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26 Oct 17. Starting off small: Army grapples with bringing robotics into fold. After years of struggling to come up with a solid strategy for bringing robotics and autonomous systems into the fold, the U.S. Army finally appears on the verge of bringing them into combat formation in a way that makes operational sense, especially within the ground force.
But that still means starting off small.
“Smaller unit capabilities will be the first to be fielded with robotics,” Maj. Gen. Bo Dyess, the acting director of the Army Capabilities and Integration Center, told Defense News in a recent interview.
In executing the Army’s robotics and autonomous systems strategy born out of ARCIC and Training and Doctrine Command a year ago, the service will likely have a good idea in just a few years on how it will use robotics to decrease the soldier load and prevent battlefield surprise by being able to see over the next hilltop, Dyess explained. He noted that robots will continue to provide capabilities that are widely prevalent in operations such as bomb disposal.
While using robots in the field is nothing new, fully integrating the capability with units on the ground hasn’t been easy to conceptualize and execute.
Dyess sees “beyond 2020” as the time when the Army will likely look at how to bring robotics and autonomous capabilities to higher echelons and in more complex ways. “That’s like just over the rainbow,” he said.
The ability for robots to lead and follow, serve as wingmen or bird dogs to the soldiers, and possibly even shoot at the enemy are farther afield.
While manned-unmanned teaming is often used downrange in Army aviation, it’s much harder to get vehicles to work autonomously and safely over unpredictable terrain.
While armed ground vehicles are prevalent at defense trade shows worldwide, Dyess said he doesn’t foresee armed ground robots before 2020, and even then “they’re going to have some type of human in the loop in order to pull the trigger or make lethal decisions.”
But he added he feels “pretty strongly” that arming ground robots will be a requirement for the Army in the future.
Forward march
The service has taken major steps to figure out how to integrate robots into the maneuver force over the last several years.
In the summer, the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence held a demonstration at Fort Benning, Georgia, that showcased its efforts to develop a robotic wingman within the maneuver force and how to incorporate robotic capability within a tank formation.
Much of the technology is there to drive robotics and autonomy into maneuver formations, but when it comes to developing tactics, techniques and procedures, the Army is figuring out “how we want to massage this,” said Robert Sadowski, robotics chief with the Army‘s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, said at the demonstration. “The next 10 to 15 years will help us figure out how we want to embed robotics and autonomous systems into the formation.”
The service is investing in some new platforms across the next five years, but those are mostly tactical systems focused on explosive ordnance disposal, logistics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
The Army awarded in September an engineering development and production contract to Endeavor Robotics to build its Man Transportable Robotic System Increment 2 for $158.5m. MTRS will be a remotely operated, medium-sized common robotic platform to replace thousands of unique robotic systems rapidly fielded during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The service does not want to repeat the rapid procurement of a hodgepodge of one-off systems when providing its next round of robotic capability to the war fighter, and MTRS helps to get after that goal.
MTRS is the first of three programs to replace the countl