Robots Of War

Rise Of The Robots For War

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The future of war with the RAF and the Pentagon pouring huge sums into robotics, one has to imagine; how could this change warfare and what ethical and legal challenges will follow?

BAE Systems unveiled its 'Taranis' unmanned stealth aircraft prototype. Faced with an enemy fighter jet, there's one sensible thing a military drone should do: split.

But in December 2002, caught in the crosshairs of an Iraqi MiG, an unmanned US Predator was instructed to stay put. The MiG fired, the Predator fired back and the result, unhappily for the US, was a heap of drone parts on the southern Iraqi desert.

This incident is often regarded as the first dogfight between a drone, properly known as an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV, and a conventional, manned fighter. Yet in a way, the Predator hardly stood a chance.

New Equipment

American And British UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

They are operated remotely by pilots sitting thousands of miles away on US turf, so manoeuvres are hobbled by signal delays of a quarter-second or more. This means evading missiles will always be nigh-on impossible, unless the UAVs pilot themselves.

In July this year, amid a haze of dry ice and revolving spotlights at the Warton aerodrome, Lancashire, BAE Systems launched a prototype UAV that might do just that.

With a development cost of more than £140m, the alien-looking 'Taranis' was billed by the Ministry of Defence as a "fully autonomous" craft that can fly deep into enemy territory to collect intelligence, drop bombs and defend itself against manned and other unmanned enemy aircraft.

Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement from 2005-2007, said: 'Taranis' would have "almost no need for operator input." 'Taranis' is just one example of a huge swing towards autonomous defence systems: machines that make decisions independent of any human input.

With the potential to change modern-warfare radically. States with advanced militaries such as the US and the UK are viewing autonomy as a way to have a longer reach, greater efficiency and fewer repatriated body bags.

The government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, published last month, cited it as a means to "adapt to the unexpected" in a time of constrained resources.

But behind the technological glitz, these autonomous systems hide a wealth of ethical and legal problems?

For some military tasks, armed robots can already take care of themselves. The sides of many allied warships sport a Gatling gun as part of the Phalanx system, which is designed to fire automatically at incoming missiles.

Israel is deploying machine-gun turrets along its border with the Gaza Strip to target Palestinian infiltrators automatically. For this "See-Shoot" system, an Israeli commander told the industry magazine Defense News, a human operator will give the go-ahead to fire "at least in the initial phases of deployment".

Phalanx And See-Shoot Automated Systems

The Phalanx and See-Shoot are both automated systems, but they are not autonomous, a subtle yet crucial difference. A drinks machine is an example of an automated system: you push a certain button and out drops the corresponding bottle.

In a similar way, the Phalanx Gatling gun waits for a certain blip to appear on its radar, then fires at it.

Autonomous systems, on the other hand, perform much more complex tasks by taking thousands of readings from the environment. These translate to a near-infinite number of input states, which must be processed through lengthy computer code to find the best possible outcome.

Some believe it's the same basic method humans use to make elementary decisions ourselves. High-profile armed systems such as 'Taranis' have the true nature of their autonomy kept secret, but other projects hint at what might be in store.

At the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, researchers are using Pentagon funding to develop a six-wheeled tank that can find its own way across a battlefield.

Autonomous Platform Demonstrator

The prototype, which tipped the scales at six tonnes, was nicknamed the 'Crusher' thanks to its ability to flatten cars. The latest prototype, known as the Autonomous Platform Demonstrator or APD, weighs nine tonnes and can travel at 50mph.

The key to the APD's autonomy is a hierarchy of self-navigation tools. First, it downloads a basic route from a satellite map, such as Google Earth.

Once it has set off, stereo video cameras build up a 3-D image of the environment, so it can plan a more detailed route around obstacles. To make minor adjustments, lasers then make precision measurements of its proximity to the surrounding terrain.

Dimi Apostolopoulos, principal investigator for the APD, said that its payload could include reconnaissance systems or mounted weapons, primarily for use in the most dangerous areas where commanders are loath to deploy human soldiers.

"Strange as it may sound, we believe the introduction of robotics will change warfare," he said. "There's no doubt about that. It'll take a lot of people out of the toughest situations. And my belief is that this is a good thing for both sides."

The 'BigDog'

A four-legged all-terrain robot has already been developed. Other research in military robots ranges from big to small, from impressive to bizarre. At the robotics lab Boston Dynamics, engineers funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, are developing a four-legged robot that can go anywhere people and animals can go.

Called BigDog, the robot uses sensors and motors to control balance autonomously, trotting over rugged terrain like a creepy headless goat.

Perhaps more creepy is Darpa's research proposal to hijack flying insects for surveillance – in other words, harness a biological "UAV" that is already autonomous.

