Robot Cowboy
The odds are good that by now you have seen some kind of a military
style drone in the past, either online or on TV. If you have then you
know that most of them are controlled by a remote command unit of some
kind. A new generation of military robots is under development however
and they will work be a lot less like children’s toy cars and a lot more
like the computers on Star Trek. While the concept of voice activated technology has some serious military applications, the trickle down for possible comsumer applications is also very promising. After all we got tang because of a government program. Can robots that understand our speech be far behind?
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory Human Research and Engineering
Directorate, HRED for short, is working on a robot that can navigate by
voice commands. The intelligence system, which is currently under
development, is designed to be paired with unmanned vehicles and other
robots that will not allow for a human to fit inside. The system has
been dubbed The Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control
System, and it is loosely based on the Adaptive Character of
Thought-Rational, an AI system developed by researcher at the University
of Michigan.
Troy Kelley, the cognitive robotics team leader at HRED, said the following about the development of the system in a release
put out by the U.S. Army, "We have found that in order to simulate
complex cognition on a robot, many aspects of cognition (long-term
memory and perception) needed to be in place before any generalized
intelligent behavior can be produced. In working with ACT-R, we found
that it was a good instantiation of working memory, but that we needed
to add other aspects of cognition including long term memory and
perception to have a complete cognitive system."
