Pentagon increases its reliance on robots

The Sun News | 02/14/2006 | Pentagon increases its reliance on robots

Pentagon increases its reliance on robots
By Robert S. Boyd
Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The Defense Department is rapidly expanding its army of robot warriors on land, air and sea in an effort to reduce American deaths and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We want unmanned systems to go where we don't want to risk our precious soldiers," said Thomas Killion, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for research and technology.

Robots should take over many of the "dull, dirty and dangerous" tasks from humans in the war on terrorism, Killion told a conference of unmanned-system contractors in Washington last week.

Despite doubts about the cost and effectiveness of military robots, the Defense Department's new Quadrennial Defense Review, a strategic plan that's updated every four years, declares that 45 percent of the Air Force's future long-
range bombers will be able to operate without humans aboard. No specific date was given.

One-third of the Army's combat ground vehicles are supposed to be unstaffed by 2015.

The Navy is under orders to acquire a pilotless plane that can take off and land on an aircraft carrier and can refuel in midair.

Robotic submarines are also planned.

The Pentagon is doubling the number of Predators and Global Hawks, unpiloted surveillance aircraft that have been prowling the skies since before the Iraq war began.

Operating the Global Hawk costs as much as $100,000 per flight hour, many times higher than a piloted aircraft, according to Melody Avery, an advanced-aeronautics expert at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Unpiloted aerial vehicles "are frequently oversold," Avery said in an e-mail message.

Still, those vehicles are being joined by a host of small robotic machines.

Miniature drones with cameras and weighing a few pounds can be launched by hand, bungee cord or catapult, from a rooftop or a moving truck.

A hopping gadget described by John Feddema, a robotics expert at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., can jump 50 feet in the air to place a communications system in a tree or on a rooftop. A "throwbot" can be tossed over a wall or into a building to avoid a deadly ambush.

The remote-controlled Pacbot can sniff a roadside bomb 50 yards away, roll up, and defuse or detonate it. A larger version pokes its video camera through doors or windows, looking for signs of danger.

Ground robots frequently break down, are damaged or get stuck in caves.

But soldiers love the robots, said Army Col. Edward Ward of the Pentagon's Robotics Systems Joint Project Office. "We're in the business of saving lives, and it works."

Marine Col. Terry Griffin, who also works in the Robotics Systems office, talked about a hypothetical situation in which soldiers were ordered to check a multistory building in which insurgents might be lurking.

"Do you want to send your son or daughter in there? No. Let's send a robot," Griffin said.