Army Pairs Humans with Robots and LIDAR Sensors

This “battle buddy” doesn’t get tired, and to paraphrase a line from The Terminator, it doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until … you have a complete picture of your environment.

Military robots/drones/UAVs aren’t exactly new. In the air, creations like the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper rain destruction on America’s enemies, while ground systems like the Packbot and Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle do everything from defuse bombs to surveillance, reconnaissance, and even combat.

And they’ve evolved with the times.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been pairing soldiers with specially-equipped ground robots, with the latter sporting LIDAR sensors in order to provide total situational awareness.

The Velodyne VLP-16 LiDAR and Ouster OS1 LiDAR detect physical changes in 3D and conveys that information back to their human counterpart in real-time through augmented reality. The key factor in future warfare is information (and who has more of it). That and overwhelming firepower.

“This could let robots inform their Soldier teammates of changes in the environment that might be overlooked by or not perceptible to the Soldier, giving them increased situational awareness and offset from potential adversaries,” said Dr. Christopher Reardon, a researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory. “This could detect anything from camouflaged enemy soldiers to IEDs.”

This will lead to more interaction between human and robot, improving the “autonomous context understanding and reasoning capabilities of the robotic platform … such as by enabling the robot to learn and predict what types of changes constitute a threat.”

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