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Originally Posted by BAN SUVS
Recon and mine sweeping missions maybe, but not supply lines. Reason being that A: soldiers are cheaper than smart robots (meaning training and supply, etc.) and B: supply convoys have to be defended. You need people to be able to organize a defense, fight smart, and be supremely adaptable to the conditions of a battlefield. So unmanned vehicles might become a part of our ground forces at some point, but only as a uniquely capable tool rather than a replacement for soldiers. Point vehicles, mine sweepers, decoys, etc.- but probably very rarely would they actually be acting autonomously.
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I'm confused to how having people driving supply trucks in a convoy is somehow better than having robots drive them. Let's say I've got a convoy: 2 HMVs, 4 supply trucks, 1 Bradley. They get attacked. The HMVs and Bradley return fire to try to protect the convoy, the trucks scatter to take cover. If the trucks are shot up, we lose the supplies and the drivers.
Now let's take the same convoy, except now the trucks are piloted by robots. They have essentially the same defensive capabilities, 'cept now, if they're destroyed we're just out some additional hardware. It's been shown that soldiers are far more valuable (both in ability and in cost to train) than hardware. IIRC each soldier costs something like $1.5M to train and equip. That's a hell of a lot more expensive than $300,000 in servos, sensors and computers.
That's *why* we use robots for recon and other high-risk operations, the hardware is far cheaper than the people. If people were so cheap, we'd build suicide cruise missles, and wouldn't bother with drones and the like. But it's more economical to get a job done w/ a 50% success rate at 1/3 the cost than to get a 90% success rate w/ the loss of soldiers. It's got nothing to do with the sanctity of human life, it's just a matter of affording the fight.
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Originally Posted by BAN SUVS
The Air Force however, is well on their way to having unmanned combat aircraft, whether autonomous or remote piloted. Go here, shoot/bomb that, avoid these electronic signal sources, evade enemy fire like this; nothing extremely difficult to consider when programming them. Plus, you can program it to hightail it when things just don't make sense or it is likely incapable of completing the mission. Escape is much easier for aircraft than ground vehicles.
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As far as the "nothing extremely difficult" when it comes to autonomous vehicles... it's actually *extremely* difficult. What we've achieved is essentially a robot that can follow a map. In the 50 years or so we've been working on it, all we've come up with is "when you get to point X, turn left". Autonomous aircraft have the advantage of being able to employ canned routines (like a pre-programed anti-aircraft avoidance manuver), which make them look smart, but if they were placed up against a capable human opponent, they'd get whupped... ever play a video game?
The real reason that the Air Force is so interested in autonomous/remote piloted aircraft (aside from the aformentioned economic savings) is because we've just about reached the limits of human anatomy w/ regards to g-force. A remote/robot pilot can pull 20+ G's w/o breaking a sweat, while human pilots have about a limit of 9, and only for brief manuvers. An aircraft w/o a pilot can make up for it's lack of smarts by simply being so rediculously manuverable it's impossible to shoot down with current technology.
Finally, back to the Darpa project, there are some really good things that can come from this contest, outside of the military application. Besides just the experience with complex problem solving AI, I see this stuff ending up in the space program for remote rovers where the transmission delay is so long they have to drive themselves. Then the next step is AI for non-military vehicles... MattR and qksubi are gonna be outta work when robots are driving trucks and trains. And eventually I look forward to being able to get into my car for a long trip and just kicking back as the onboard computer drives me to Vegas at 180mph. I enjoy driving, but not for a long distance or in a straight line. The only problem is that we're probably another 50 years away from that sort of stuff... hell back in the 60's people assumed we'd have flying autonomous cars by 2000... when it comes to AI, people tend to drastically underestimate how difficult it actually is.