WASHINGTON: “Right now, it’s very difficult for a robot that looks at a puddle. It doesn’t know if it’s a Marianas Trench, or if it’s two inches deep,” Army Maj. Corey Wallace told reporters this morning. “It’s something that we as human beings can contextualize, but the robot has a hard time doing it.”

Private-sector R&D has made for tremendous advances in self-driving vehicles – though they’re still not street-legal – but those cars are designed to drive on roads. Army combat robots must maneuver cross-country, and as soldiers found in five weeks of field tests now wrapping up at Fort Carson, that’s a lot trickier for machines.

The service has a multi-year plan to push the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, evolving from today’s experimental Robotic Combat Vehicles — geriatric M113 troop carriers upgraded with new electronics so they can operate unmanned – to a family of purpose-built RCVs ranging from seven-ton scouts to a 20-ton mini-tank. But some of the solutions the soldiers suggested on today’s call were breathtakingly simple, like putting microphones on the robots so the operators can hear what’s going on as well as see through cameras.

“I’m getting no audio,” said Sgt. Matthew Morris, who drives an RCV in the experiment. “That’s not a fundamental technical limitation. It’s just that no one thought to mike up the robot. “We definitely need something along those lines,” the sergeant said.

Army photo

Adjusting the remote-controlled weapons station on an experimental Robotic Combat Veicle

For the robot to act as a virtual sentry, Wallace added, “it needs to hear branches breaking around it.”

Other problems require software advances. Currently, Wallace said, “we were able to do very limited waypoint navigation,” where a human selects a few points on a map and then the robot finds its own path from one to the next.

For some missions, that’s enough. “Earlier this year in Europe, we had one of our robots pick up a logistics load and travel three kilometers without human interference, drive to a command post, and deliver that logistics package, without a single human touching it,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, the Army’s modernization director for armored vehicles. In this latest experiment, he added, “the map interface… absolutely blew us away.”

The map is not the territory, however, and even the most fine-grained digital map won’t tell a human or robot driver everything they need to know to make their way in the real world. The current robots are pretty good at detecting solid obstacles, like rocks, tree stumps, and fallen logs, and finding a way around them on their own. But “negative obstacles” – potholes, ditches, puddles – still confound computer vision, because it lacks the human capacity to estimate the depth of a hole, especially when it’s filled with water.

“Right now, we don’t have sensors that can tell whether we’re coming across a little puddle that we can just drive through or whether that puddle’s eight feet deep and gonna bog us down forever,” said Jeffery Langhout, director of the Ground Vehicle Systems Center.

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Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman during a Robotic Combat Vehicle demonstration.

Humans and Machines

When the robots can’t make sense of something on their own, they need a human operator to intervene, look through their sensors, and tell them what to do. By 2035, Brig. Gen. Coffman said, the Army wants “one human controlling 12 robots.” Today, it takes two – a driver and a gunner/sensor operator.

Driving a vehicle by remote control, staring at a screen, is a lot harder than actually sitting in it. You can’t feel the vibration of a straining engine, the jolt of the suspension going over rocks, the slush of tracks or tires bogging in soft ground, the tilt of going up a slope too steep for safety.

“When you’re in a Humvee, it’s very clear when you’re getting into soft sand, you know to downshift to a lower gear. You know when you’re getting on a steep slope,” Wallace said. “Is the solution something as simple as a microphone on the RCD and an artificial horizon to let the soldier the operators know when their RCV’s about to tip?”

Driving isn’t the only function the Army wants to partially automate. So is spotting targets and aiming the gun. (The decision on whether or not to fire, however, will remain under human control). The Aided Target Recognition software now on the RCVs works well when the vehicle is stationary, Coffman said. When the vehicle is moving, however, the weapon and its sights still bounce too much for the software to get a clear picture.

With all this information coming in, “the RCV operators have a lot on their plates,” Wallace said, “They’re trying to fight the vehicles. They’re trying to send reports. They’re trying to coordinate CASEVAC [casualty evacuation].”

So the Army is looking at adding another human to the mix. Rather than have the RCV operators report directly to the unit commander, the Army may have each pair of RCV teams – four operators running two robots – report to an experienced NCO, who oversees their actions and coordinates with the rest of the unit.

That kind of coordination is critical, because the Army doesn’t want robots operating on their own. It envisions a “human-machine team” of RCVs, manned vehicles, and dismounted infantry.

Army photo

Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman (left) talks to Gen. John “Mike” Murray (right) and Sgt. Maj. Michael Crosby (far right) during a Robotic Combat Vehicle demonstration.

The experimental platoon now at Fort Carson has four RCVs, two modified M2 Bradleys (aka MET-Ds) carrying the RCV operators, and two regular Bradleys transporting a half-dozen scout troopers. After two weeks of training and a week of live-fire with the RCVs’ weapons, said Lt. Nicholas Best, the force spent two weeks maneuvering together over a mix of mountainous and desert terrain, as well as a simulated urban environment. The scouts dismounted to enter buildings and move through rough terrain the vehicles couldn’t handle, with human and robot working together to cover each others’ blind spots.

This experiment at Fort Carson focused on what the Army calls “cavalry” operations – small units scouting ahead of the main force. Instead of human scouts stumbling across the enemy and coming under fire, as has happened in battles from Gettysburg to Baghdad, the goal is to make first contact with a robot. At the very least, the robot’s demise can warn its human operators that something hostile is coming, giving them more time to prepare. At best, said Coffman, the robot can not only spot the enemy but open fire with its own weapons, disrupting their advance.

Future experiments will move beyond the cavalry role and have robots attack and defend objectives, Coffman said, culminating in a “combined arms breach” of a defended obstacle. In each case, the goal is for the robots to move forward into the kill zone while the humans hang back in “overwatch,” close enough to monitor the battle but under cover and out of range of some, if not all, the enemy’s weapons.

“The distance between the robot and the controller is a physics problem,” Coffman said. Currently, in open terrain, the robots can be up to 2000 meters away – about a mile and a quarter. Mountains, solidly constructed buildings, and close-packed trees can all disrupt transmissions, he said, but companies have shown the Army radio waveforms that get transmit multiple megabytes per second a considerable distance through dense forest.

For the next major experiment, scheduled for 2022 once new purpose-built RCV prototypes are on hand, “we’ll have a new radio to increase the range,” the general said, as well as a tethered drone to relay signals over obstacles.

What’s most impressive to Coffman, however, is not the technology itself, but how quickly the humans have adapted to it.

Army photo

Humans check out one of the modified M113s converted into an experimental Robotic Combat Vehicle

“It knocked my socks off that the soldiers said they needed about, oh, 30 minutes to learn how to operate the robots,” he said. “I thought it was gonna take them days. But our soldiers are so amazing, and they grew up in this environment of gaming, that they said yeah, 30 minutes and we could handle everything.”

Those soldiers’ feedback will be a vital guide to turning new technology into something troops can actually use in combat, said Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston.

“I still remember when I was a young soldier growing up, and somebody drops off this kit and says ‘here it is, the new item!’ And you go, ‘well, that doesn’t make any sense,” said Grinston, who’d come to Fort Carson to observe the experiment. When real troops can get their hands on the equipment early enough to change it, he said, “it’s really powerful.”