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Boston Dynamics and its terrifying BigDog pack mule robot might not have taken the armed forces world by storm as some predicted information technology would, only that doesn't mean the military is giving up on autonomous robots — not past a long shot. The Marine Corps appear a new round of testing for its promising Unmanned Tactical Democratic Command and Collaboration (UTACC) robotic combat assistance program. It could help brand troops safer, give them better battlefield awareness, and even interact with other autonomous systems so fewer troops are needed in the showtime place.

The UTACC (I've decided that this is pronounced YOUtack) plan plainly includes a number of unlike robotic solutions, each crucially designed to interact intelligently with the others. One might notice an enemy, signaling another to start post-obit that enemy from far to a higher place. In the testing revealed this week, they tried out piffling rolling robot packed with sensors, various communications systems, and a quadcopter drone on its dorsum. According to its creators, when this "ground and air robot" detects a problematic pigsty in its sight, it can automatically launch the air unit and sew the readings together into 1 useful, unbroken picture for soldiers and commanders.

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The UTACC air-ground robot searches for enemies in an indoor fake urban environment. Credit: The states Marine Corps

This robot was used in the tests to search through a simulated urban environment, launching as needed and, hopefully, alerting testers when information technology spots a hiding enemy. There'south no word on how well the robot really did at this test, or what criteria information technology is programmed to use for the identification of enemies versus non-combatants.

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Similar any headless domestic dog, robot carrier accept and then far had trouble finding their ain way frontward.

This is all part of the Distributed Real-time Autonomously Guided Operations Engine, or DRAGON, which allows what the military calls "information to determination services." This involves letting the robots have actions automatically — obviously, the decision to have lethal activity is the most extreme version, but it could also extend to things similar pro-actively re-arming a vehicle without being having to be asked to do so. It also means that soldiers should be able to ask a robot companion for an item or job, and trust that the robot can figure out how to deliver on that request without having to explicate how to achieve the goal.

At the aforementioned event, presenters also mentioned a cargo loading and off-loading robot that could save marines precious time when moving out, and delivering that cargo upwardly to 800 meters over rough terrain, Ars Technica reports. With DRAGON technology, this could be as simple every bit "move Ten thing to Y place," or, perhaps, "Keep Ten thing stocked in Y identify, making requisitions and scheduling deliveries as necessary."

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Traditionally, DAPRA has supplied these sorts of advances, but now most branches of the military conduct advanced research projects all their own.

This is admittedly a small innovation in the scheme of prior war machine robot promises, similar a full-featured robot squad-mate to deport equipment upwards a mountain and keep up with the men the whole way. That may be the reason for UTACC's preliminary success, however. The military is finding it that it tin wring surprising efficiency gains out of relatively small-scale robotic abilities. These loader robots can't carry that equipment up a mountain with a bunch of soldiers, for instance. Simply while nosotros're waiting effectually for a robot that can, the military is decorated using less-impressive robots to go an extra 5 supply runs per 10-hour window.

Robots are coming to the battlefield, but despite legitimate fears of killer autonomous drones and robots, nosotros don't need to imagine killing machines to revolutionize war zones. The number of human American actors needed in a combat zone could exist near to collapse — and if it does, the policy obsession with avoiding a "boots on the ground" scenario, with lots of deployed American troops, could be a trumped-upward nightmare.

Soon, American power and American lives could be two separate, disconnected concepts.