Killer Swarms: The New Generation

Killer Swarms: The New Generation
I have an article in this month’s BBC Focus magazine –- “the world's best science and technology monthly” -- about swarming robots. Previously I've looked at the potential for the deployment of large numbers of battlefield UAVs, but this goes into some detail about what flocking and swarming behavior actually mean and how they are being applied to robotics. Nature is way ahead of us here. A flock of a thousand starlings can maneuver together with ease, changing flight plans from moment to moment, and without any central control. The methods they use are remarkably subtle and effective, and researchers are borrowing these from nature to enable multiple UAVs to operate in the same airspace without the risk of collision. The pioneering first flight of a flock of Onyx guided parachutes last year was a small milestone in unmanned flight. Swarms are a level up from flocks. With swarms there is communication between individuals – known as stigmergy – and the result is incredibly complex, ‘intelligent’ behavior. This is what iRobots Swarmbots are are about. The Swarmbots have already shown their ability to co-operatively explore and navigate, for example searching an area in the most efficient way without central co-ordination. But greater levels of integration are possible than nautre can achieve. The article includes an interview with Prof Owen Holland who is building Gridswarm: Imagine a large group of small unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles that can fly with the agility of a flock of starlings in a city square at dusk. Imagine linking their onboard computers together across a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless network and configuring them to form an enormous distributed parallel computer. Imagine using this huge computational resource to process the sensory data gathered by the swarm, and to direct its collective actions. You have now grasped the idea of a flying gridswarm. The latest incarnation of this concept is the Ultraswarm an indoor flying cluster computer composed of miniature robot helicopters. Although the article concentrates on civilian applications, from space explorartion to firefighting and domestic cleaning, most of the really advanced work in this area is military. Swarms are extremely robust, have a high level of built-in redundancy and are well suited to complex and rapidly-changing environments. Swarming robots are a natural for the battlefield. Because the individual elements can be made small and cheap, swarms can consist of a very large number of units – and the success of this approach in nature hints at how effective it is. UAV swarms are likely to arrive sooner rather than later. Check out the Killer Bee It’s a flying wing with a span of less than seven feet and an airframe made of three components. Its thick wing means it can be released from aircraft at high speeds. It has eight-hour endurance with a twenty-pound payload. A unique feature of the KillerBee’s geometry is that it can be stacked. Numerous planes can be stored in a small space. This, plus the ability to air-deploy the KillerBee at high speeds, means an airplane can release a single KillerBee for a close look at a dangerous target, or it can release a swarm of KillerBees to overwhelm the defenses of a target. As recounted in my book, Weapons Grade, things are likely to develop extremely quickly over the next few years, with swarming systems producing a transformation comparable to precision weapons. There are no technological barriers, just cultural ones. The new paradigm for air power is coming, and it's about to kick the door down. UPDATE: Contradictory reports over whether the drone shot down by the IDF yesterday carried a warhead. Certainly Hezbollah are aware of the possibilities.
"You can load the Mirsad plane with a quantity of explosives ranging from 40 to 50 kilos and send it to its target," Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is quoted as saying in November 2004. "Do you want a power plant, water plant, military base? Anything!" Range of the Mirsad-1 is likely to be well over 100 Km. August 7, 2006

Attack Of The Genius Robot Cockroach Swarm

Attack Of The Genius Robot Cockroach Swarm
I have seen some radical ideas for attacking deep bunkers, but this beats 'em all... Having previously looked at Deep Digger and the Supercavitating penetrator, I was intrigued by an Air Force research Laboratory program called “Creative Robots to Defeat Deeply Buried Underground Targets” After finally getting clearance, I was able to interview Stephen Thaler of Imagination Engines Inc, the man behind the project. Thaler is evangelical about his brand of artificial intelligence, and the result is a piece in Wired News - "Experimental AI Powers Robot Army."
It’s quite a project. The idea is to develop software to make a collection of robots smart enough to break into, explore and neutralize deep bunkers. The challenges are gigantic. The robots have to deal with an unspecified number of unknown obstacles as they travel via cable runs, air ducts, service pipes or other channels, dealing with grilles, bars, doors or other checks. Then they need to correctly identify the target (waste bin, or WMD container?), which is easy for people but hard for robots – and this task requires being out of radio contact. They have to act in concert and help rather than hinder each other, co-ordinating their efforts to explore and map the facility. And all the time they have to be able to avoid, outwit or defeat the human defenders of the bunker, whose tactics, numbers and abilities cannot be predicted. Thaler’s believes his software can do all this. It’s an unusual neural network with the ability to ‘dream up’ new ideas, exploring likely approaches before putting them into action. For example, give it a set of robotic limbs and it will quickly find the most effective way of using them – a video here shows a six-legged robot figuring out how to walk from scratch with no programming in eight minutes flat. Imagination Engines’ capabilities also extend to sensors. Thaler describes products including a million-pixel array which can interpret input ‘an order of magnitude’ faster than any comparable system and another with formidable powers of recognition, such as distinguishing a T-72 from an Abrams. There is no programming involved: just show the system the two different objects and it figures out how to tell them apart. The most guarded aspect of the Creative Robots is their tactical intelligence, which seems to be considerable – Thaler describes them as "Machiavellian" in how devious they can be. The Creativity Machine's ability to explore the entire range of possibilities means that in principle it could dream up any tactic that a human could, and more besides. Within the next few months the software toolkit for Creative Robots will be available for the military. It will run on any standard hardware, turning a pack of dumb robots into smart team players capable of carrying out missions on their own. Thaler believes their speed makes Creative Robots superior to those that rely on human control, “performing at near-human levels of intelligence at Terahertz clock rates, while our joy-stick controlled robots are performing effectively at the 4 Hz clock rates characteristic of the brain.” The possibilities for civilian use are tremendous. There are a vast number of ‘hard problems’ involved in getting robots to interact with the everyday world which require intelligence. Thaler believes that he has the solution. Look out for a host of commercial and industrial applications. Dean Vieau, a consultant with many years of experience in the fields of Controls and Machine Vision, is an enthusiastic supporter. In one case study he carried out, Vieau found that a solution using Imagination Engines software was twenty times faster to develop and a hundred times cheaper than the existing approach. “Imagination Engines represents a significant advancement in the realms of AI. Not just esoteric academic conjecture but real world paths to concrete results.” As usual the military are developing world-changing technology that will filter down to the rest of us later. But are we really ready for killer robots yet? “There is a reluctance to entrust lethal missions to autonomous robots,” says Thaler. “However, the bad guys may not share the same reservations. The escalation is inevitable.”