10-28-18 In 2002, DARPA announces its Grand Challenge, offering researchers from top research institutions a $1 million prize if they can build an autonomous vehicle able to navigate 142 miles through the Mojave Desert.
When the challenge kicks off in 2004, none of the 15 competitors are able to complete the course. The “winning” entry makes it less than eight miles in several hours, before catching fire. It’s a damaging blow to the goal of building real self-driving cars.5-1-18
Starting in 2009, Google begins developing its self-driving car project, now called Waymo, in secret. The project is initially led by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View.
Within a few years, Google announces that its autonomous cars have collectively driven 300,000 miles under computer control without one single accident occurring. In 2014, it reveals a prototype of a driverless car without any steering wheel, gas pedal or brake pedal, thereby being 100 percent autonomous. By the end of last year, more than 2 million miles had been driven by Google’s autonomous car. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/history-of-self-driving-cars-milestones/
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(TNS) — WASHINGTON — Forget Uber, Waymo and Tesla: the next big name in self-driving vehicles could be the Pentagon…. “We’re going to have self-driving vehicles in theater for the Army before we’ll have self-driving cars on the streets,” Michael Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill last month. “But the core technologies will be the same.”
The stakes for the military are high. According to Griffin, 52 percent of casualties in combat zones can be attributed to military personnel delivering food, fuel and other logistics. Removing people from that equation with systems run on artificial intelligence could reduce injuries and deaths significantly, he added. http://www.govtech.com/fs/automation/Fully-Driverless-Vehicles-Will-Likely-See-Battle-Before-Public-Streets.html
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5-25-18 The US army aims to have its first Robotic Combat Vehicles Technology demonstrator ready by 2021, but what changes will this unmanned paradigm bring to the manufacture of military vehicles? Here Nick Jordan, technical engineering manager at military steering system specialist, Pailton Engineering, combats the issues related to autonomous design.
Unlike Uber or Google's Waymo, the self-driving technology developed by the military won't only be designed for America's roadways but for conflict zones all over the world. The military is primarily concerned with developing robust and reliable tactical vehicles to withstand these terrains, while removing people from unnecessarily risky situations.
According to Pentagon figures, in 2013 alone, some 60 percent of US combat causalities were related to convoy resupply. Autonomous vehicles to deliver supplies could address this issue. https://www.sensorsmag.com/components/driverless-vehicles-ready-to-go-ballistic
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8-6-18 Driverless cars and delivery drones are already in an advanced stage of development, so it’s no surprise that similar technology is being developed for battlefield use.
The US Army has awarded a contract to Oshkosh to convert their trucks for automated operation.
Oshkosh’s PLS is the US Army’s main ammunition supply truck, a rugged 10x10 vehicle which can haul a 16-ton container with a built-in arm to load or unload at the touch of a button. The autonomy kit allows the PLS to drive itself.
The US Army plans to run convoys with just one or two human drivers and several unmanned vehicles, so the same number of drivers can shift far more cargo.
In the UK, the Defence Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL) wants robots to bring ammunition, food and other supplies right up to the front line, in a program called Autonomous Last Mile Resupply.
After a selection process involving 142 original proposals, the DSTL has now awarded contracts to five competing teams for unmanned systems.
These aim to carry out the resupply process automatically, navigating, plotting their own route and dropping off a payload without human help.
Some of the teams are working on small drones, like a military version of Amazon’s Prime Air. The heavy lifting will require ground vehicles though, the two contenders being the tracked TITAN developed by QinetiQ and Milrem, and the wheeled Viking from HORIBA MIRA.
The Viking is a two-ton, 6x6 robot with a top speed of 40 kph, able to deliver a load of 600 kilos 200 kilometres.
-TITAN is smaller at less than a ton, but can still carry the same payload at speeds of over 25 kph (Picture: QinetiQ).
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-DoD
5-21-17 The Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base has turned its massive MaxPower microwave defense system over to the U.S. Army for new rounds of research and development.
The system, which the AFRL built to destroy improvised explosive devices, will now be housed at New Mexico Tech’s Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center near Socorro. The center, which includes a 40-square-mile field laboratory in the mountains adjacent to the university, has been used for explosives research and testing by NM Tech for government and private clients for more than 60 years.
The Army’s Armament, Research, Development and Engineering Center took over the MaxPower program this week. The system packs a full gigawatt of concentrated electromagnetic power into an armored truck. That’s one billion times the power of an average home microwave oven, allowing the vehicle to instantly destroy IEDs as it cruises through battle zones. https://taskandpurpose.com/army-microwave-weapon
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7-28-15 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military has made strides in developing lasers, microwaves and other directed energy weapons, and could soon use them more widely, top armed forces officials and U.S. lawmakers told an industry conference on Tuesday.
The officials described weapons that are in various stages of development and testing by the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Army but said more work was needed to scale up the technology for larger weapons, develop tactics for their use, and ensure sufficient funding.
“Directed energy brings the dawn of an entirely new era in defense,” Lieutenant General William Etter, Commander, Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, told a conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment.
Directed energy refers to weapons that emit focused energy in the form of lasers, microwaves, electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, sound or particle beams. Lasers are already widely use to guide bombs to their target, but the next step would be to use the lasers as weapons themselves. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-arms/u-s-military-sees-more-use-of-laser-microwave-weapons-idUSKCN0Q22HH20150728
The officials described weapons that are in various stages of development and testing by the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Army but said more work was needed to scale up the technology for larger weapons, develop tactics for their use, and ensure sufficient funding.
“Directed energy brings the dawn of an entirely new era in defense,” Lieutenant General William Etter, Commander, Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, told a conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment.
Directed energy refers to weapons that emit focused energy in the form of lasers, microwaves, electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, sound or particle beams. Lasers are already widely use to guide bombs to their target, but the next step would be to use the lasers as weapons themselves. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-arms/u-s-military-sees-more-use-of-laser-microwave-weapons-idUSKCN0Q22HH20150728
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