Killer robots may remain a dystopian vision of the future for now, but another military deployment of AI could be sooner to arrive on the battlefield. Known as the Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS), the system is being developed by the US Army to transform how the military plans and conducts operations. It's comprised of a network of air and ground vehicles equipped with sensors that identify potential threats and autonomously notify soldiers. The information collected would then be analysed by an AI-enabled decision support agent that can recommend responses -- such as which threats to prioritize. The system was developed by the Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force (AITF), which was activated last year to improve the Army's connections with the broader AI community.

The Army is working to deploy artificial intelligence on the battlefield to detect and classify real-time threats for soldiers in the years to come. The new systems, called the Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS), will scan and classify imagery from sensors that can be mounted on vehicles, aerial coverage and autonomous vehicles that will help soldiers recognize incoming threats. It is a tool that Lt. Col. Chris Lowrance, head of autonomous systems with the Army's AI Task Force, said will act as a "teammate" and reduce "cognitive load" by alerting soldiers of incoming threats. Soldiers in vehicles or holding mobile devices will be able to customize the feed of data that the ATR-MCAS will show and alert them to, Lowrance said. For example, a soldier driving a tank could set a laptop to only display images of enemy tanks when the computer-vision system detects them.

One of the most difficult of tasks on the modern battlefield is predicting where the enemy will attack next. Although the Army has plenty of ways to find the enemy, figuring out his intentions are something else entirely. Now the U.S. Army plans to use drones, target recognition, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to tell the colonels and generals where an attack appears imminent. The Army's Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS) program aims to operate autonomous air and ground drones throughout the battle zone, keeping a continuous watch on the enemy. The drones identify the enemy weapons systems, such as tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, then pass on the sightings to the AI.