Algorithm for 2D-to-3D Engineering Integrates Art, Nature, Science

 Interesting, How does this integrate these? 

Algorithm for 2D-to-3D Engineering Integrates Art, Nature, Science

Penn Engineering Today

Devorah Fischler, October 31, 2022

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory have developed what they are calling a universal algorithm that permits two-dimensional materials to retain their lightness and durability when converted into three-dimensional (3D) structures. The algorithm allows hard materials to keep their mechanical strength after cutting by mimicking the structure of nacre, mollusks' natural shell coating. The algorithm can generate a computational map of cuts that are optimized for stacking, ensuring they never overlap with one another to compensate for necessary defects; fortifying tabs further bolster mechanical strength.

Full Article  

Army Night-Vision AR

 An AR ability with enhanced low light vision.    Integration of maps.   When we tested plant applications we added blueprint and technical data, but also were sometimes also in low-no light locations.   So could see the application there too.  

The Army's Latest Night-Vision Tech Looks Like Something Out of a Video Game

The Washington Post, Dalvin Brown, May 24, 2021

The U.S. Army is training on a new night-vision system that generates a videogame-like view of a scene. The helmet-mounted Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular device features thermal imaging and augmented reality (AR) capabilities, incorporating smartphone and gaming-systems technology into traditional night-vision hardware. The goggles have a mode that outlines objects with glowing white light, and an AR overlay that can display maps and navigation data. The system, which also features an intensity tool that allows it to be used in daylight, is a result of years of work to modernize the tools used by the military.  ... " 

The French Army Tests the Spot for Recon

Unexpected, but real uses in reconnaissance and supply applications.   And just exposure of the French army and command to future, possibly more autonomous means of warfare.   In another report,  New York City stopped using its test police robodog.  

French Army Testing Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog Spot in Combat Scenarios  By The Verge, April 14, 2021

The robot dog Spot, apparently being tested for reconaissance.The French Army has been using Spot, a quadruped robot built by U.S. firm Boston Dynamics, in military exercises.

France's military used robotics developer Boston Dynamics' four-legged Spot robot in training exercises, raising questions about the robot's future applications.  The French military school École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr described the tests as "raising students' awareness of the challenges of tomorrow," including the "robotization of the battlefield."

A more detailed account by French newspaper Ouest-France said Spot was one of a number of robots tested by students at the École Militaire Interarmes (Combined Arms School), apparently to evaluate their reconnaissance utility.   Spot's terms and conditions prohibit its use "to harm or intimidate any person or animal, as a weapon, or to enable any weapon," and Boston Dynamics' Michael Perry said he is adamantly against the robot's weaponization....'

The Army Studies Real Time Conversation

Considerable, interesting piece on the topic. Leads to the open question about how we converse with our robot assistants.   And leads on to other kinds of hybrid, cooperative work.   And AI to provide useful information about the meaning of statements and commands in context.    Expect lots more in this space in the coming years.

Army researchers create pioneering approach to real-time conversational AI  by The Army Research Laboratory  in Techexplore.

Spoken dialogue is the most natural way for people to interact with complex autonomous agents such as robots. Future Army operational environments will require technology that allows artificial intelligent agents to understand and carry out commands and interact with them as teammates.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, a Department of Defense-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center, created an approach to flexibly interpret and respond to Soldier intent derived from spoken dialogue with autonomous systems.

This technology is currently the primary component for dialogue processing for the lab's Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, or JUDI, system, a prototype that enables bi-directional conversational interactions between Soldiers and autonomous systems.

"We employed a statistical classification technique for enabling conversational AI using state-of-the-art natural language understanding and dialogue management technologies," said Army researcher Dr. Felix Gervits. "The statistical language classifier enables autonomous systems to interpret the intent of a Soldier by recognizing the purpose of the communication and performing actions to realize the underlying intent."

For example, he said, if a robot receives a command to "turn 45 degrees and send a picture," it could interpret the instruction and carry out the task.

To achieve this, the researchers trained their classifier on a labeled data set of human-robot dialogue generated during a collaborative search-and-rescue task. The classifier learned a mapping of verbal commands to responses and actions, allowing it to apply this knowledge to new commands and respond appropriately....  " 

Microsoft Gets Army Augmented-Reality Headset Contract

Such uses could lead the way to business application, still uncommon.

