Desktop Warfare: Robotic Collaboration for Persistent Surveillance, Situational Awareness and Combat Operations

Robotic sensing and weapons platforms can be controlled from a desktop workstation on the other side of the planet from where combat is occurring. This minimizes the potential for injury to soldiers and increases operational productivity. Significant work has been undertaken and is ongoing related to the autonomous control of battlefield sensing and warfighting systems. While many aspects of these operations can be performed autonomously, in some cases it is necessary (due to technical limitations) or desirable (due to legal or political implications) to involve humans in the low-level decision making. This paper reviews a number of specific applications where human involvement in lowlevel decision making is required, identifies the source of this requirement and discusses how humans can be involved without requiring continuous human involvement (and thus a one-to-one relationship between remotely operated robotic craft and human operators). Challenges related to human control of multiple craft, simultaneously, are reviewed. A system for managing multiple craft for surveillance purposes is presented. From this, a prospective system for the control of combat robots is extrapolated. The paper concludes by presenting an overview of the pathway to the advent of this technology, discussing the technical, social, legal and ethical challenges that will need to be overcome.

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