Truly autonomous weapon systems.

The Navy ship sailed up the James River on a clear day with no less than 13 escorts. All of the small boats assigned to protect the ship were armed with .50 caliber machine guns, and none of them had sailors aboard.

A helicopter spotted another boat and designated it as a threat. Perhaps it was a boat laden with improvised explosives. All 13 of the robots went into a swarm maneuver to protect the high value ship. Each acted on its own in coordination with the other unmanned boats.

This Office of Naval Research experiment, which took place in August, was the culmination of 10 years of research and development, its organizers said. But the next wave of autonomy in military systems could come much quicker than that.

Experts are talking about exponential progress as Moore's law on computing power converges with breakthroughs on the way researchers are tackling the challenge of creating fully autonomous weapons, which indudes robots and other systems.

"The next five years will see the same kind of leaps made in the last 30 years as advances in cognitive systems come online," said James Canton, CEO and chairman of the Institute for Global Futures in San Francisco.

Cognitive systems differ from the typical computer chip in that they are based on the way the human brain thinks, he said. "It's based on the brain as opposed to just based on silicon."

This will create what Canton calls "holistic" awareness for machines. "They are aware of themselves, aware of objects and information and levels of physical and virtual reality around them. They are aware of other nodes in their own network," he said.

Drones flying or swimming at different levels of awareness would be able to interact and may autonomously attack a system not identified as part of their own network.

Maj. Gen. Torn Masiello, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, said the service wants "machines to make decisions. We want the machine and the individual to be viewed as teammates, and then we concentrate on doing what machines do best and have them do those tasks to take off the burden on the ... human."

Masiello said the unmanned aerial vehicles of the future may at first make recommendations to human operators on potential courses of action. They might suggest what weapons should be selected. The next step would be onboard decision making.

"And then finally kind of merging those into where you have maybe an unmanned wingman sort of thing," he said.

Autonomy is not only applied to...