The US Army is looking for a few good robots. Not to fight — not yet, at least — but to help the men and women who do.
These robots are not taking up arms, but the companies making them have waged a different kind of battle. At stake is a contract worth almost half a billion dollars for 3,000 backpack-sized robots that can defuse bombs and scout enemy positions. Competition for the work has spilled over into the US Congress and federal court.
The project and others like it could someday help troops “look around the corner, over the next hillside and let the robot be in harm’s way and let the robot get shot,” said Paul Scharre, a military technology expert at the Center for a New American Security.
The big fight over small robots opens a window into the intersection of technology and national defense, and shows how fear that China could surpass the US drives even small tech start-ups to play geopolitics to outmaneuver rivals.
It also raises questions about whether defense technology should be sourced solely to US companies to avoid the risk of tampering by foreign adversaries.
The US Army’s immediate plans alone envision a new fleet of 5,000 ground robots of varying sizes and levels of autonomy.
The marines, navy and air force are making similar investments.
“My personal estimate is that robots will play a significant role in combat inside of a decade or a decade and a half,” US Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said in May at a US Senate hearing where he appealed for more money to modernize the force.
Adversaries like China and Russia “are investing heavily and very quickly” in the use of aerial, sea and ground robots, Milley said.
“We are doing the same,” he added.
Such a shift would be a “huge game-changer for combat,” said Scharre, who credited Milley’s leadership for the push.
The promise of such big Pentagon investments in robotics has been a boon for US defense contractors and technology start-ups, but the situation is murkier for firms with foreign ties.
Concerns that popular commercial drones made by Chinese Da-Jiang Innovations Technology Co ( 大疆創新科技) could be vulnerable to spying last year led the US Army to ban their use by soldiers.
In August, the Pentagon published a report that said China is conducting espionage to acquire foreign military technologies — sometimes by using students or researchers as “procurement agents and intermediaries.”
At a defense expo in Egypt this month, some US firms spotted what they viewed as Chinese knock-offs of their robots.
The China fears came to a head in a bitter competition between Israeli firm Roboteam Ltd and Massachusetts-based Endeavor Robotics over a series of major contracts to build the US Army’s next generation of ground robots.
Those machines would be designed to be smarter and easier to deploy than the remote-controlled rovers that have helped troops disable bombs for more than 15 years.
The biggest contract — worth US$429 million — calls for mass producing 11.3kg robots that are light, easily maneuverable and can be “carried by infantry for long distances without taxing the soldier,” said Bryan McVeigh, project manager for force projection at the army’s research and contracting center in Warren, Michigan.
Other bulkier prototypes are tank-sized uncrewed supply vehicles that have been tested in the past few weeks in the rough and wintry terrain outside Fort Drum, New York.
A third, US$100 million contract — won by Endeavor late last year — is for a mid-sized reconnaissance and bomb-disabling robot nicknamed the Centaur.
The competition escalated into a legal fight when Roboteam accused Endeavor, a spinoff of iRobot, which makes Roomba vacuum cleaners, of dooming its prospects for those contracts by hiring a lobbying firm that spread false information to politicians about the Israeli firm’s Chinese investors.
A federal judge dismissed Roboteam’s lawsuit in April.
“They alleged that we had somehow defamed them,” said Endeavor chief executive officer Sean Bielat, a former US Marine who twice ran for US Congress as a Republican.
Roboteam chief executive officer Elad Levy declined to comment on the dispute, but said the firm is still “working very closely with US forces,” including the air force and other countries.
However, it is no longer in the running for the lucrative army opportunities.
Endeavor is. Looking something like a miniature forklift on tank treads, its prototype called the Scorpion has been zipping around a test track behind an office park in a Boston suburb.
The only other finalist is just 32km away at the former Massachusetts headquarters of Foster-Miller, a part of British defense contractor Qinetiq Group PLC.
After hiding the Scorpion behind a shroud at an army conference, Bielat and engineers at Endeavor showed it for the first time publicly to The Associated Press last month. Using a touchscreen controller that taps into the machine’s multiple cameras, an engineer navigated it through tunnels, over a playground-like structure and through an icy pool of water, and used its grabber to pick up objects.
Bielat said the new Scorpion and Centaur robots are designed to be easier for the average soldier to use quickly without advanced technical training.
“Their primary job is to be a rifle squad member,” Bielat said. “They don’t have time to mess with the robot. They’re going to demand greater levels of autonomy,” he said.
However, it will be a while before any of these robots become fully autonomous.
The US Department of Defense is cautious about developing battlefield machines that make their own decisions.
That sets the US apart from efforts by China and Russia to design artificially intelligent warfighting arsenals.
A report from the US Congressional Research Service last month said that despite the Pentagon’s “insistence” that a human must always be in the loop, the US military could soon feel compelled to develop fully autonomous systems if rivals do the same.
Or, as with drones, humans would still pull the trigger, but a far-away robot would lob the bombs.
“China has showed off armed ones. Russia has showed them off. It’s coming,” said P.W. Singer, a strategist for the New America Foundation think tank.
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