Carnegie Mellon Gets $14.4M to Build Robo-Tank

coondoggie passed us a NetworkWorld article, this one discussing new developments in the state of robotic warfare. Carnegie Melon is now hard at work on a tank set to join its brother, the already much-discussed Unmanned Areal Vehicle, on the modern battlefield "Ultimately unmanned ground vehicles would be outfitted with anti-tank or anti-aircraft missiles and anti-personnel weapons to make them lethal. Part of the new award budget is also slated to help the university prove that autonomous ground vehicles are feasible in future combat situations."

Is this what is called pork ?

I'm asking a serious question. I've never understood what is and what isn't pork.

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Depends on your definition. This is a DARPA contract, which is awarded based on if some guy likes you. If they suddenly don't like you, they pull the plug. But mostly this is pretty much a buddy network of people who have known each other for years, and th

Re:Is this what is called pork ?

I think it's safe to say Carnegie Melon is focused on industry applicable results when it comes to robotics.
Maybe you should check out the NREC [cmu.edu].

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I've never understood what is and what isn't pork.

It depends on which political party you belong to and whether elections are coming up.

Re:Is this what is called pork ?

Pork is in the eye of the beholder (c.f. "waste"). Seems like a decent project to me, and it's not like they awarded the contract to some unqualified fly-by-night outfit (despite what Stanford will tell you :) Tanks could be so much faster, lighter, and cheaper if not for the need to protect the soft, chewy middle. Make 'em 80% cheaper than the M1 and deploy 3x as many to make sure the job gets done.

Also, "unmanned" is a bit of a misnomer; as with unmanned aerial vehicles, I'm sure they will be remotely "manned" - people will still decide whether to pull the trigger (and probably do most of the driving, at first).

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I think this is not pork. In the long term, manpower is very expensive, and paying people to put their lives in danger is much more expensive than having tech-jocks sitting at consoles controlling remote vehicles.

Also, the cost of future tanks would be r

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No, pork is the culinary name for meat from the domestic pig. This is a mechanized weapons platform, and falls under the heading "robotics." There are other differences as well (for example: pork is sometimes called "the other white meat" while this part

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Not really; pork is more like the 'bridge to nowhere' built in Alaska; projects that really only benefit the people in the home district of Senators and Representatives are usually what is called pork. At the very least, pork is something that the congress

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Autonomous ground vehicles aren't ready for deployment yet. UAVs barely are, and they have an almost obstacle free 3D space to maneuver in, with decades of autopilot usage in almost all commercial planes to get experience how to do it and how not to.

Since

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Robotic warriors don't bother me. Its those cloners that bother me. Robots are not able to respond and be creative in the way cloners can. Thats why the cloner army destroyed the CIS so fast.

[/humor]

InnerWeb

Areal?

Might I wager "aerial?"

Maybe these damn typos are intentional by submitters. It can't be that hard at all, seeing how lax the editors are.

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I don't think we're talking about a flying tank here. Areal sounds weird but it's a real word.

This Won't Work

This won't work for a variety of reasons. Mainly, though, it won't work because they picked one organization and handed them $14 million dollars. They should learn from NASA or other DARPA challenges and just open it up and say "create an autonomous tank and the winner gets $14 million dollars." That's a much better investment of the money, and it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. I predict this project goes the way of the ill-fated M247 Sargeant York [wikipedia.org].

Re:This Won't Work

CMU got the $14 million because the Robotics Institute already has an autonomous tank, Crusher [cmu.edu]. The money was given specifically to create an updated version of it.

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I imagine building a robotic tank is considerably more expensive than building a robotic car. CMU probably got the contract because they won the DARPA challenge.

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just open it up and say "create an autonomous tank and the winner gets $14 million dollars."

Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. They've had three "Challenges" now and they they still don't have a real autonomous vehicle. Just something that, on

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$14.4M is nothing for this kind of thing. I wonder what it would have cost if it was given to GD or Locheed, or some other defense contractor.

Where's the full scale combat-ready Diesector?

http://www.mutantrobots.com/html/diesector.html [mutantrobots.com]

And when it comes bearing down on a pickup truck full of bad guys, it should have a camera in the jaws to capture that "kodak moment". ;-)

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And when it comes bearing down on a pickup truck full of bad guys,

      We're using the US Army definition of "bad guy" which means "whoever was in the pickup truck", right?

