Autonomous systems offer a wealth of promise for the military, but working with industry to transition technology from research labs to the battlefield will be key, service officials said on Thursday.
Officials from the services’ science and technology community told the House Armed Services Committees Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee that the Pentagon is expanding its partnerships with commercial companies.
The Air Force is working through Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental—the Pentagon’s hub at Moffett Field, created to scout out disruptive technologies—to try to connect with Silicon Valley companies doing advanced robotics, machine learning and pattern recognition, said Greg Zacharias, the service’s chief scientist. “We will be reaching out additionally with more Air Force Research Lab personnel in that direction.”
The Navy, which recently stood up a new N99 directorate for unmanned systems, is trying to energize the development of autonomous technologies, said Frank Kelley, who in October was named the first deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for unmanned systems.
One of the first things he did after taking the post, Kelley said, was to talk with Brian Wynne, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). During that discussion, he learned that the military and commercial sector share many of the same obstacles to unmanned aerial vehicle and robotics use, such as developing robust sense-and-avoid radars.
“I think one of the responsibilities of our office is also to work across the entire enterprise and provide opportunities for industry to participate in demonstrations and exercises,” he said. “We’re taking a really rigorous stab at prototyping and experimentation, and this is to better inform the requirements at the front end of our acquisition framework. The most important thing is to get the requirements right.”
However, the military will have to develop certain autonomous technologies without help from the private sector, said Jonathan Bornstein, chief of the autonomous system division of the Army Research Laboratory’s Vehicle Technology Directorate.
Unlike commercial companies, which develop systems that work well on structured environments—such as a driverless car that can operate on known roads via GPS— the military oftentimes must deal with more dynamic environments where more advanced sensors and reasoning systems are necessary—such as driving offroad in a jungle, he said.
“Where the military can leverage heavily is in those applications that are in more structured environments. Think about logistics, many aspects of convoy operations, forward operating bases,” he said.
In the midterm, the Army is focusing on growing autonomous systems that can be used for robotic vehicles or to aid “manned-unmanned teaming” between drones and manned aircraft, Bornstein said.
Investment in those midterm requirements is critical to build doctrine and experience using autonomous systems, he said. “It’s very difficult to write requirements for a revolutionary technology in which you have no experience.”
When most people think about autonomous systems, they think about mobile systems such as a robot or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Zacharias said. However, some of the greatest leaps for unmanned technologies are happening not in the world of the motors and sensors that aide such systems movement, but in the “brains” of the system that analyze data and imagery.
“If you think about removing those onboard smarts to a ground-based system and putting them, say in a ground control center or a planning center, then you’ve got autonomy at rest,” he said. “Many of the advances that we’re going to see in this area may come from data feeds or other sensors or satellite imagery, but they’re going to be in these ground-based situations.”
The Navy faces a unique challenge in that it operates autonomous systems on land, air and undersea, Kelley said. For that reason, it’s important that the service make investments in domain- and platform-agnostic technologies.