Pentagon to Beat Uber, Tesla in Race Over Self-Driving Vehicles
Pentagon to Beat Uber, Tesla in Race Over Self-Driving
Vehicles
Daniel Flatley 1 May 2018, 1:16 PM 30 April 2018, 1:00 AM
(Bloomberg) -- 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 this 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 been 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.
“You’re in a very vulnerable position when you’re doing
that kind of activity,” Griffin said. “If that can be done by an automated
unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving algorithm where I don’t
have to worry about pedestrians and road signs and all of that, why wouldn’t I do
that?”
Technology and auto companies including Alphabet Inc.’s
Waymo unit and General Motors Co. are racing to develop autonomous vehicles to
deploy in ride-hailing fleets. Uber Technologies Inc. has introduced
self-driving trucks to U.S. highways on a trial basis in some locations. Waymo
has been working on the technology for more than a decade, and most other
companies have encountered significant hurdles, highlighted by the death of a
pedestrian who was struck by an autonomous Uber test SUV in March.
Beyond the technical challenge of engineering a car that
can safely traverse chaotic city streets on its own, civilian self-driving
developers must navigate a still-evolving legal and regulatory environment.
Passenger vehicles must comply with scores of federal vehicle safety
requirements governing everything from turn indicators to braking systems, many
of which assume drivers will be human.
But the military’s autonomous vehicles won’t roam regulation-free
just because they may be headed toward battlefields, according to Karlyn
Stanley, a researcher and lawyer at the RAND Corp.
DARPA Research
“The regulatory structure here in the U.S. and the
countries where the U.S. may be sending troops are very different,” Stanley
said. “How autonomous vehicles are going to be regulated -- in terms of safety,
cybersecurity, privacy and liability -- those are going to be critical issues”
the Pentagon will have to address as well, she added.
The Pentagon has a long history of support that helped to
develop or refine key technologies that become widespread later, including
space flight and the internet.
Griffin said the Pentagon “absolutely must leverage” what
private companies are doing to develop self-driving cars, though he didn’t
mention any by name and his office declined to comment when asked for more
details about the Pentagon’s plans.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which
Griffin oversees, has been funding research into self-driving cars for years
and sponsored its first competition for the vehicles in 2004.
“The military is very eager to learn and build upon
what’s been done commercially as opposed to try to reinvent and do it
themselves,” said RAND’s Stanley.
$700 Billion
With an annual budget of almost $700 billion, the
Pentagon can afford to aggressively pursue autonomous vehicle technology well
beyond fuel and food delivery trucks. The Army, for instance, is pushing
forward with efforts to develop unmanned tanks and smarter vehicles for bomb
disarmament, though many of those technologies will be remote-controlled, not
autonomous.
Major Alan L. Stephens, an officer at the Mounted
Requirements Division of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence in
Georgia, said in December that the Army wants to start testing light, fast
remote-controlled tanks with the same firepower as the current 70-plus-ton
manned M1 Abrams tank within the next five years.
BAE Systems Plc, the maker of the Army’s manned Armored
Multi-Purpose Vehicle, also makes unmanned vehicles known as the Ironclad and
the Armed Robotic Combat Vehicle. The Ironclad, which looks like a miniature
tank missing a gun turret, is expected to have roles in reconnaissance,
evacuations of injured personnel and explosive ordnance disposal, according to
the London-based company’s website.
Pilotless Submarines
Offshore, the Navy is seeking help developing technology
for the next generation of large and extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles
to incorporate artificial intelligence so they can handle navigation hazards
such as deep-draft commercial ship traffic, fishing activities, marine mammals
and prospecting for oil, gas or minerals. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.,
the largest and second-largest U.S. contractors, are competing on the program,
with a critical design review scheduled for December.
The effort to field autonomous vehicles in combat comes
amid a broader push by the Pentagon to use technological innovation to
“increase lethality,” in the words of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. But the
implications of using technology in this way have raised the antennae of
socially conscious employees at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
‘Enormous Pressure’
Thousands of employees at Alphabet’s Google recently
demanded an end to deals letting the military use the company’s artificial
intelligence technology. Mattis visited Google headquarters in Mountain View,
California, last year to discuss with executives the best ways to use AI, cloud
computing and cybersecurity for the Pentagon.
Among critics’ concerns is the potential development of
autonomous weapons that make their own life-and-death targeting decisions. Ash
Carter, who was defense secretary under President Barack Obama, told a Silicon
Valley audience in 2016 that “in the matter of the use of lethal force, there
will always be -- at least speaking for the United States -- a human being
involved in decision making.”
Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force major general who’s
now a law professor at Duke University, said companies will come under
“enormous pressure” as they sort out these issues and try to make sure their
artificial intelligence products for the military don’t put people in danger.
“Self-driving vehicles for battlefield logistics resupply
are obviously more benign than autonomous weaponry,” Dunlap said in an email.
“But it would still be legally and ethically necessary to demonstrate that they
can be used without excessive risk to civilians who may be caught up in the
fighting.”
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
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