According to the proposal, tiny, electro-mechanical controllers could be implanted into the insects during their metamorphosis, although some researchers have said this idea is a little too far-fetched.

What is clear is that there is huge investment in military robotics, with UAVs at the forefront. The RAF has five armed Reaper UAVs and has five more on order. The US is way ahead, with the Pentagon planning to increase its fleet of Reaper, Predator and other "multirole" UAVs from 300 next year to 800 in 2020.

As Gordon Johnson of the US Joint Forces Command famously said of military robots: "They don't get hungry. They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders." His statement was reminiscent of a line in the 1986 blockbuster Short Circuit by Newton Crosby.

Absent Without Leave

A scientist who had created a highly autonomous military robot said: "It doesn't get scared. It doesn't get happy. It doesn't get sad. It just runs programs!" In that film, the robot went awol?

What happens if real-life military robots go wrong? Although we are a long way from the sophisticated robots of science fiction, the military are still considering how to tackle potential failure.

In June, Werner Dahm, then chief scientist of the US Air Force, released the USAF "vision" report Technology Horizons, in which he argued that autonomous systems, while essential for the air force's future, must be put through "verification and validation", to be certified as trustworthy.

Military systems already have to undergo verification and validation using a method largely unchanged since the Apollo programme. It's what Dahm calls the "brute force" approach: systematically testing every possible state of a system until it is 100% certifiable.

Today, says Dahm, more than half the cost of modern fighter aircraft is in software development, while a huge chunk of that cost is in verification and validation.

Yet as soon as one contemplates autonomous systems, which have near-infinite input states, brute-force verification and validation becomes out of the question.

Certification

Although Dahm says V&V could be made easier by designing software to "anticipate" the testing process, he believes we will ultimately have to satisfy ourselves with certification below 100%.

The average citizen might say, well, 99.99%, that's not good enough, there are two important responses to that. One, you'd be surprised the car you're driving isn't 99.99% [certified] in most of what it does.

And the other part of the answer is, if you insist on 100% [certification], you'll never be able to get the highly autonomous system at all.

Even existing military robots, which are human-operated, have become controversial. Some believe the CIA's use of UAVs to target alleged insurgents in Pakistan goes against a 1976 executive order by President Ford to ban political assassinations.

Yet for autonomous systems, with humans gradually taken out of the loop, it gets more complicated. If a machine that has learnt on the job shoots at an ambulance rather than a tank, whose fault was it? A barrister and systems engineer, might ask, "Who has committed the crime?"

These concerns are echoed by other lawyers, scientists and professors of artificial intelligence at Sheffield University, they say it is impossible for autonomous robots today to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants, a cornerstone of international humanitarian law.

They also believe that robots lack the subtle judgment to adhere to another humanitarian law: the principle of proportionality which says civilian causalities must not be "excessive" for the military advantage gained.

It's not always appropriate to fire and kill, there are so many examples in the Iraq war where insurgents have been in an alleyway, Marines have arrived with guns raised but noticed the insurgents were actually carrying a coffin.

So the marines lower their machine guns, take off their helmets and let the insurgents pass. Now, a robot couldn't make that kind of decision.

What Features Does It Look For?

Could the box be carrying weapons? The issue is autonomous strike, that is, a robot making its own firing decision, and this is where opinions differ.

An MoD spokesperson mentioned; that, in attack roles, there will remain an enduring need for appropriately trained human involvement, in operating UAVs, for the foreseeable future.

It is believed that the USAF holds the same view, though it appears to be lost in its latest UAV Flight Plan. Increasingly, humans will no longer be 'in the loop' but rather 'on the loop,' monitoring the execution of certain decisions, it reads.

Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions, without necessarily requiring human input. However: Authorising a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions.

A 2008 paper by the US Office of Naval Research also admits that there are ethical and legal obstacles to autonomy. It suggests a "sensible goal" would be to program autonomous robots to act at least as ethically, as human soldiers.

Although it notes that accidents will continue to occur, which again raises the question of legal responsibility. The paper also considers the idea that autonomous robots could one day be treated as being partly or almost?

Rob Alexander, a computer scientist at York University, thinks this would be a step too far. "A machine cannot be held accountable," he said. "Certainly not with any foreseeable technology – we're not talking about Star Trek androids here.

These things are machines and the operators or designers must be responsible for their behaviour."

There Are Broader Issues

In his recent book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, Stephen Graham, a human geography expert at Durham University, argues that autonomy is the result of shifting warfare from fields to cities, where walls and hideouts "undermine" the leadership of advanced militaries.

But the real danger, Graham says, is that autonomous robots reduce the political cost of going to war, so that it no longer becomes a last resort. "You don't get the funeral corteges going through small towns in Wiltshire," he explained to me.

