(ORDO NEWS) — The project Project Convergence, the US Army tested the unmanned robots, capable of engaging enemy armored vehicles. In particular, Russian T-72 tanks.
The US Army is testing combat robots that can independently identify enemy armored vehicles and destroy them. Without being tied to the Internet – only with the help of onboard artificial intelligence.
An army training ground in the American desert of Yuma has become a test site for combat robots created for the US Army as part of the new Project Convergence project. During the tests, the interaction of several combat units was worked out, and the target recognition system was being trained.
Brigadier General of the U.S. Army Richard Ross Coffman in charge of Project Convergence, noted that specialists from Carnegie Mellon University were attracted to create robots. For 8 months, they created a system that allows equipment to navigate in space using video cameras and processing incoming information with computer vision, since lidars cannot be used in combat – laser radiation can detect enemy equipment and destroy robots.
In addition, robots have received artificial intelligence that allows several machines to work in conjunction. One conducts reconnaissance with the help of a built-in drone, then a robot moves into a safe area, which at that moment covered the scout and so the technique changes roles. Onboard automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms allow to identify enemy equipment in the field of view and, after confirmation from operators, destroy it.
As explained by Richard Ross Coffman, training artificial intelligence to find the differences between the military equipment of its own army and the enemy’s is of particular difficulty – in particular, now Project Convergence robots are able to distinguish the Russian T-72 from the American M1 Abrams and a Toyota pickup from the same vehicle, but with an installed in the back with weapons. To do this, it was necessary to train artificial intelligence on more than 3.5 million human-marked images of various military equipment.
A distinctive feature of Project Convergence robots is the absence of the need for a constant Internet connection to transfer data from cameras to a remote server. All images are processed directly on board the equipment, which allows it to operate autonomously, without creating unnecessary load on the communications infrastructure. The timing of the appearance of the Project Convergence robots in the real US army has not yet been reported.
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