PrairiePundit

 Defense News: As armed aerial drones and artillery threaten troop movements on the front lines in Ukraine , experts are beginning to see crude ground robots whizz over the battlefield to resupply soldiers. The systems observed so far in shaky footage distributed on social media appear to be designed for logistics, obviating the need for soldiers to venture from their foxholes. A Kremlin-affiliated Telegram channel recently published a clip purporting to show a Russian unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, delivering supplies to front-line troops while avoiding strikes by Ukrainian mini-drones and transporting a wounded soldier, though the evacuation is never clearly shown. “Because of so many drones operating in the air, both surveillance and first-person-view ones, moving around has become very difficult for both sides,” Sam Bendett, research analyst at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses think tank, told Defense News. “So regular tasks like logistics, supply and evacuation are...

 Business Insider: The deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality, The New York Times reported. Lethal autonomous weapons , that can select targets using AI, are being developed by countries including the US, China, and Israel. The use of the so-called "killer robots" would mark a disturbing development, say critics, handing life and death battlefield decisions to machines with no human input. Several governments are lobbying the UN for a binding resolution restricting the use of AI killer drones, but the US is among a group of nations — which also includes Russia, Australia, and Israel — who are resisting any such move, favoring a non-binding resolution instead, The Times reported. "This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity," Alexander Kmentt, Austria's chief negotiator on the issue, told The Times. "What's the role of human beings...

 War Zone: The U.S. Marine Corps recently tested a robot dog toting a training version of the M72 infantry anti-armor rocket launcher. This is the latest example of growing interest in the U.S. and foreign militaries forces, especially the Chinese and Russian armed forces, in the idea of arming four-legged uncrewed ground systems. In fact, the Marine design looks to be based on a similar, if not identical Chinese-made commercial-of-the-shelf quadrupedal robot that has emerged in anti-armor rocket launcher and submachine gun-armed configurations in Russia in the past. Members of the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command's (MAGTFC) Tactical Training and Exercise Control group (TTECG), based at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms in California, tested the robot dog back in September. Members of the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) were also involved in what was described as a proof-of-concept demonstration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

 Popular Science: On the second floor of the Walter E. Washington convention center in the District of Columbia sits a robot tanklet, designed to hunt drones. The uncrewed vehicle is the TRX SHORAD, and it is part of the display from defense giant General Dynamics Land Systems, assembled alongside the wares of over 650 other exhibitors for the annual Association of the United States Army meeting and exhibition. The TRX SHORAD suggests a future of robot-assisted combat, where attacks by drones are met with the automated speed and power of a companion robot built to destroy quadcopters. TRX SHORAD is a composite name. TRX is the category name for General Dynamics 10-ton tracked robots, a platform that can accommodate a range of payloads including cargo and weapons. SHORAD is a military acronym for “Short Range Air Defense,” a category that is somewhat vague but broadly includes finding and destroying threats such as drones, helicopters, low-flying planes, and more. ... Drone warfare ...

 USNI News: Marines are looking to push as many tasks as possible to autonomous systems as the service aims to operate across wide swaths of the Pacific. The Marines are working on several avenues to add autonomy to the service, Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, Marine Corps deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told the audience at the Defense News conference Wednesday. “If you take the [person] out of it, things get simpler and they typically get more efficient, and they get less expensive,” he said. “You should try to go after everything.” An example is the under-development low-profile autonomous ships the Marines are considering for contested resupply. The idea came from America’s ongoing counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, Heckl said. “We just copied the drug lords out of South America,” he said. Heckl singled out the recent test transit of the autonomous Spearhead-class highspeed transport USNS Apalachicola (T-EPF-13 ) that was fi...

Breaking Defense: The US Army is looking into robots designed by Israel Aerospace Industries , with the first contracts likely to be signed in early 2019, after which production will shift to IAI’s US subsidiaries . In recent months top officials of the US Tank-Automotive Research, Development & Engineering Center (TARDEC) have been visiting IAI facilities almost on a weekly basis, Breaking Defense has learned. TARDEC, soon to be part of the new Army Futures Command , is exploring a wide range of IAI robotic systems, Shamni said: counter-IED bots to handle roadside bombs; robotic mules to follow infantry soldiers with extra supplies; “leader-follower” systems where manned vehicles lead unmanned ones in convoy; engineering robots to bulldoze obstacles under fire; optionally manned vehicles that can switch to unmanned operation “in seconds”; and even armed robots. All these systems, he said, can either be remotely controlled by human operators or switch into a fully autonomous mo...

National Defense Magazine: Within five years, Marines could head into battle alongside autonomous robotic trucks carrying water, ammunition and other gear. By the end of the decade, troops could be fighting with unmanned ground systems that communicate, duck and fight like humans, according to scientists working with the military. With fiscal upheaval in the Pentagon, it is uncertain how much funding will be available to purchase robotic systems, but industry and military laboratories are working on the Marine Corps’ behalf to develop technologies and drive costs down, said Roy Byrd, director of government relations and Marine Corps programs at ITT Exelis. Because of the budget crunch, labs like the Office of Naval Research are focused on retrofitting existing vehicles and systems with autonomy kits that will allow them to operate without a human in the driver seat. “The science and technology focus is developing autonomy enablers, not platforms,” Byrd said. “The [science and technol...