Given the limitations of current robotics, the deeper ethical and legal issues of autonomy will, for the near future, stay largely hypothetical. According to Dahm, autonomy will have more imminent uses as part of large military systems, performing tasks that are becoming too laborious for humans.

Satellites, for example, could autonomously filter information and reconnaissance data so they only transmit selected images displaying recognisable and highly important targets.

Indeed, military commanders already use software that has elements of autonomy to help in certain fiddly tasks, such as organising the deployment of munitions. As years go by, more tactical decisions, mundane at first, could be handed over to machines.

The natural reaction is that we're paving the way for a dystopian future akin to various science fiction films, a world taken over by self-aware robots.

But that would be missing the point: in exchanging flesh and blood for circuits and steel, it is the precise opposite of artificial intelligence we should be afraid of. It dosen't look like we're on the path to a Terminator-style future. Those robots were really clever.

Despite the US Department of Defense once predicting that a third of US fighting strength would be composed of robots by 2015, experts warn that the machine wars seen in the movies will remain science fiction for quite some time yet.

"I'll be back"

Said Arnold Schwarzenegger as cyborg-assassin the Terminator, back from the year 2029 to carry out a murder in 1984. But it seems that, when it comes to science fact rather than science fiction, it is unlikely that anything like him, or should he be an it? - will ever "be" at all.

Robots in the home have been promised for a while and though - technology is slowly allowing robots closer to domestic use, some of the most practical applications so far have been in military operations.

Robots so far are not quite up to the images depicted in science fiction What robots are doing in modern warfare is no small feat. Machines undertake bomb disposal, mine detection and entering unknown places of interest before sending in soldiers, a practice that the military believes is saving lives.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones have already carried out numerous military operations carrying "lethal payloads" without having a soldier on board.

It was called "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership [in Pakistan]" by CIA director Leon Panetta in 2009.

Despite it being called a "drone war" by some commentators, the Department of Defense is keen to point towards its key goals of "intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance" when it is using robotics.

In a document setting out an unmanned military vehicle roadmap between 2005 and 2030, it stated that around a third of US fighting strength would be composed of robots in a $127bn (£80bn) project.

This Was Scrapped In 2009

But some of the latest prototypes could still make robots in military operations on the ground a regular occurrence. The LS3 - known as "Alphadog" to its developers - will be able to carry up to 400lbs (180kg) of equipment over a distance of up to 20 miles (32km) over a 24-hour period.

In practical terms, this means that it could replace the use of a mule or donkey to carry heavy loads.

These newest prototypes move a lot more like organic animals than previously Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and the US Marine Corps, it can withstand being kicked and maintains its balance when pushed.

"For years, I did work on one-legged hopping machines - funny contraptions in the lab," Marc Raibert, of Boston Dynamics told an audience at Stanford University.

"The number of remaining problems that need to be solved is a small but manageable list. In the next couple of years, I can imagine getting legged robot technology… out there and into use."

The way it is able to right itself when toppled and the noise it makes when moving is more than a little like the Terminator and many reacting to the clips have been amazed at just how realistically the robot moves.

Tech site Gizmodo called it the "creepiest and most awesome quadruped robot of all time".

Life And Death

But despite the occasional YouTube comment saying this development will lead to the end of the world, this is where robotics experts are keen to see the comparisons with sci-fi stop.

"With today's technology, there has to a person in the loop with regard to a decision that would have the gravity of life and death," says Joe Dyer, chief operating officer of robotics firm iRobot.

The world will begin to change drastically when robots have the manipulation capability of a five or six-year-old child. Will we ever have machines that would truly challenge Asimov's laws? Maybe, but it's going to be a long time coming.

The real stumbling block for robotics engineers is that where a robot fails, and a human excels, is in the context of recognition. People can tell things apart quickly, effectively and all from a very early age.

While handling rough terrain is now generally considered to be at the later stages of development for robots, actual intelligence and recognition about what it finds when it reaches its destination is a lot more complicated. But we are starting to nibble at the edges of it.

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Brain Power

At the moment, "stupid" robots serve a purpose. Their main function is to go into places where it would be dangerous or impossible for a human to tread. High intelligence is not required so much as brute strength and the ability to keep humans away from potentially harmful situations.

Some robots are a lot less frightening to people than others. The first major mass practical use for these type of robots came in the aftermath of 9/11 as a search and rescue tool when emergency personnel were unable to carry out an operation.

They were operated by human controllers in a similar way to how they are today. But if futurist and author Ray Kurzweil is right, by 2019 a $1,000 (£650) computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain.

And this could lead to "intelligent" robots with an autonomy that many find uncomfortable. But what many see this as frightening at the moment, some experts think that it is only a matter of time before it becomes an idea that people will get used to and eventually consider normal.

We [humans] don't like to give up our special-ness, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures, I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we're going to have to accept it over the next 50 years or so.

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Robots Of War

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