Robots Go to War

Trial by Fire

Twenty years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) inaugurated an Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) program. Right idea, wrong era. Then, the only way to harness enough computing power for autonomous operation was to stuff half of a schoolbus-size vehicle with Silicon Graphics workstations. Even so, the ALV couldn't go more than a few miles an hour without leaving the road or smacking into something. Clearly, this wasn't what the Department of Defense had in mind. Unmanned aerialvehicles (UAVs) were taking off, but UGVs appeared to be about as dead as the also-rans in a Battlebots telecast.

The robotics world looks a lot rosier these days. The accuracy of commercial-grade GPS navigation has improved from 100 feet to about 30-or, in some military applications, only a few feet. New sensors generate denser images that are approaching one million pixels in resolution, rather than a mere 100,000. This, in turn, allows 'bots to"see" with reasonable clarity for 50 to 100 yards. Meanwhile, more elegant algorithms enable faster onboard computers to consider thousands of routes as often as 10 times a second. Roll all this into a single package, and you've got a UGV that can safely achieve speeds of 35 miles an hour on obstacle-laden cross-country jaunts; 55 mph is possible on well-marked highways.

The first generation of small, crude remotely-operated (as opposed to autonomous) UGVs has already acquitted itself on the battlefield. The Talon, a 100-pound treaded 'bot built by defense contractor Foster-Miller, was first used in Bosnia in 2000. At the moment, there are several hundred Talons and slightly smaller PackBots, built by iRobot (of Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner fame), on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both carry cameras and articulated arms to deal with roadside bombs and booby traps. The Army has tested a Talon variant that can be equipped with any one of four weapons ranging from an M16 rifle to a medium-weight machine gun, although it hasn't yet blessed it for combat."The operator sees a bore-sighted image with a crosshairs," says Bob Quinn, Foster-Miller's general manager for Talon operations."It's exactly like a videogame-except it's real."

But the real goal for UGVs is autonomous operation with no human input whatsoever and no dependence on unreliable wireless linkages. This is, after all, standard operating procedure for many UAVs. You would think it would be easy to apply this technology to ground ops. But you wouldn't have thought so if you'd been in the California desert in March 2004, during the inaugural running of the Darpa Grand Challenge. Created to spark grassroots UGV development, the first Grand Challenge came off as something of a Three Stooges affair. None of the entrants came anywhere near completing the 142-mile cross-country course, and most of them barely made it past the starting line. The Oshkosh Truck Corporation showed up with an autonomous version of its six-wheeled Marine Corps truck dubbed the TerraMax, but the bright yellow beast was terminally flummoxed by a software glitch after just one mile.