, and the video and audio recordings the Turkish got were from Skype or Whatsapp, taken by Ahmed al-Assiri's men as he did the 7 minute bone saw dissection of a living man. Reasoning: If you drug and dissect a living man, you're doing a show, and the boss man is known to be blood thirsty, and known to use Skype, he unbanned it and Whatsapp in 2017 and that would explain how the Turks got their recordings and why the killing was done in such an unnecessarily gruesome way.
Which means the NSA has the recording to, and so does a US tech company.
What is this spam?
Our world is gradually becoming a poorly-scripted science fiction B-movie about a corrupt world empire ruling people using mindless drones and robots.
It is almost like a bad joke - except for being real.
the words evil and empire don't mean what you think they mean.
make the human occupants decide to flee
How many times does this happen ? I'm asking you because you seem to know a lot and are emiting opinions. By flee do you mean call in backup and air support because now you found the bad guys which have been hiding until now ?
Nice, they found a use for Uber's deadly driverless technology. From failure to innovation!
Do you want Bolo's? This is how you get Bolos.
Remember DARPA?
Of course they wanted to use this for war.
This is nice but the realities faced by the Army at war will mean the only working versions of this will be found in parades and is one was silly enough to put one in combat its life expectancy with be measured in hours.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. "
-Commandant of Rommelwood Military School
The less involved a human is with controlling the behavior of a machine, the less you can bank upon are his/her human responses to situations to apply to the machine's behavior. That's legitimately scary.
That depends. In the US alone there are 30,000 accidental deaths caused by humans driving vehicles each year and about 300 deliberate deaths (vehicular homicide). The risks for machine drivers are different but I am not sure that they are objectively any scarier. It seems more like the irrational (but sometimes useful) fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.
We have drone planes, why not drone trucks? Seems it would be a lot easier to remotely drive a vehicle than to make it autonomous. Possible even a hybrid of the two if communications is lost between the controller and the vehicle or if the vehicle is running autonomously and runs into a scenario that requires human input. . Combat Truck Simulator 2018?
At least that way when they run someone over, hopefully it will be someone that we meant to kill.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
The posts debating how this differs 'from today?' aren't focusing on the problem this solves.
With this setup: It only takes 1 crew to move a convoy of N trucks.
Today: It takes N crews to move N trucks.
It would be awesome so see a chain-gun system like Phalanx with a Boomarang anti-sniper capability on these, but much more likely to see iron-curtain based anti-rpg tech
You all realize that the way the system is currently being demonstrated and how it may actually be implemented are two vastly different things. TARDEC is currently in the process of demonstrating the full extent of the capability, perhaps define the boundaries and gaps of the capability to inform future development. The next step in the fielding process will be the handing off of the technology to commanders for use extensively in war games. Both experienced and novice commanders will be given an opportunity to use and attack this capability with varying resource levels. The results of the gaming is where integration into current operations will be determined and use doctrine defined. I'm pretty sure the final implementation of the technology will not be as simple as one guy in a lead truck all alone in hostile territory.
My guess, initially it will not be used to reduce the number troops in the trucks. It will be used to change the function of those troops, more eyes on situational awareness and less on driving. I'm guessing the technology will be used in a duck-flying-in-a-'V' fashion, where the lead position will be traded off between trucks/drivers (because currently the technology package allows any of the trucks to be designated as leader), allowing the non-lead drivers to rest. This would vastly increase the amount of time a convey could spend running routes without having to increase the driver pool.
What is the point of a battle of bots without a human being in sight? How do you determine which side wins? Why not let two national champions do battle in a game of chess?
That sure seems safer for N-1 of the crews...
Pff MANPADS, smanpads, the enemy fighting for righteous freedom and peace or earth will bring their laser ion cannon to counter any A10/F35/battlecruiser teh ev1l US might have! Ha take that clearly they are superior might as well stop trying !!11
You right ! Clearly medieval is better than this fancy smancy western civilization that can only produce flawed, crappy, fighter jets.
isn't this obvious? Take out one vehicle and the whole convoy is kaput.
Don't the IEDs detonate on the first vehicle? Wouldn't you want at least one autonomous vehicle in front of the human?
J