ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

DARPA is no longer satisfied with merely deploying drones to the battlefield. It wants swarms of unmanned aircraft and ground-borne robots that can work together to isolate an urban objective, according to  an article on  TechCrunch . The military research agency has announced the second “sprint” of its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. Sprints are periods in a program when DARPA announces a main theme and asks for related solicitations or prototypes in the hopes of getting faster technological breakthroughs. Whereas the first sprint focused on swarm tactics, this sprint’s theme is swarm autonomy. DARPA is fishing around for concepts that can allow drones to talk with each other and work as as a well-oiled team of lean, mean, killing machines with little in the way of human supervision. (Related:  Leaked DARPA Robot. Can You H.A.N.D.L.E. the Truth? ) These ideas could be built around more capable sensors, smarter software, or more effici...

Military robots pulled off the very first robotic breaching operation during a joint training exercise in Germany. While their American and British minders supported them from a safe distance, the robots successfully removed various dangerous obstacles from the simulated battlefield,  according to an article on  ZDNet . During the Robotic Complex Breach Concept exercise, manned tanks and fighting vehicles provided covering fire for British-built Terrier engineering robots. The remote-controlled robots neutralized minefields and set up a heavy-duty bridge over a deep trench while their operators stayed inside American vehicles several hundred feet back. Other ground-based robots that saw action during the drill included a self-driving armored personnel carrier that deployed smoke to hide the Terries from sight. Several models of drones also flew over the pretend battlefield in search of possible chemical weapons. “This is a historic moment...