Technical Assessment: Autonomy
Abstract
U.S. and foreign technology and capability development is pushing existing human-machine systems to the edge of their abilities by introducing extreme timescales, high levels of complexity, severe risk to warfighters, and increasing costs. While these trends and the challenges they pose to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) do not appear likely to abate, autonomy has the potential to enable U.S. forces to break out of current limitations by allowing systems to understand the environment, to make decisions, and to act more effectively and with greater independence from humans. In doing so, autonomy can augment or replace humans to enhance performance, to reduce risk to warfighters, and to decrease costs. This assessment identifies research and development (R&D) and policy opportunities to position DoD to more effectively leverage autonomy. Based on an analysis of the security environment, opportunities presented by autonomy, and private sector investment, there are four major gaps in DoD efforts to date: 1. There is no unified analytic framework to examine needs and opportunities for autonomy across DoD tasks and missions. 2. Few DoD efforts are conducting R&D, carrying out experimentation, or developing approaches to testing for systems to operate against intelligent adversaries. 3. While there is substantial interest in autonomy to enhance capabilities and to decrease risk to warfighters, there is relatively little focus on leveraging autonomy explicitly to decrease costs. 4. There is insufficient R&D, experimentation, and policy for developing architectures, concepts of operations, and test, evaluation, verification, and validation approaches to ensure future systems are affordable and can operate effectively as a joint force.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 23, 2015
- Accession Number
- ADA616999
Entities
Organizations
- United States Assistant Secretary of Defense