Areal?

Areal as in "related to Ares the Greek God of Savage War"?

Fitting typo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares [wikipedia.org]

--
BMO

No, it's

areal, as in "not real".

Link to more objective article...

Link to PC Pro News [pcpro.co.uk]

Ok

First, it's been obvious for a long time that robot tanks (and eventually robot infantry) are an inevitable development. It WILL happen, has to happen. Some of the posters will spout some meaningless garbage about how you can't trust a machine to decide whether or not to kill someone. Others will give some meaningless "rah rah" about how you can't hold ground without a 20 year old with a rifle standing there to keep it.

In response to this : first, I predict for the foreseeable future none of these fighting machines will be allowed to shoot anyone without human authorization. Requiring a human operator to directly control the machine from a safe distance away is the plan.

And second, a fleshy 20 year old is a bad way to hold ground. Robots have numerous advantages over humans. 1. Disposable. 2. Can take risks with a robot that a human wouldn't take. 3. Don't need supplies when not operating. Could deploy robots in hidden capsules located in the ground, using no fuel and minimal battery power. When something happens, months or years later, you activate the robot and guide it on it's mission. 4. A control center for an army of robots could have far more educated and experienced people manning it than the kind of people you can get to sign up for the Army and marines. Notably, you could have experienced translators, and input from high ranking officers.

Finally, robots mass produced should be cheaper than human soldiers.

Ultimately, the only thing holding this all back is technology. The KEY technology that made tele-operated robotic war-fighters impossible in the 1980s and early 1990s was that there was no way to get the kind of bandwidth needed over digital radios using un-jammable and unbreakable codes.

Notably, the communication system needed for this type of war machine is a mesh network of high bandwidth radio links (each robot would need several megabits, mostly for data from the video cameras) using electronically steered antennae to filter out jamming and allow for thousands of robots sharing the same slice of spectrum. All data would need to be communicated using a one time encryption pad.

As far as I know, the kind of radio hardware to do that was not possible before 2000, and using one time pad encryption means each bot would need to have many gigabytes of internal non-volatile storage. The tech wasn't possible in the past. It is today.

Sure, in the 1980s and 1990s there were demos of related technology, and people laughed at it and said it could never replace human beings. It can.

Note : I am in the US Army reserves as a medic.

Secondary effects

I think what will be really interesting is the secondary effects of this stuff. Traditionally, the human cost has put a check on war-waging. Already, things like Predators and all our other high-tech warfare gadgets have imbalanced the soldier casualties when we wage war against a third world opponent. And they've responded by changing the rules of the game, mixing in with civilian populations, and making extensive use of roadside IEDs. (Now that I think about it, roadside IEDs are kind of like unmanned suicide bombers, turning the tables...)

I fear that all these technologies that take soldiers away from the battlefield, in combination with bringing the battlefield into cities, will result in lower barriers to entry for starting wars (because the military probably worries more about protecting its own than they do about collateral damage), but also higher (and underreported) civilian casualties. I worry that by distancing our soldiers from the battlefield, by making them safer, we might actually increase the human toll.

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(Now that I think about it, roadside IEDs are kind of like unmanned suicide bombers, turning the tables...)

That's actually quite backwards. Most people plant unmanned explosives. Suicide bombers are (as an exception) manned bombs--likewise, kamikazes are manned cruise missiles, devised by the Japanese when they couldn't develop a guidance system.

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I agree that you can't halt innovation, but you can choose which innovations you want to invest in. I think we need to find some way to better reward innovation in fields that don't bring in as much money. Whether you're a defense contractor or a Univers

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While I agree with the general gist of your post, that robotics are certainly going to be a big part of a "future" army, I have to make a few counter-points.

Your "robot" needs a human to oversee it - a human who requires supplies whether or not the robot i

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use of nuclear weapons costs tremendous political clout and risks at least economic harm in return by many nations. but an automated killing machine that kills friend or foe indiscriminately, already had those for more than half a century

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I like the part where you delve into the communication-side of the equation. I would just like to add that they would probably have to use frequency hopping - usuing, again, a schema based on one-time pad.

