NEW ORLEANS—The problem with robots on the battlefield today, according to Marine Corps Colonel Jim "Jinx" Jenkins, is that they still have to be driven by humans. That's why the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense are researching ways for robots to act more like teammates on the battlefield than just another piece of hardware.

Jenkins, who serves as director of science and technology at the Marine Corps' Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Virginia, said in a presentation at the Association for Unmanned Systems International's XPONENTIAL conference that while robots such as those used for explosive ordnance disposal and other roles on the battlefield take soldiers and Marines out of some dangerous situations, they take their operators out of the fight.

"A marine is driving, so we haven't improved our manpower situation, and sometimes it costs more manpower," he noted, since operators have to pay such close attention to what they're doing with the robot that they need someone watching their back. "We need to move toward autonomy" for robots and other uncrewed systems, he said. Eventually, the Marine Corps wants swarms of collaborating drones and robots to act at the command of a single operator as a force multiplier at every level of operations.

That's the reasoning behind the Unmanned Tactical Autonomous Control and Collaboration (UTACC) program currently going through testing at Quantico. UTACC is developing systems that will allow robots and drones to act in concert—what Jenkins described as "multidimensional uncrewed system teaming," where robotic systems collaborate with each other in pairs or swarms alongside troops in the field and are autonomous enough to allow a single human operator to oversee them.

The software foundation of UTACC is called the Distributed Real-time Autonomously Guided Operations eNgine (DRAGON), and it has undergone early conceptual tests at Quantico. The Marines have tested "a ground robot with attached air robot," Jenkins explained as he showed a brief video of the test. So far, the tests of the robots have taken place indoors in a simulated urban environment at Quantico's Ellis Hall.

"The ground vehicle launches the air vehicle to fill in gaps in its sensor picture," Jenkins explained. The robot/drone team then sends back reconnaissance information to an operator who can pass it along as targeting information.

In some tests, data from the robot tag-team was sent by a Marine operator back to a Navy M80 Stiletto, an experimental stealth patrol craft operated by Naval Sea Systems Command as a testbed for new weapons systems. The Stiletto then carried out a simulated missile attack against targets identified by the robots and designated by their human operator.

The human operator won't go away any time soon, according to Jenkins. "As you talk about unmanned systems, the topic of trust comes up," he explained. "At what point am I going to trust a machine to pull the trigger? As we start to let machines make decisions for us, we can't give up basic human judgement."

Still, Jenkins said he sees autonomous systems playing an increasingly larger role in Marine (and broader military) operations—everything from handling delivery of supplies on the battlefield to conducting "big data" analytics on intelligence and gathering and processing social media data.

Lugging bullets

The Marine Corps is already involved in testing robots as cargo carriers. In addition to testing uncrewed helicopters to carry netted cargo to Marines in the field, the Corps is also funding the development and testing of robots that carry cargo on and off helicopters on their own, delivering it up to 800 meters from a landing zone, over rough terrain, to field posts.

These robots, described in another presentation by Mark Rosenblum, the director of research at the Boulder, Colorado-based robotics company Stratom, are called Expeditionary Robopallettes (XRPs). They are in the second phase of their development by Stratom. An evolution of an idea originally developed for the US Air Force, the XRP is designed to roll itself with or without human guidance into the cargo bay of an MV-22 Osprey or a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter.

By eliminating the need for the slow, manual unloading of aircraft at remote operating bases—as well as the danger related to having a large number of people and an aircraft exposed to attack during unloading—the XRP could speed up cargo deliveries enough to allow aircraft to make five more supply runs within a 10-hour window, Rosenblum said. And the robotic delivery vehicles will be controllable from an Android tablet.

Autonomous systems could also play a major role in wargaming various scenarios and making decisions about courses of action. And Jenkins said that the Marine Corps is also looking at autonomous systems to provide medical care to injured troops—"robots that plug into a person, monitor their care, and keep them alive during transit with medication and blood transfusions," he said. And robots could play a major role in the first wave of an amphibious assault, conducting mine countermeasures and delivering vehicles to the beachhead.

To become really effective, however, Jenkins said that autonomous systems need to be capable of interacting with humans in more natural ways—distinguishing voice commands and hand signals in the din of the battlefield and acting accordingly. "We need more intuitive robotic control," he said. "How can I make it more like talking to a human?"