Microsoft wins U.S. Army contract for augmented-reality headsets, worth up to $21.9 billion over 10 years   By Jordan Novet  

Microsoft will deliver to the U.S. Army over 120,000 devices based on its HoloLens augmented-reality headset.

The deal, which could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, follows a contract Microsoft received to build prototype headsets for the U.S. Army.

The contract comes a year and a half after Microsoft won a cloud contract from the Pentagon that could be worth up to $10 billion.  ... "

U.S. Army Looks to Improve Quadrotor Drone Performance

Changes in flight capabilities for in context dynamic needs. 

U.S. Army Research Laboratory

December 8, 2020

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers have developed a trajectory planner to speed the switch between hovering and forward flight in vertical takeoff and landing tail-sitter drones. The planner was engineered for the Army's Common Research Configuration (CRC) platform, a quadrotor biplane tail-sitter used in testing new design features and examining fundamental aerodynamics. The research team thinks the planner may eventually enable the CRC to intelligently switch between hover and forward flight while navigating across dense or urban areas. Said ARL’s Jean-Paul Reddinger, "This method ... is a step in the direction of integrating high-level autonomy with platform-specific dynamics."

Army Testing AR Goggles for Commanding Dogs

Had not seen the idea before.    For remotely sending commands to dogs.

The Army is Testing AR Goggles for Dogs

 A military dog wearing augmented reality goggles. 

Seattle-based company Command Sight has developed augmented reality devices that can be worn by dogs, through which human handlers can provide visual clues to direct the animal to a specific spot. An often-heard prediction is that augmented reality (AR) could one day become a central tool in our everyday work and play – but it turns out that the technology might not be only suited for humans. 

The U.S. military has unveiled a new project in partnership with Seattle-based company Command Sight, to fit working dogs with AR goggles that would enable soldiers to give orders to the animal at a distance.

Military dogs intervene in tactical operations, patrol, detection and specialized searches. Oftentimes, they can find themselves scouting dangerous areas, looking for explosive devices or materials, for example.

From ZDNet

The Army and Swarming Drones

Expect the use of multiple drones that work together to achieve results to comtine to increase.   And Military is an obvious application.  Note the use of (HRL) Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning) as being tested,will take a look at the details of that.

Army Advances Learning Capabilities of Drone Swarms   By U.S. Army Research Laboratory

U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory researchers, working with colleagues a North Carolina State and Oklahoma State universities, have developed a reinforcement learning technique to guide swarms of unmanned drones on missions.

Researchers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and North Carolina State and Oklahoma State universities developed a reinforcement learning technique to enable swarms of unmanned drones to carry out missions while minimizing performance uncertainty.

The Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approach breaks down a global control objective into hierarchies, including multiple small group-level microscopic control and broad swarm-level macroscopic control.

Each hierarchy exhibits a unique learning loop with its own local and global reward functions, and running these loops in parallel significantly compresses learning time.

Compared to centralized reinforcement learning, HRL shortened learning time by the swarm by 80%, and limited loss of optimality (the point at which the difference between benefits and costs is maximized) to 5%.

From U.S. Army Research Laboratory
More at the link.

AI Enables Efficiencies in Quantum Information Processing.

Good general introduction.  Impressed by the approach being worked on.

AI Enables Efficiencies in Quantum Information Processing
U.S. Army Research Laboratory
July 8, 2020

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and Tulane University integrated machine learning with quantum information science, applying photon measurements to reassemble the quantum state of an unknown system. The team used quantum state tomography to define an unknown quantum system, preparing and measuring identical unknown quantum systems and employing a complex computational process to ascertain the system most consistent with the measurement results. A recent implementation reconstructed quantum states and standard, more computationally intensive methods—and outperformed those techniques in several instances. The team modeled familiar sources of measurement error to train the machine learning artificial intelligence, then refined the system when measurements were noisy or entirely absent. The actual reconstruction demands relatively modest resources, because the team can pile the expensive computation into the training process.  ... "

Drones Changing Shape

An example of how defensive activities of Drones are also at play.

