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Full Version: Autonomous Military Robotics:   Risk, Ethics, and Design
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Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design
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Introduction

Imagine the face of warfare with autonomous robotics: Instead of our soldiers returning home in flag draped caskets to heartbroken families, autonomous robots mobile machines that can make decisions, such as to fire upon a target, without human intervention can replace the human soldier in an increasing range of dangerous missions: from tunneling through dark caves in search of terrorists, to securing urban streets rife with sniper fire, to patrolling the skies and waterways where there is little cover from attacks, to clearing roads and seas of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), to surveying damage from biochemical weapons, to guarding borders and buildings, to controlling potentially hostile crowds, and even as the infantry frontlines.

Report Overview

Following this introduction, in section 2, we will provide a short background discussion on robotics in general and in defense applications specifically. We will survey briefly the current state of robotics in the military as well as developments in progress and anticipated. This includes several future scenarios in which the military may employ autonomous robots, which will help anchor and add depth to our discussions later on ethics and risk.

Military Robotics

The field of robotics has changed dramatically during the past 30 years. While the first programmable articulated arms for industrial automation were developed by George Devol and made into commercil products by Joseph Engleberger in the 1960s and 1970s, mobile robots with various degrees of autonomy did not receive much attention until the 1970s and 1980s. The first true mobile robots arguably were Elmer and Elsie, the electromechanical tortoises made by W. Grey Walter, a physiologist, in 1950 [Walter, 1950]. These remarkable little wheeled machines had many of the features of contemporary robots: sensors (photocells for seeking light and bumpers for obstacle detection), a motor drive and built in behaviors that enabled them to seek (or avoid) light, wander, avoid obstacles and recharge their batteries. Their architecture was basically reactive, in that a stimulus directly produced a response without any thinking. That development first appeared in Shakey, a robot constructed at Stanford Research Laboratories in 1969 [Fikes and Nilsson, 1971]. In this machine, the sensors were not directly coupled to the drive motors but provided inputs to a thinking layer known as the Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS), one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence. The architecture was known as sense plan act or sense think act [Arkin, 1998].