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I wanted to add something to my last reply. I've noticed that, because I'm a programmer and whatnot, I tend to geek out about cool tech. I think the gov't does, too, and so it's easy to sell everyone, from higher-ups to civilians, on cool fast jets and a

Systems that shoot back

first, I predict for the foreseeable future none of these fighting machines will be allowed to shoot anyone without human authorization.

There's considerable interest in systems that shoot back, really fast. The U.S. Army has had counter-battery fire sy [fas.org]

watch-robo-cop-for-cues-on-what-not-to-do

No. Read old Keith Laumer stories.

Illegal to deploy at home.

I'm all for expending steel instead of lives. The only misgiving I would have at all is domestic uses of these technologies. Not SWAT or special response situations but more general use. At home I believe the final barrier to misuse is a real human bein

Predecessor Crusher is why we got this money

The reason CMU got this funding is primarily due to the fact that we built Crusher (I'm a grad student at the Robotics Institute), for which some of this funding is directed to upgrade. Crusher is, hands-down, the biggest beast of a robot I've ever seen. It's a six wheeled, 6.5 ton, autonomous vehicle - this thing can drive up 4 foot (1.2 meter) steps, has 30 inches (76 cm) of suspension travel, and can carry 8000 lbs of payload. There isn't much that this thing can't handle.

If you have never seen Crusher in action, you've got to see it to believe it. There's a bunch of videos here: http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/crusher/videos/index.htm [cmu.edu].

The quote in the original post is a little misleading - I don't really think NREC is going to be working on mounting weapons on the new vehicle. Primarily they're continuing development on autonomous mobility - can it properly plan and quickly execute a good route to get from point A to point B over rough terrain. Check out the CMU press release [cmu.edu] for a little more detail on the grant.

Who needs tanks anymore?

Maybe that is what they're out to prove, but I see two major combat redundancies here, and I'm not even searching hard. And before I typed them out, I answered myself. I'll post this though because I think it will be interesting. A) If you can get a laser reading on anything with GPS, you can annihilate it via any number of GPS integrated missiles, and I'm sure the autonomous flying vehicle can do an air strike on the point too. So why not lower the lethality of the tank, and just use it more as a scout vehicle that can send valuable visual information as well as paint a target with GPS. B) You don't need much armor on the tank except to protect its engine/treads/ammunition and sensors. This thing's primary goal isn't going to be protecting lifeforms inside even though the first tank will probably be a lot like a conventional tank... For two reasons: Its easy to start with, and having a big ass tank in your lab is unfortunately worth cool points. PS: I was on the team for the first red team racing car, but all they had me do was plot some GPS points. PSS: I thought the robotic vehicle was 5-20 years in the future, not 1. LOL. PSSS: I think the ultimate combat vehicle for modern warfare that I could imagine would be a satellite up link spy tank. It could drop surveillance pods at convenient places to monitor if enemies are moving there. It would also have a few anti bomb robots it could deploy to take out things like IEDs, and to advance on the opponent where you wouldn't want to risk the whole tank. Of course, I don't think this vehicle ever should be autonomous except for uploading video and sensor information. Lets take it one step at a time, and have people safely piloting these things from a distance before jumping into the land of ED209.

The Big Question

The big question here seems to be - will (eventually) having a cheap, powerful unmanned military force make the United States much more likely to use it? Or will this (potentially) massive increase in force strength serve as a deterrent?

Unfortunately,

This is news? I have two.

What's the big deal? I have three robot tanks already: one is called "water heater" and another "water softener"; in my car my "gas tank" tells me when I need to connect it to the tank-fed robots at a station. What's so special about yet another robot tank?

Morality

How do you decide when it's good to place better weapons in your President's hands vs. when it's not good?

If only the U.S. had several, distinct militaries:
a) the Department of Defense (only functions in or near U.S. borders)
b) the Department of Securing Cheap Oil
c) the Department of Get Them Before They Get Us.
d) the Department of Team America, World Police.

Unfortunately, when researchers take DoD money, or soldiers enlist, they have no choice but to support all of a - d. Painful dilemma.

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Ah, but we do:

a) the Department of Defense (only functions in or near U.S. borders)
Department of Homeland Security
b) the Department of Securing Cheap Oil
Department of Defense
c) the Department of Get

If you get invited to this project, don't do it

The world does not need more effective ways to kill people. It is unethical to build automatic tanks; they will be used by psychopaths for selfish purposes. You do not need to help them do this.
Its bound to happen anyway you say? You are bound to die someday too; but it doesn't have to be today.

