War Drone Refueling a Major Step in Robotics

X-47B UCAS workers on runway. The drone will be the first of its kind to be able to land on an aircraft carrier without a pilot. (Courtesy of Northrop Grumman) 

A glimpse at what’s to come often comes shrouded in mystery. In mid-December, a 32-foot package was transported down U.S. Route 77, smooth and rounded, tightly wrapped from front to back.

The object was a near-perfect match to the stereotype of a UFO (and fooled many onlookers), but it was not. For inside was the Navy’s experimental X-47B, the first autonomous drone capable of landing on an aircraft carrier. 

The Navy took a key step Jan. 23 toward its release, with tests on autonomous midair refueling. “This is a game-changer for naval aviation and is critical for our success with unmanned long-range aircraft in the future,” said Capt. Jaime Engdahl, Navy UCAS program manager, in a press release.

This latest achievement in drone development comes like a car to a world of horse-drawn carriages. The autonomous technology is made for military robots, a technology that soon may not only dominate modern wars, but also find its way into every household—for better or for worse.

“There always needs to be a triggering event, and that just happened,” said Robert Oschler, who programs artificial intelligence (AI) and electroencephalogram control systems for home robotics.

Oschler said the latest developments in military technology are “huge,” noting that major shifts in consumer technology often start with the military.

The consumer robotics market was nearly destroyed several years back. Just prior to the global financial crisis, a small, cute robot dinosaur known as “Pleo” made a round of appearances, including television shows like 20/20 and Ellen DeGeneres. “Shortly after that, everyone started getting in the game,” Oschler said.

As development sailed along, consumer feedback was already pointing in a specific direction: people didn’t want remote-controlled consumer-programmed robots. “They want their robots autonomous,” Oschler said. “It’s like if someone said before you go watch TV tonight you have to go through these eight steps. People just want to sit down on their couch, throw back some popcorn, and watch TV.”

Yet before development could move further, the market died. “It was starting to boom. It was about to be the next big thing, before the global financial crisis killed it,” he said.

A handful of companies weathered the robotics fallout by cashing in on the military market. A small handful of others, like iRobot, makers of the Roomba, hunkered down and waited for the market to open again.

Yet developments in military robotics technology, coupled with the military market now drying up, could cause another shift. “These companies are going to need something to sell,” Oschler said.

“What are they going to do with the R&D departments, what are they going to design and sell now that the markets are drying up? They’re going to turn to the consumer marketplace,” he said.

Next ... Robotics Ethics

 

Robotics Ethics

The emergence of robots—whether in military use, or with hospitals, toys, or public spaces—is creating a new list of questions on ethics.

We Robot, an inaugural conference on the legal and policy issues of robotics, will be held April 21–22 by the University of Miami School of Law. But they’re not the only group discussing this.

For military use, a whole platter of debates are already being served to Congress, filled with concerns of what removing humans—and human empathy—from the battlefield will mean. Who will be held accountable for unwarranted killings? What if the drones malfunction or are hacked? What is the chance of error?

The International Committee of the Red Cross, in charge of protecting victims of armed conflict under the Geneva Convention, is already on the case.

“The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities,” committee president Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference, the LA Times reported. “The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system.”

And aside from potential computer errors, human error will always be a factor. There is the looming story of NASA’s Mariner 1, the first spacecraft of the Mariner program. The craft, launched on July 22, 1962, was meant to perform a Venus flyby, yet was given a destruction command by NASA soon after its launch.

A cause of the failure was a coding error—a single missing hyphen “allowed transmission of incorrect guidance signals to the spacecraft,” states NASA on its website.

Further, “... the omission of the hyphen in the data-editing program caused the computer to incorrectly accept the sweep frequency of the ground receiver ... This caused the computer to swing automatically into a series of unnecessary course corrections with erroneous steering commands which finally threw the spacecraft off course,” NASA states.

Yet the coming march of military robots may be inevitable, simply due to a need to fight superior weaponry. UAVs are already being developed all over the world, even finding their way into domestic and consumer markets.

The Army released a new directive Jan. 13, effective immediately, to govern the use of UAVs within the United States—for both training missions and domestic operations. It notes their use of UAVs requires access to the National Airspace System.