The robots are coming: US Army experiments with human-machine warfare

Sur le même sujet

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  3 août 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Army, NASA Want Laser Micro-Satellites For 50 Times The Bandwidth

  By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. It was hard enough keeping the data flowing to the far mountains of Afghanistan, but at least the Taliban didn't have the technology to attack the network. Russia and China, however, are investing heavily in capabilities to eavesdrop on or jam the radio transmissions and to blind or outright shoot down the satellites. ASSOCIATION OF THE US ARMY, ARLINGTON: War zones, it turns out, get crappy reception. But the Army, NASA, and multiple private companies are looking to optical communications — that means lasers — off affordable micro-satellites that could dramatically increase bandwidth. Just this morning, the federally funded Aerospace Corporation announced a successful test for NASA that provided bandwidth 50 times higher — an almost 5,000 percent increase — than current military satellites that use radio waves. Bassett: Military Necessity Not three hours before the Aerospace Co. announcement, Maj. Gen. David Bassettwas getting excited about optical satellites at the Association of the US Army's annual cyber and networks conference here. That matters because, after a successful tour in charge of armored vehicle programs, Bassett is now the Army's Program Executive Officer for Command, Control, Communications – Tactical (PEO-C3T). Currently, Bassett said, during a typical exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center, meant to depict realistic combat conditions, an Army brigade HQ gets a satellite link that can transmit two megabits a second. By comparison, he said, one of his fellow panelists, Forcepoint Federal CTO George Kamis, had just clocked his smartphone at 70megabits per second. That's 35 times the power the 4,000-soldier brigade gets, for just one person. “We have to provide more bandwidth to a headquarters than Mr. Kamis has in his pocket,” said Bassett. Full article: https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/army-nasa-want-laser-micro-satellites-for-50-times-the-bandwidth

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  6 février 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  GKN Fokker and LM Aeronautics Collaborating on Future F-35 Long Term Agreement

  Manufacturing of the Flaperons, Inflight Opening Doors (IFOD), and Electrical Wiring and Interconnection Systems (EWIS) for the F-35 Follow-on agreement will cover a five year extension up to 2024 Continuous employment for approximately 600 employees At the roll-out event of the first operational Dutch F-35 in Fort Worth, Texas USA both GKN Fokker and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics confirmed via a protocol document the continuation of GKN Fokker's efforts on F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter specific to the manufacturing of Flaperons, Inflight Opening Doors (IFOD), Arresting Gear, and Electrical Wiring and Interconnection Systems (EWIS) content. Production will take place at GKN Fokker's sites in The Netherlands and Turkey with delivery taking place over the next five years. The protocol document was signed by Lockheed Martin's Vice President of F-35 Supply Chain Management, Drew Ruiz and by GKN Fokker's CEO John Pritchard. State Secretary of Economic Affairs Mona Keijzer, Royal Netherlands Air Force Commander-in-Chief, Lt. Gen. Dennis Luyt, and the Netherlands' Special Envoy for industrial participation, Maxime Verhagen all attended the ceremony. GKN Fokker has been a valued supplier on the F-35 program since 2002 and has produced and delivered the flaperons, inflight opening doors (IFOD), arresting gear, and designed and produced the electrical wiring interconnection system (EWIS) for all F-35 aircraft that are currently flying and in production. Source: GKN Aerospace http://www.asdnews.com/news/defense/2019/02/01/gkn-fokker-lm-aeronautics-collaborating-future-f35-long-term-agreement

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  13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre

  DARPA wants commanding robots to work like a video game

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game