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The world does not need more effective ways to kill people.
We should be so lucky to have enemies that agree with you.

This is a really stupid position. The 'enemy' will surely copy your technology. America built the bomb, and its 'enemies' had their own i

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The 'enemy' will surely copy your technology. America built the bomb, and its 'enemies' had their own in a matter of months.

That's far too simplistic a view and factually incorrect: the Russians did not build their first atom bomb in months. As it happe

Obligatory

Well I, for one, welcome our new higher education engineering overlords!

I remind them that the current administration might make excellent test subjects for the armored autonomous vehicle's weapons systems.

Devices like this will inevitably breed terrorism

I wonder why it is that nobody stops to think of what terrorism is: a tool of the powerless. If you've got a superior kick-ass military, there's generally no need to resort to terrorism: you do what you want, and if somebody resists, you can blow them away. If you don't have that kind of force at your disposal, you start to look for less direct options to express your opinions than an all-out military confrontation.

Another thing that breeds terrorism is a sense of being wronged by a powerful oppressor, particularly when you're desparate and helpless. If your life isn't worth living, you're probably a lot more willing to give it up in the cause of revenge.

Devices like robotanks that COMPLETELY remove US soldiers from danger will have the inevitable side-effect of making our enemies immediately think: Here we are watching our families and friends getting killed by machines from the USA, but there are no enemy soldiers to fight. Maybe they're too cowardly. So... who are our enemies, really? These machines? Of course not... they're only tools, being operated by CIA agents and military contractors and the like somewhere else, probably over in the US. Hmm... could it be.... US... civilians?

The payback exacted by people who lose everything they have worth living for and are left only with such thoughts may be many years in coming, but it *will* be both horrible and inevitable. And of course we'll react accordingly when it does. It's bad enough when armies go at it in the name of 'accomplishing national objectives'. But once entire civilian populations learn to truly hate each other, war is no longer enough. At that point, only genocide will suffice.

Ethical problems: continuous easy war

How much more do humans need to innovate on ways to kill each other?

The more efficient the methods, the more distant the human cost - all lead to more killing and more government control, not less. How much more war do we need? Maybe when all the "bad" people are killed then the "good" ones left can get around to creating peace. The direct fruits of this research are more effective killing machines, really useful only in killing other humans. There may be other upsides to autonomous vehicles, but that is not what DARPA is about.

When does the global population start to work together to create a world that is peaceful? Will it ever happen? Will it happen in our lifetime? Why are people not pushing THESE questions?

I don't want my grandkids living in a world with autonomous machines toting guns and killing people. That's completely absurd - yet here we are, building it! What we have now is bad enough.

The US has shown that no rules of law, no standards of ethics will hold up against the tyranny of powerful people willing to break them. Why would anyone want governments to wield even more power over people? Guess what - the right to form a militia and protect yourself against government aggression doesn't mean shit when the central authority uses unmanned tanks against you because you don't fall in line, pay your taxes, work your job, and stay in your place. Better pray to god^H^H^H er. . . the president that she lets you live the life you want. No person is going to falter, no one is going to ask, "hey does this make sense?" when the servo and an AI script decide when you are a threat because you shot at the machine.

Most of the discussion on this list is sickening to me. People here are talking about killing people like sweeping floors or serving coffee - completely abstracted from the horror that a real war would be. Just wait until the Chinese start making robots to sweep through the street, packing heat and rounding up US-ians for internment camps. Maybe THEN people will finally say, "Hey, maybe we should work on making peace instead of war!" All the while you're maching down to a camp.

Some of these questions I ask rhetorically, but I'm serious with the point. No more wars. We're had enough.

Re:I For One Welcome...

A student protest is scheduled for May 1st, when the prototype is expected to be ready for it's first trial. Further protests will be scheduled as development progresses.

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If that were the case, I imagine that opposition to the war would be like environmentalism: more in the realm of an abstract ideal that most people won't care about when it comes to the bottom line. I am seeing 3 major objections to the war:
1) Lives are b

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What sort of opposition will the US public have for a just war? Or a necessary one?

I, for one, would rather have our soldiers safe. Even if it means that third world dictators lose their power more often.

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You think war is always avoidable. So did Neville Chamberlain. I do not.

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Such as the Talon [news.com]?