Army Researchers Chart AI Course.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Algorithmic Warfare

The Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command is laying the groundwork for its artificial intelligence plans with a newly crafted strategy.

"It's safe to say that AI and machine learning is having a huge impact across all of our S&T," said Brian M. Sadler, a senior scientist for intelligent systems at the Army Research Laboratory. "We're in a very interesting time... with respect to AI and machine learning."

In July, the command released an artificial intelligence strategy that was formed over a 90-day period, he said during remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association's Army Science and Technology Conference in Washington, D.C.

The RDECOM strategy, which has not been made public, details where the command currently is regarding the development of AI capabilities, where it wants to go in the future, and defines taxonomy associated with the technology, Sadler later told National Defense during an interview.

While the Air Force and Navy have made a number of strides in artificial intelligence development, the Army is lagging behind, he noted.

"The Army in many ways has the hardest problem" out of all the services, he said. With "respect to robotics and autonomy, the Army [challenge] is so much harder because we're in this ground-based complex environment."

The Air Force and Navy may be further along in terms of putting autonomous vehicles in the air and sea domains, respectively, but that's not surprising given the cluttered environments Army systems have to deal with, he added.

Additionally, the service faces a number of challenges that commercial industry is unlikely to solve, he noted.

"To think that our problems are going to be solved by commercial industry, it's just simply a fallacy," Sadler said. "We go to places like Google and we say, Well, this is the problem that we're working on,' and they look at us and they go, 'That's really a hard problem.'"

Autonomy is a particularly difficult technology area to exploit because the Army lacks infrastructure and operational scenarios that are conducive to the use of autonomous robots, he said.

"We're not operating in the air or a homogenous medium," he said. "We want to operate in really tough, complex environments where we haven't been before and... we don't have access to" networks.

That lack of access to networks and, ergo, data makes it difficult to operate in a rapid, effective and distributed fashion, he said. "We want to go fast," he added. "We're really good at...