Research Leads to Army Drones Changing Shape Mid-Flight
U.S. Army
June 16, 2020

Researchers at the U.S. Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and Texas A&M University helped create a tool that will enable autonomous aerial drones to change shape during flight. The tool can optimize the structural configuration of Future Vertical Lift vehicles while accounting for wing deformation due to fluid-structure interaction. Fluid-structure interaction analyses generally have high computational costs because they typically require coupling between a fluid and a structural solver. The researchers were able to reduce the computational cost for a single run by as much as 80% by developing a process that decouples the fluid and structural solvers, which offers further computational cost savings by allowing for additional structural configurations to be performed without reanalyzing the fluid.  ... "

Predictive Maintenance Driving 3D Printing

A long term interest and application area.  You could do a good job of prediction, but had to have a complex array of replacement parts in inventory.   Here, for the right kind of of application, the inventory could be minimized.  Could the parts even be produced to address certain kinds of predictive degradation by altering manufacturing design? 

Army 3D Printing Study Shows Promise for Predictive Maintenance
U.S. Army Research Laboratory
May 19, 2020

A study by researchers at the U.S. Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, CCDC Aviation and Missile Center, and Johns Hopkins University detailed a method for monitoring the performance of three-dimensionally (3D)-printed parts. The technique uses sensors to detect and track the wear and tear of 3D-printed maraging steel (known to possess superior strength and toughness without losing ductility), to help forecast degradation or malfunctions that warrant replacement. ARL's Todd C. Henry said the study was as much about understanding the specific performance of a 3D-printed material as it was about understanding the ability to monitor and detect the performance and degradation of 3D-printed materials.

Total Cost Visibility in the US Army

We recently participated in:

Graphs in Government: Achieving Total Cost Visibility for the U.S. Army
via Lauren McCormack, Neo4j    Presentation below:

Thanks for your interest in the Graphs in Government: Achieving Total Cost Visibility for the U.S. Army webinar. Click here to watch the recording.  

Very Fast PhotoGrammetry for Agriculture

Once again, very fast acquisition of accurate maps, in agriculture could be used to quickly detect changes in plantings by location and predict changes.  Our own needs were to determine changes that would influence harvesting plans.  Another use for drones.

Army Photogrammetry Technique Makes 3D Aerial Maps in Minutes   By Devin Coldewey in TechCrunch

Researchers at the U.S. Army's Geospatial Research Laboratory in Virginia have developed a highly efficient photogrammetric method that can turn aerial imagery into accurate three-dimensional (3D) surface maps in near-real time without any human oversight. The Army’s 101st Airborne Division tested the system by flying a drone over Fort Campbell in Kentucky. The system was able to map a mock city used for training exercises. "Whether it's for soldiers or farmers, this tech delivers usable terrain and intelligence products fast," said Quinton King, a manager at TechLink, the Defense Department's commercial tech transfer organization.   ... "

Robots as Army Assistants

Robots following orders.   We know this is still hard, and depends much upon the nature of an order.  Its good that many consumers are getting used to the idea of talking to smart speakers, and getting used to the implications of understanding, planning, sensors and results.

U.S. Army Creating Robots That Can Follow Orders
Technology Review
by David Hambling

Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Boston Dynamics have developed software that allows robots to understand verbal instructions, carry out those instructions, and report back. The robot can accept verbal instructions, interpret gestures, or be controlled via a tablet to return data in the form of maps and images. The researchers used deep learning to teach the system to identify an object, as well as providing a knowledge base for more detailed information that helps the robot carry out its orders. Said ARL's Ethan Stump, "The robot can make maps, label objects in those maps, interpret and execute simple commands with respect to those objects, and ask for clarification when there is ambiguity in the command." ..... '

Robotic Reliability vs Reasoning with Transparency

We came up with some similar conclusions.  That observed reliability was typically much more important that people thought, and it was best to solve that problem before aiming at advanced reasoning in a robot, or robotic process.    This further explores the value of transparency in an embedded reasoning  process, especially in human-robot teams.  All essential in a future of such cooperation.

When It Comes to Robots, Reliability May Matter More Than Reasoning
U.S. Army Research Laboratory    September 25, 2019

A study by U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and University of Central Florida found that human confidence in robots decreases after a robot makes a mistake, even when it is transparent with its reasoning process. The researchers explored human-agent teaming to define how the transparency of the agents, such as robots, unmanned vehicles, or software agents, impacts human trust, task performance, workload, and agent perception. Subjects observing a robot making a mistake downgraded its reliability, even when it did not make any subsequent mistakes. Boosting agent transparency improved participants' trust in the robot, but only when the robot was collecting or filtering data. ARL's Julia Wright said, "Understanding how the robot's behavior influences their human teammates is crucial to the development of effective human-robot teams, as well as the design of interfaces and communication methods between team members."

