Military Robotic And Ground Robots To Combat Forces

The recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq saw the first large‐scale deployments of ground robots to combat the IED threat, and the US Army has a large scale robotics component of its new Future Combat System to increase the war‐fighting productivity of its ground forces. Unmanned air vehicles have also come into their own in the last decade, but historical insistence on having a “pilot” fly them, even from Nevada, is at odds with the needs of increasing military personnel productivity. The Navy, the Marines, the Army, and the Air Force all will require robots with significantly greater autonomous capability over the next decades if they are to maintain US superiority. The US currently leads the world in military robotics, and with further encouragement, manpower and casualty costs can be held in check and reduced through investment in greater autonomous capabilities for robots.


The US currently leads the world in deployed service robots but is in fierce competition with Japan and Korea to maintain that edge. Both those countries, along with Taiwan, have made domination of the service robotics industry key national goals. The European Union is also investing heavily through its “seventh framework.” There is no comparable national program in the US. Robotics research has largely been funded in fits and starts by the Department of Defense and NASA. The former is now more focused on military
applications and the latter has little room for extramural research as it struggles to fund a Shuttle replacement. While US floor cleaning robots are relatively well known, there are significant new markets for robotics emerging in healthcare (prostheses, surgery, and hospital operations), fulfillment centers, and agriculture.

Despite the impression from the popular press, US manufacturing remains strong, is the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and has had sustained productivity increases over the last fifty years at a rate even higher than that of the IT industry. At the same time, as a percentage of GDP it has roughly halved, as labor‐intensive manufacturing has gone off‐shore. Labor‐intensive manufacturing would seem to be a high impact target for
robotics, but it has not been due to the sorts of successes robotics had early on, casting the die for the direction it would take, effectively restricting manufacturing robots to structured environments. Robotics in high‐value areas such as automobile manufacturing has had a fifty‐year history in the US, though no domestic manufacturers of such robots have significant US or world market shares any longer (those that were successful were bought up by foreign companies).

Today’s industrial robots follow the practices set out in the 1950’s, though they are cheaper and more accurate. But they have not fully embraced the IT revolution and have very little in the way of flexible computation, perception, or realtime planning. This makes the systems integration overhead of setting up robotic lines, turning factories into structured environments, for “Wal‐Mart‐class” manufacturing prohibitively expensive, and so such manufacturing has migrated to relatively low labor cost countries such as China. That pool of low‐cost labor will not be around indefinitely, and until the recent hiccup in the world economy signs of difficulty were already becoming apparent in China. As we move forward, the US will need to invest in more intelligent industrial robots if it is to retain its manufacturing base, and be able to compete broadly in
that arena.