Army Research Lab Uses AI to Land Drones on Tanks

Video Above: Army Research Lab Advances AI to Land Drones on Tanks

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

(Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md) As rapid advances in AI continue to reshape thinking about the future of warfare, some may raise the question as to whether there are limits to its capacity when compared to the still somewhat mysterious and highly capable human brain.

Army Research Lab – Artificial Intelligence

Army Research Lab scientists continue to explore this question, pointing out that the limits or possibilities of AI are still only beginning to emerge and are expected to yield new, currently unanticipated breakthroughs in coming years. 

Loosely speaking, the fundamental structure of how AI operates is analogous to the biological processing associated with the vision nerves of mammals. The processes through which signals and electrical impulses are transmitted through the brain of mammals conceptually mirror or align with how AI-operates, senior ARL scientists explain. This means that a fundamental interpretive paradigm can be established, but also that scientists are now only beginning to scratch the surface of possibility when it comes to the kinds of performance characteristics, nuances and phenomena AI-might be able to replicate or even exceed.

For instance, could an advanced AI-capable computer have an ability to distinguish a dance “ball” from a soccer “ball” in a sentence by analyzing the surrounding words and determining context? This is precisely the kind of task AI-is increasingly being developed to perform, essentially developing an ability to identify, organize and “integrate” new incoming data not previously associated with its database in an exact way.

Dr. Nicholas Waytowich, Machine Learning Research Scientist with DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, told Warrior in an interview how humans can essentially “interact” with the machines by offering timely input of great relevance to computerized decision-making, a dynamic which enables fast “machine-learning” and helps “tag” data.