Military Robots Will Predict Your Next Move
New research may enable robotic-armed guards, or just help self-driving cars get through a four-way stop. The algorithm, by two University of Illinois researchers, opens the door to software that can guess where a person is headed, reaching for a gun, steering a car into armored gate, milliseconds before the act plays out. Researchers, Justin Horowitz and James Patton undertook the work under a National Institutes of Health Grant, as described in “I Meant to Do That: Determining the Intentions of Action in the Face of Disturbances” in the journal PLOS ONE.
The idea was to help robots help humans — by taking the steering wheel when a driver makes a bad decision, or perhaps activating an exoskeleton when a patient with a weak arm reaches for an object. But the algorithm, broadly speaking, might also help fly a plane or anticipate the next move by a suicide bomber or gunman.“Imagine that a terrorist runs toward a crowd of VIPs with a bomb strapped to their chest, but they’re tackled before they can succeed. This technology (alongside a good deal of supporting technology) would be able to determine who within the crowd they were aiming for,” Horowitz wrote in an email.
“We want to temper what we say about security because it has not been tested and would require some restrictions on what needs to be known, but we have also thought about applying this to dynamic security situations. An example might be understanding what a person intends to do,” Patton added.
To test the algorithm, they gave a joystick to five men and three women between the ages of 24 and 30. The subjects were instructed to reach out with the joystick 730 times under various conditions, including ones that obstructed their motion. The tests proved the algorithm’s ability to infer, within tenths of a second, where the subject was headed.
What could you use this for? If you’re Russia, which has deployed armed ground robots to monitor missile bases, your security droids just became a lot better at discerning whether or not they should shoot and at what. If the US ever puts armed robots on the ground — something Defense Department is not currently tempted to do because of the danger to friendly forces — the algorithm could make those robots safer and more capable.
When robots can detect your intent in the same way that it took us millions of years to evolve the ability to do, they may save your life, or at least give you the right-of-way.
DefenseOne: http://bit.ly/1lixFE8
