Military Robotics

Boston Dynamics' robotic quadrupeds have achieved infamy and virality through a series of social media videos since 2008. In 2019 Boston Dynamics began commercial sale of 'Spot', a moving, sensing, networked robot dog. Spot has been designed to be a platform, which can be augmented with hardware payloads (e.g. sensors, robotic arm) and software to command Spot to conduct specific missions. In this paper we first trace the development of Spot and highlight the interest of the United States military in its development. This is followed by our text analysis of social media reactions to Boston Dynamics' quadrupeds, revealing public fascination as well as ongoing suspicion and dark humour about 'killer robots'. We then discuss how humanitarian applications, including in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used as an opportunity to promote Spot and overcome public negativity. This is an example of a more general strategy advocates use to garner acceptance for autonomous robots in both civilian and military roles using humanitarian justifications: the robots 'save lives.' We conclude by discussing how Spot and other robot quadrupeds demonstrate the intertwining of humanitarian and military applications in the development, normalization and deployment of autonomous robots.

In recent years, militaries around the world have recognised the need to rapidly increase investments in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and examine the potential ways it may be employed in future warfighting. Over time, AI will likely infuse most military equipment and enable the battlespace. Yet, there is still much to be determined in terms of the application and management of AI as a military capability.

This paper considers these issues and proposes operational level defensive and offensive concepts for an AI-enabled battlespace. He then explores how these concepts may be applied to the traditional sea, land and air domains. The intent is to stimulate discussion and new ways of thinking about how AI may be employed in the future and how to begin preparing for that future now.

Humans have never lived with so many robots. In this context, the intensification of military robotization is closely related to the emergence of the Digital Age and to the digitization of the armed forces – understood as the accelerated use of ICT to perform traditional military functions. In the United States, more than thirty systems are currently under development and/or operating. It is estimated that the country has more than twenty thousand robots capable of operating on land, at sea and in the air. This work is therefore dedicated to the broad study of military robotization. More specifically, it seeks to fulfill two main objectives. The first one is related to the need to understand the relationship between war and technology in the Digital Age. The second objective of the thesis is to verify how the military has been dealing with the incorporation of such systems. In order to do so, the dissertation uses a model developed to aid in the planning and analysis of military capabilities known as “force design”. It draws from, but is not limited to, studying the case of the United States, from which the dissertation intends to derive broader lessons applicable to other contexts.

In this Article, I review the military and security uses of robotics and "un-manned" or "uninhabited" (and sometimes "remotely piloted") vehicles in a number of relevant conflict environments that, in turn, raise issues of law and ethics that bear significantly on both foreign and domestic policy initiatives. My treatment applies to the use of autonomous unmanned platforms in combat and low-intensity international conflict, but also offers guidance for the increased domestic uses of both remotely controlled and fully autonomous unmanned aerial , maritime, and ground systems for immigration control, border surveillance, drug interdiction, and domestic law enforcement. I outline the emerging debate concerning "robot morality" and computational models of moral cognition and examine the implications of this debate for the future reliability, safety, and effectiveness of autonomous systems (whether weaponized or unarmed) that might come to be deployed in both domestic and international conflict situations. Likewise , I discuss attempts by the International Committee on Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) to outlaw or ban the use of autonomous systems that are lethally armed, as well an alternative proposal by the eminent Yale University ethicist, Wendell Wallach, to have lethally armed autonomous systems that might be capable of making targeting decisions independent of any human oversight specifically designated "mala in se" under international law. Following the approach of Marchant, et al., however, I summarize the lessons learned and the areas of provisional consensus reached thus far in this debate in the form of "soft-law" precepts that reflect emergent norms and a growing international consensus regarding the proper use and governance of such weapons.

DARPA's Atlas robot, pictured above, is one of the world's most advanced humanoid robots. Atlas represents the transformation of robots from vehicle form to humanoid form, and it took less than six years to develop the latest version of ATLAS. Future developments and improvements to Atlas may occur at a more rapid pace. Atlas was designed as a rescue robot, but future developments in humanoid robots will have a dramatic effect on future ground military forces. (DARPA Image) Image Location: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/darpa-virtual-tool-thats-revolutionizing-robotics The robots are here, in the air, on the ground and in the sea, and are already an integrated part of combined arms operations in nearly all modern military forces. The US Army, for instance, has more than 12,000 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) currently in operation and more and better robots are on the 1

Every major military force in the world today is maintaining and upgrading its tanks. Tanks provide protected, mobile striking power that has been the centerpiece of modern ground combat since WWI. There is a famous saying: "The only thing better than a tank is two tanks." If you look at the tank inventories around the world, you understand the truth of this maxim. Russia maintains around 20,216 tanks. China boasts about 6,457. North Korea reportedly has 5,025. The US has approximately 5,884. Israel has 2,620.