Palantir Army Intelligence System

Defense advances with data analysis, actions and reactons.

Palantir Wins Competition to Build Army Intelligence System 
The Washington Post
By Shane Harris

The U.S. Army has chosen Palantir Technologies to deploy a complex battlefield intelligence system for its soldiers, marking the first time the government has selected a Silicon Valley software company, as opposed to a traditional military contractor, to lead a defense program of record. The contract is potentially worth more than $800 million. In March 2018, the Army chose Palantir and Raytheon to compete for the next phase of the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A, for Army), which lets users gather and analyze information about enemy movements, terrain, and weather to create detailed maps and reports in real time. Unlike most Silicon Valley start-ups, Palantir believed from the start that its data analytics tools would find a willing market among U.S. spy agencies and the military, which are constantly trying to manage ever-expanding streams of information..... "

A Future of Drone Natives

My recent involvement with looking at near and long term applications of drones made me note this.  The term 'Drone Native' struck me.   Describing some near or long term future where drones will be cheap and common enough that everyone will control them.  Stats here are interesting. What are the implications?

'Drone natives' may one day help or harm US forces, says Army futurist   By David Vergun  

By 2020, Goldman Sachs estimates that global militaries will spend a combined total of $70 billion on unmanned aerial systems each year and the global civilian drone market will be $20 billion per year by 2021.

WASHINGTON -- The term "digital natives" was coined for children born after 2000, because those young people have grown up in a world already inundated with computers, cell phones and tablets, said Luke Shabro, deputy director of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command's "Mad Scientist Initiative."

Children born today might one day be called "drone natives," he said, because the use of drones around the world will soon expand substantially.

Shabro spoke here Aug. 24 during the Institute for Defense & Government Advancement-sponsored Counter-UAS Summit.

By 2020, Goldman Sachs estimates that global militaries will spend a combined total of $70 billion annually on unmanned aerial systems, he said. And the global civilian drone market will be $20 billion per year by 2021.

That proliferation poses unique rewards and challenges for the U.S., and for the U.S. military in particular, he said.   ... " 

Army Looks to Train with VR

Another example of VR training:

Magic Leap is Bidding on an Army Combat Contract
Microsoft has also expressed interest in providing augmented reality equipment for the battlefield

By Joshua Brustein in Bloomberg

Magic Leap Inc. is pushing to land a contract with the U.S. Army to build augmented-reality devices for soldiers to use on combat missions, according to government documents and interviews with people familiar with the process. The contract, which could eventually lead to the military purchasing over 100,000 headsets as part of a program whose total cost could exceed $500 million, is intended to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy,” according to an Army description of the program. A large government contract could alter the course of the highest-profile startup working on augmented reality, at a time when prospects to produce a consumer device remain uncertain.   ... "

Decisions and Technology

Ultimately its about the how technological results translate into decisions.  So that makes this interesting.   Does tech enhance decisions, and how can you make it do that?  The influence of user interface?    Organizations, like a company or even an Army are ways that have been established with ways to influence decisions internally and externally.

Does technology really enhance our decision-making ability?     By ARL Public Affairs

ADELPHI, Md. -- An Army scientist recently won a best paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization for discovering that most people cannot distinguish between liking a user interface and making good choices.

Dr. James Schaffer, U.S. Army Research Laboratory scientist stationed at ARL West, and his collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Drs. John O'Donovan and Tobias Höllerer, received the best paper award at the conference held in July at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

So, does technology really enhance our decision-making ability?

The paper, "Separating User Experience from Choice Satisfaction," addresses this question and furthers the theory that underpins the evaluation of recommender systems, which are designed to help users make good choices.

Simply put, recommender systems are artificially intelligent algorithms that use big data to suggest additional products to consumers based off of things such as past purchases, demographic information or search history, for example. Think of the "people you may know" feature that exists on many of today's social media platforms.

In recommender systems, it has been assumed that users form very complex mental models of user interfaces.

This is reflected in current user experience measurements, which elicit subjective responses on a wide range of system features.  .... "

AI Reasoning about Photographic Data

In Engadget.  How do I make sense of the knowledge in a vast set of images?  In real time?    Its called visual media reasoning.  DARPA and others are supporting ... " .... system both detects what's in a shot and presents it in a simple interface that bunches photos and videos together based on patterns. If you want to know where a distinctive-looking car has been, for example, you might only need to look in a single group. ... "