New Vehicles Will Make Own Decisions Based on Commands

Nov. 17, 2004 — -- The next war could be fought partly by unmanned aircraft that respond to spoken commands in plain English and then figure out on their own how to get the job done, even dodging enemy aircraft as they carry out their assignments.

This isn't just robotics, in which someone has to be on hand to issue commands to an unmanned vehicle all along the way. This is autonomy at its best, with vehicles that can make decisions similar to the way a human pilot figures out how to accomplish a task and then carries it out.

Engineers and scientists at several institutions and corporations are working on the project, chiefly under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have already demonstrated that the idea can work.

Last June, a Lockheed T-33 fighter jet successfully completed a series of assignments given by the pilot of another aircraft over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. There was a pilot aboard the T-33, just in case something went wrong, but it turned out that he had nothing to do. Everything went according to plan, even when some assignments were changed at the last minute.

"That was a proof of concept," says Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to work on the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the lead institutions in the effort. "But this is obviously a system that is still in development."

Valenti sees many applications for the technology in the years ahead. That could include a vastly improved air traffic control system, in which aircraft approaching a busy airport would be given commands in English by the traffic controller in the airport tower, and then the aircraft would figure out the safest way to land at the assigned time while avoiding other planes.

But the first application will almost certainly be military, because it could greatly increase the effectiveness of pilotless aircraft in a combat setting. It doesn't take much imagination to picture a bunch of unmanned aircraft zeroing in on enemy targets while responding to brief verbal commands from pilots of other aircraft who remain safely behind.