Nel mondo si moltiplicano le guerre e i campi di battaglia di popolano di robot. Persino le operazioni di polizia volte a fermare le azioni terroristiche vengono ora affidate a macchine programmate per uccidere. Questo libro offre una panoramica dei problemi etici legati all'uso bellico di sistemi d'arma robotici e, assumendo una prospettiva futurologica, si avventura nell'analisi di possibili scenari futuri.

Remotely operated Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or “drones” are now routinely deployed in theatres of war and are capable of lethal acts such as firing missiles under the control of their human operators. It would take a small technological step but a large legal and ethical one to allow them to make “kill” decisions autonomously. This paper outlines some general technical and ethical contexts surrounding the use of these weapons and examines a specific proposal for implementing ethical constraints on UAS, Arkin’s “ethical governor”. It is argued that the proposal is flawed in several respects: the author fails to support his bold claim that robots are capable of acting more ethically than humans, there is a lack of clarity in the formal representations of ethical constraints, and the metaphor of a “governor” is a misleading characterisation of the proposed system’s functionality (as argued elsewhere by Matthias).

For nearly fifty years both sides of the Cold War advanced the technology of the tank, but since the fall of the Soviet Union and the continuing advancement of smart weaponry, many have declared the tank obsolete. In spite of today’s main battle tank’s SWaP-C disadvantages, when you are in a close-quarters fight and the enemy has tanks and you do not, you are in trouble.  Precision strike without dominant maneuver leads to stalemate unless your precision munitions are employed on such a scale to neutralize every enemy.  If dominant maneuver is still required to render opponents incapable of resisting by shattering their morale and physical cohesion, rather than simply destroying them through attrition, then how will that tank evolve to meet these requirements?  The answer is in the next step of tank evolution.  Smaller, faster, cheaper, unmanned robotic tanks can be produced today and operated by human “tank commanders” by remote control, just as today’s UAVs are controlled.  A fleet of small, fast, robotic tanks, can be equipped with an intelligent computer system that provides for nearly autonomous operation with human weapons control.

Many ethicists writing about automated systems (e.g. self-driving cars and autonomous weapons systems) attribute agency to these systems. Not only that, they seemingly attribute an autonomous or independent form of agency to these machines. This leads some ethicists to worry about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps in cases where automated systems harm or kill human beings. In this paper, I consider what sorts of agency it makes sense to attribute to most current forms of automated systems, in particular automated cars and military robots. I argue that whereas it indeed makes sense to attribute different forms of fairly sophisticated agency to these machines, we ought not to regard them as acting on their own, independently of any human beings. Rather, the right way to understand the agency exercised by these machines is in terms of human-robot collaborations, where the humans involved initiate, supervise, and manage the agency of their robotic collaborators. This means, I argue, that there is much less room for justified worries about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps than many ethicists think.

Warfare is changing as demographics, the battlespace, and technology change. Most of the people of the world live in cities and megacities — cities with a population over ten million that possess a complex structural and infrastructure system. There are over 31 megacities in the world today and the UN predicts that there will be 41 by 2030. Urban warfare will be the common setting for future wars and land battles in open areas will be exceptions to this rule. Cities tend to consume military units and few armies have the manpower or expertise to sustain a prolonged CQB fight in a megacity. Recently, General Mark A. Milley, Chief of Staff US Army, recognized this fact and challenged his leaders to review the requirements for CQB in megacities. He believes that warfare will experience a fundamental shift in the next decade and that that to win, forces must be optimized for urban warfare. To do this requires an effort to maximize CQB training for the human force and leverage emerging unmanned technologies to create a hybrid human-machine force.

We spontaneously tend to project animacy and sensitivity to inanimate objects and sometimes we attribute distinctively human features like intelligence, goals, and reasons to certain artificial devices. This phenomenon is called “anthropomorphism” and has been long studied by researchers in human-robot interaction and social-robotics. These studies are particularly important from the perspective of recent developments in military technology, as autonomous systems controlled by AI are expected to play a greater and greater role in the future of warfare. Anthropomorphistic effects can play a critical role in tactical operations involving hybrid human-robot teams, where service members and autonomous agents need to quickly coordinate relying almost exclusively on fast, cognitively parsimonious, natural forms of communication. These forms rely importantly on anthropomorphism to allow human soldiers read the behavior of machines in terms of goals and intentions. Understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underpin anthropomorphistic attributions is hence potentially crucial to increase the accuracy and efficacy of human-machine interaction in military operations. However, this question is largely philosophical, as numerous models compete in the space of social cognition theory to explain behavior reading and mental states attribution. This paper aims to offer an initial exploration of these mechanisms from a perspective of philosophical psychology and cognitive philosophy, reviewing the theories in social cognition that are most promising to explain anthropomorphism and predict how it can enable and improve natural communication between soldiers and autonomous military technologies.

