Army researchers develop robot intelligence to support Soldiers

Unmanned drones providing sustained surveillance, swift precise attacks on high-value targets and small robots are used for missions to counter improvised explosive devices. The systems are generally remotely piloted and rely on near-continuous control by a human operator. Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Human Research and Engineering Directorate, or HRED, are developing robot intelligence that will enable robots to successfully navigate (move around) in their environment when given a voice command (instruction) by a human. Army researchers say the future for unmanned systems lies in the development of highly capable systems with "a set of intelligence-based capabilities sufficient to enable the teaming of autonomous systems with Soldiers." To act as teammates, robotic systems will need to reason about their missions, move through the world in a tactically correct way, observe salient events in the world around them, communicate efficiently with Soldiers and other autonomous systems and effectively perform a variety of mission tasks. The Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, or SS-RICS, which was developed by HRED in cooperation with Towson State University in 2004, combines symbolic and sub-symbolic representations of knowledge into a unified control structure.