[iwar] [fc:The.Drone.Armies.Are.Coming]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-30 15:42:47


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Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:42:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Drone.Armies.Are.Coming]
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Wired News
The Drone Armies Are Coming 
By Lakshmi Sandhana 
2:00 a.m. Aug. 30, 2002 PDT 

Dispatched on a rescue-and-capture mission, unmanned vehicles arrive at
the scene in minutes, corner a potential suspect and await visual
confirmation before proceeding.  Star Wars 2020? It might be happening
sooner than you think. 

Allen Moshfegh at the Office of Naval Research is the head of the
Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS), a program that aims
to create an operational drone army by the year 2020. 
 

Initiated in 1996 -- and based on a humble spy plane originally used for
tracking whales at sea -- researchers are attempting to make this
science-fiction scenario a reality.  The project has an annual budget of
roughly $6 million.  Given more aggressive development and increased
funding, Moshfegh believes that the technology could be functional well
before that date. 

Going well beyond autopilot and preprogramming, he envisions swarms of
unmanned, unattended and untethered drones on the ground, in the air and
underwater.  These machines would be capable of independently handling
events in a hostile combat zone, such as surveillance, strike and even
capture and detention.  Aiming to create an adaptive, dynamic,
self-healing network of drones, Moshfegh intends to rework the whole
idea of military structure. 

"The army of the future will be one where human and machine collaborate
to achieve a common goal," said Moshfegh.  "The mission commander will
provide high-level goals and tasks to teams of heterogeneous
agents/UAVs/UGVs/UUVs .  In turn, the teams of autonomous agents will
synthesize the high-level tasks into emerging low-level tactical tasks,
and then to low-level machine trajectories for navigation.  Execution
will become faster as the commands go down the layers."

The focus of the network, though, is on decentralized command. 
"Although we do not rule out reporting to a central command post and, in
fact, require the commander to intervene in high-level decisions, if a
reliable, secure connection exists, we avoid reliance on central control
as this is a major reliability issue," said Mario Gerla, spokesman for
the Minuteman project (Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended
Mobile Agents), which is supported by the AINS program. 

While networking a few agents and performing an operation successfully
is already possible, Moshfegh's intent differs in that it involves whole
battalions of these vehicles communicating and operating together,
capable of instantaneously reacting to unpredictable wartime events. 

The hurdles that have to be overcome are many. 

First of all, there's mission planning and decision making, with
essentially an army of brainless hardware. 

Then comes distributed signal processing, dynamic tracking of mobile
threats and real-time trajectory generation, stored sensory information,
variance in available bandwidth, hardware engineering difficulties,
fault tolerance (the adaptive ability to protect and heal itself from
the environment as well as from attack), situational awareness in real
time, collaborations amongst the nodes and time-sensitive multimedia
information distribution in a dynamic mobile environment. 

A key component is creating an impregnable wireless "Internet in the
sky" capable of routing huge amounts of data between agents moving at
nearly 300 mph.  Minuteman project developers have discarded
conventional technologies such as radar signals or the GPS as
potentially risky. 

Emphasizing that these technologies were capable of being easily
switched off or jammed, Moshfegh said that the wireless Net would be
implemented instead with pseudo-GPS information obtained by the drones
with the help of physical landmarks or a vast array of sensors on the
ground, which would generate the location information through
triangulation. 

Currently the team is working with 20-pound drones that were initially
developed by Advanced Ceramics Research in Tucson, Arizona, to locate
and track whales.  Part of the AINS program, the Smart Warfighter Array
of Reconfigurable Modules (SWARM) provides the autonomous intelligent
control for collaborative flights and navigation of the mobile drones. 
Carrying a wide variety of sensors, including biological hazard sensors,
audio sensors, real-time video, infrared and night-vision cameras, the
drones are capable of flying 24 hours without refueling at speeds of up
to 60 mph. 

So far, Moshfegh has been able to connect about 9 to 10 nodes to the
network.  "Research is on scalability, e.g., 10,000 or greater.  Scaling
up the nodes increases difficulties at a number of levels such as
resolution of information transmitted, fuel consumption ...  etc.  In
the end only a handful of people should be needed to manage the network. 
It would be totally unacceptable to have 400 or so people managing a
network of say 10,000 nodes."

And will all this lead to a safer world? Gerla thinks so. 

"Armies of drones will exist and will help not only to combat
conventional battles, but also to assist in disaster prevention/recovery
and homeland defense operations," he said.  "In that respect, this
approach will definitely make the world safer as it performs functions
that humans cannot support. 

"As for the conventional battlefield, the problem of out-of-control
armies of drones will not occur; it will be prevented by the fact that
there is a limit with the level of decisions made by the drones and the
scope of their range.  In other words, the drones can intelligently
organize to execute a mission in the most efficient way.  But, it is the
commander that 'pulls the trigger.'"


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