As a reminder: CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense, and although there are certainly civilian applications for this technology, one of the most likely short-term applications is improving legged drones for battlefield deployment (often, it should be said, in humanitarian roles, including search and rescue, or support roles, such as ammo, food, and water resupply, but deployment of armed legged drones is also an active area of research).
> CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense
Is this not the case with all the major R1 institutions?
Walt Rostow may no longer be deciding on troop levels from his office in the MIT Economics department (that cause MIT to "divest" its overtly military work into figleaf organizations) but still, after that, ARPA (later DARPA) poured hundreds of millions into the institution.
They basically paid for my education there and I am not a US citizen and never worked on anything military-related, either while in school or since.
I can't really speak for many other institutions. I know plenty of robotics labs that are doing completely civilian work under NSF grants, grants from corporations, some civilian manufacturing and automation work through the national labs, etc. And even among those institutions working on DARPA-funded projects, not every institution has NREC right down the street working on autonomy systems for ground combat vehicles: https://www.nrec.ri.cmu.edu/solutions/defense/other-projects.... The research done by students at CMU directly makes these types of weapons platforms possible, and vice versa.
It's certainly true that many, many universities are deeply embedded with the DoD, defense contractors, and other weapons manufacturer ecosystems. Certainly CMU isn't exceptional here. But I think it's very important to keep in mind the reality of these programs when they come up in the news, like this article, which is why I left the link to how "the other side" sees these types of research programs.
This tech is the stuff of nightmares. People are going to see this unfeeling little chitinous bug-dog-thing crawling in with them, then they die. And it is making it cheaper to kill people in exotic foreign lands.
This is the tragedy of the commons. I'd rather see nobody making these advances, but if someone has to it'd better be people on my side. Can't stop progress :(
Maybe there's a glimmer of hope that someday both sides can send their robots to destroy one another, instead of their sons and daughters? I agree that initially there's an advantage to richer nations, but it's not like a $30M jet fighter, there could be parity.
That's not how it's going to work. There's no point in taking out a relatively cheap robot that can be replaced in a day, when you can take out a person that will take 20 years to be replaced.
What a naive statement. Do you really believe no other nation is capable of making such a thing? This doesn’t improve our national security at all. Just ups the ante for robotic infantry, whatever the hell that ends up meaning. Like advancements in war technology has ever been a positive in the world.
> Like advancements in war technology has ever been a positive in the world
Yeah, screw GPS, trauma surgery improvements and better prosthetics, IFF systems, radar/sonar, Internet, ToR, Epipens, and duct tape. /s
Really, I get having a generally anti-war position and wanting to spend money on other shit but pretending like there are no positive externalities to defense spending is childish.
They are vehicles that can navigate terrain a wheeled vehicle cannot. So they could do anything from operate as pack "animals" for infiltration teams to be armed drones that creep along the ground, harder to detect than a flying one.
That seems like a rather limited view of the word "defense", more appropriate to football or hockey than warfare. Even for that you could have these drones patrolling the territory/shooting intruders.
But the word "defense" is much wider than that. Is the US supplying offensive weapons to Ukraine contributing to the national defense? Even if you feel the US should not be doing that, I hoe you can see the logic of people who do frame it that way.
And Ukraine's in a defensive war against an invader, and for that they have to go on the offense.
(Of course the US renaming the Department of War to Department of Defense in 1947 was 100% propaganda, or to be more charitable, aspirational. There is no question that it has been used offensively).
> Is the US supplying offensive weapons to Ukraine contributing to the national defense?
It's not. It's contributing to European security, and as such is necessary for the US to reaffirm their suzerainty over Europe, but it's not really about US defense and even less about National Security. (I'm glad they do btw, because we European powers would have left Ukraine fall after deciding it would be too expensive to help them…)
> European security is national security via geopolitics.
If you consider “national security” to be a meaningless buzzword and not an actual concept, you can say that. It's as accurate as saying “US sports results at the Olympics is a national security issue via soft power”.
Pretty much everything is “national security” by that standards.
> Being a global superpower has many benefits for US citizens.
Sure, but most of them don't have anything to do with national security.
> Drones and robots made attacks easier, did that help national security?
Large flying drones make patrolling a border easier. You don't have to worry about the pilot's fatigue level. Only fuel/battery.
The war in Ukraine clearly shows that smaller drones also help in attacking and defending. Attacking, by dropping bombs or spotting targets.
And defending, via spotting incoming enemy forces; spotting enemy artillery that is shooting at you, etc
> Drones and robots made attacks easier, did that help national security?
Yes because the enemy will have them eventually regardless of whether you develop them. Call it a Prisoner's Dilemma if you will, but it's the reality. Besides, unlike nuclear weapons, warfare with autonomous systems is not particularly more cruel than WW1 or WW2 style warfare.
There is little difference between offensive and defensive capabilities. It's all about destroying your opponent. This helps national security because it is an additional and advanced means of destruction that the enemy might not have.
Fun fact, in the mid-80's early 90's the "industry" was "getting ahead" of the Department of Defense in terms of capabilities that could be deployed in an adversarial way. One of the most visible outcomes was the first crypto wars. (source code became ITAR controlled, emailing a perl script that implemented the RSA algorithm to someone outside the country was an ITAR violation, and we joking suggested illegal immigrants get that code tattooed on their body so that it would be illegal to deport them without a license from the Dept. Of Commerce)
Getting an inertial navigation unit w/sensors that weighed less than 10kg (22 lbs) was code word level secret stuff, because beyond the line of sight missiles are a thing.
Anyway. the US DoD (like the defense departments everywhere) realized they needed to be more engaged with R&D labs if only to see what progress they were making so that they could anticipate whether or not that progress might show up as a threat in some way. On the plus side that freed up some money that would have been in black budgets for universities that were doing similar research anyway and as a funder, the source, in this case the DoD, generally gets a non-exclusive perpetual right to use any resulting IP out of that sort of funding arrangement, even when patented.
Bottom line, researchers are gonna research, so make sure what the future holds is not gonna show up unexpectedly on the battlefield or in other covert ways.
All that said, as someone who has been involved in building this "scale" of robot (under 1m, self powered) the progress has been freakin' unbelievable. In part because of the fact that you can put a supercomputer on one that weighs less than 500 g and runs for 8 hours on a battery that weighs less than 1 kg. Sensors, video, real time image processing. All pretty stunning.
The Ukranian use of off the shelf drones, and their rapid development of weaponized "drone munitions" tells me that the DoD is correct in wanting to keep track of what is going on with robots that can do "extreme parkour."
Ironic comment given the implied nationalities of the coauthors (Xuxin Cheng, Kexin Shi, Ananye Agarwal, and Deepak Pathak) and the chosen robot form factor (Unitree)
Is it? I think it's important to understand that this type of robotics research requires serious ethical considerations no matter where it happens or who works on it—this work specifically was funded by the US military, but it applies just as equally to weaponization projects happening within China.
I assume some combination of: they don’t have the same incentives to try and draw in international talent as the multicultural US does, and US k-12 schools don’t produce students that would do well on their admissions tests or whatever. Also we have pretty good engineering schools here in the US, so I don’t see why anyone would take them up on that offer if they decided to make it.
not sure what you trying to get, but hundreds if not thousands of universities are working closely with DARPA, which is an DoD agency that sponsors mostly high-level and non-classified researches. Many of the researches have weak connections to actual military usages (there has to be _some_ connections, but many of them are pretty weak).
Here's a military news article covering the same umbrella grant program this research was funded under: https://www.c4isrnet.com/2022/06/23/darpa-adding-common-sens...