The Pentagon could get self-driving vehicles first
washington — Forget Uber, Waymo and Tesla: the next big name in self-driving vehicles could be the Pentagon.
“We’re going to have selfdriving vehicles in theatre for the Army before we’ll have selfdriving cars on the streets,” Michael Griffin, the undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, told lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill this month. “But the core technologies will be the same.”
The stakes for the military are high. According to Griffin, 52 per cent of casualties in combat zones can been attributed to military personnel delivering food, fuel and other logistics. Removing people from that equation with systems run on artificial intelligence could reduce injuries and deaths significantly, he added.
“You’re in a very vulnerable position when you’re doing that kind of activity,” Griffin said. “If that can be done by an automated unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving algorithm where I don’t have to worry about pedestrians and road signs and all of that, why wouldn’t I do that?”
Technology and auto companies including Alphabet’s Waymo unit and General Motors Co are racing to develop autonomous vehicles to deploy in ride-hailing fleets. Uber Technologies has introduced self-driving trucks to US highways on a trial basis in some locations. Waymo has been working on the technology for more than a decade, and most other companies have encountered significant hurdles, highlighted by the death of a pedestrian who was struck by an autonomous Uber test SUV in March.
We’re going to have self-driving vehicles in theatre for the Army before we’ll have self-driving cars on the streets Michael Griffin, Undersecretary of defence for research and engineering
Beyond the technical challenge of engineering a car that can safely traverse chaotic city streets on its own, civilian selfdriving developers must navigate a still-evolving legal and regulatory environment. Passenger vehicles must comply with scores of federal vehicle safety requirements governing everything from turn indicators to braking systems, many of which assume drivers will be human.
But the military’s autonomous vehicles won’t roam regulation-free just because they may be headed towards battlefields, according to Karlyn Stanley, a researcher and lawyer at the RAND Corp.