Most unmanned systems used in operations today are unarmed and mainly used for reconnaissance and mine clearing, yet the increase of the number of armed military robots is undeniable. The use of these robots raises some serious ethical questions. For instance: who can be held morally responsible in reason when a military robot is involved in an act of violence that would normally be described as a war crime? In this article, The authors critically assess the attribution of responsibility with respect to the deployment of both non-autonomous and non-learning autonomous lethal military robots. The authors will start by looking at the role of those with whom responsibility normally lies, the commanders. The authors argue that this is no different in the case of the above mentioned robots. After that, we will turn to those at the beginning and the end of the causal chain, respectively the manufacturers and designers, and the human operators who remotely control armed military robots from behind a computer screen.

The DFRC is located within Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB)
and is 65 miles (105 km) northeast of Los Angeles, California,
USA. It is from the DFRC facilities that the two Global Hawk
unmanned aircraft are being operated. This section describes
the aircraft, the DFRC facilities, and operational and
payload-related features, including those features that are
unique to the NASA Global Hawk system.

There are dust clouds on the horizon. A newly formed American force composed of Robotic Combat Vehicles Heavy (RCV-H) are in position and screening a sector on NATO's eastern flank. The robotic systems are 30-tons, carry a lethal automatic cannon, and are easier to deploy than the heavier, legacy M1A2 SEPv3 tanks of a conventional US Army Armored Brigade Combat team (ABCT). The robot systems quietly scan the terrain with steady thermal and infrared "eyes," searching for the lead elements of the advancing enemy force. Their tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hover overhead, providing additional situational awareness. The RCV-Hs are stealthy and specifically designed with a reduced thermal and electronic signature that makes them nearly invisible to the enemy's sensors. A kilometer to the rear of the RCVs are a group of Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicles (OMFVs). The OMFV is a Next Generation Combat Vehicle designed to control and integrate robotic combat systems. Inside each OMFV is a bank of computers, each manned by an operator who controls an RCV-H. This human-in-the-loop system enhances the RCV's state-of-the-art sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables the vehicle to move across rugged terrain and avoid most obstacles. 1 By 2025, the US Army sees ground troops conducting foot patrols in urban terrain with robots-called Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport (SMET) vehicles-that carry rucksacks and other equipment. Unmanned aircraft could serve as spotters, according to the Army's new strategy for robotic and autonomous systems. (U.S. Army image) Image Location:

We show how one of international relations’ founding debates – the causes of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) – offers interesting insights into current political deliberations about killer robots. We then trace how concerns about AWS moved from the margins of academia to the NGO disarmament community and finally into official diplomatic forums. We demonstrate how campaigners have resisted states’ claims to ‘know best’ about security matters, by pushing officials to answer questions about the necessity and risks of killer robots as well as the underlying social norms that guide global security policymaking.

Introduction: As applications of robotics extend to areas that directly impact human life, such as the military and eldercare, the deployment of autonomous and semi-autonomous robots increasingly requires the input of stakeholder opinions. Up to now, technological deployment has been relying on the guidance of government/military policy and the healthcare system without specific incorporation of professional and lay opinion. Methods: This paper presents results from a roboethics study that uses the unique N-Reasons scenario-based survey instrument. The instrument collected Yes, No, Neutral responses from more than 250 expert and lay responders via the Internet along with their ethics-content reasons for the answers, allowing the respondents to agree to previously-provided reasons or to write their own. Data from three questions relating to military and eldercare robots are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results: The survey reveals that respondents weigh the appropriateness of robotics technology deployment in concert with the level of autonomy conferred upon it. The accepted level of robot autonomy does not appear to be solely dependent on the perceived efficiency and effectiveness of the technology, but is subject to the robot’s relationship with the public’s principle-based reasons and the application field in focus. Conclusion: The N-Reasons instrument was effective in eliciting ethical commentary in a simple, on-line survey format and provides insights into the interactions between the issues that respondents consider across application and technology boundaries.