[HN Gopher] DARPA Project Reveals One Person Can Control Dozens ...
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DARPA Project Reveals One Person Can Control Dozens of Robots
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-02-28 19:30 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| teeray wrote:
| > U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), experts
| show that humans can single-handedly and effectively manage a
| heterogenous swarm of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial
| vehicles, while feeling overwhelmed only for brief periods of
| time
|
| This will surprise nobody who has watched professional Starcraft
| players.
| KumaBear wrote:
| Watching professional starcraft players makes you question if
| they are human. Their control of vast quantities of units and
| platoons is unreal at moments.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The real limiter is (unironically) the quality of the drone
| pathfinding.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| No Newtype powers required.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Good unit AI for RTS allow for amazing results, and there is so
| much more control/automation that most RTS games could allow
| for.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| It makes me wonder if there could be some sort of lower-cost
| real-life strategy game with cheap(er) homemade drones
| eventually, kind of like FPV racing now. I'm not a big RTS
| person but that sounds really fun.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Robot wars but instead of 1v1 you have large teams of drones
| on a well enclosed football field.
|
| I can't decide if that would be cool or terrifying.
| djmips wrote:
| Both
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If the drones were not destroyed as part of normal gameplay
| it could make sense. So rather than a battle Royale maybe
| something like drone laser tag mechanics
| szvsw wrote:
| > feeling overwhelmed only for brief periods of time
|
| There is something deeply, darkly comedic (depressing?) about
| the qualitative language here. Primarily the way it
| simultaneously intersects with modern discourse around
| wellness, anxiety, and mental health in such a banal manner at
| the same time as the latent/implicit violence of action (given
| that the obvious subtext is operating semi-autonomous killing
| machines).
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Agreed- they write as if being overwhelmed 3% of the time is
| a victory. A good system would have people feeling
| overwhelmed 0% of the time.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >A good system would have people feeling overwhelmed 0% of
| the time.
|
| There are benefits to being pushed past your limits from
| time to time. Also, there's just no such thing as 0. When
| you're designing limits you don't say "this never happens",
| you're saying "this event happens less than this rate for
| this cohort".
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I'd agree that it is worth pushing your limits during
| training, but the best-case scenario during actual
| conflict is to be as close to 0% overwhelmed as you can
| be.
| some_random wrote:
| Yeah I really don't like that phrasing. Take off and
| landing is the most dangerous part of flying but only makes
| up a tiny percentage of the total flight. If that 3% of the
| time referenced is the most dangerous or most critical 3%
| of time then it hardly matters how easy the rest of it is.
| bluGill wrote:
| The real question is what happens in that 3%. If they are
| still able to control the drones that is very different
| from they set the drones to kill your own people. (This is
| DARPA so we can assume killing people is a goal in some
| form). There is a lot in between too.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's DARPA, you're really past the moralizing about war stage
| here, that's just out of context. I don't see UX experts
| hand-wringing about the effects of advertising when they're
| designing their products.
|
| >discourse around wellness, anxiety, and mental health in
| such a banal manner
|
| It's not about "feelings" and that might disturb you, but
| really very many things should be much less about feelings. A
| whole lot of "wellness, anxiety, and mental health" isn't
| about feelings but instead being inside or outside the limits
| of what a person is capable of handling. Facts-based analysis
| of work and life and people being too far outside their
| comfort zone could do a lot for many people dealing with
| mental health issues.
|
| DARPA does and obviously _needs to_ study these things. One
| of the most important areas for this are pilots especially
| during emergencies. It comes from both directions, designing
| the machine to be manageable and training the human to manage
| in exceptional circumstances and _knowing the limits_ of
| both.
| szvsw wrote:
| > It's DARPA, you're really past the moralizing about war
| stage here, that's just out of context.
|
| I don't really think I was moralizing... just commenting on
| the funny juxtaposition of the language and the context -
| or on the comedy of the language specifically when not
| considering the whole context. I was not saying DARPA
| should or should not be doing this - though I'll grant that
| what I wrote could be read as an implicit criticism, even
| though it was not my intention.
|
| > I don't see UX experts hand-wringing about the effects of
| advertising when they're designing their products.
|
| Plenty do. Plenty don't. Similarly, plenty of machine
| learning engineers might choose not to work on, say, a
| predictive algorithm for facial recognition or a product
| recommender system because they don't feel like being a
| part of that system. Some people don't have that luxury, or
| don't care. It's fine either way, though I of course
| encourage anyone to do some reflection on the social
| implications of their engineering projects from time to
| time. Hamming, who worked on everything from the ABomb to
| telephones to the foundations of computer programming (and
| everything in between) strongly recommends this, and I
| agree. Working on weapons might be necessary, but you still
| need to reflect and make a conscious decision about it.
|
| > It's not about "feelings" [...] It comes from both
| directions, designing the machine to be manageable and
| training the human to manage in exceptional circumstances
| and _knowing the limits_ of both.
|
| Of course, totally understand that. That doesn't mean we
| can't find humor in decontextualizing the language! Or in
| thinking about how science always must struggle with
| euphemism for the purposes of concision.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That sentence could come from an Onion news report about
| worker productivity.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| So Overwatch/ DVa is onto something.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| > The most common reason for a human commander to reach an
| overload state is when they had to generate multiple new
| tactics or inspect which vehicles in the launch zone were
| available for deployment
|
| This seems misleading- what they said is that when everything
| is on cruise control the commander does not feel overwhelmed.
| But if they have to do some high cognitive load task (like
| reading statuses) or react to a complex situation the commander
| will feel overwhelmed, which is bad. We want to be able to
| react quickly and appropriately to all situations, which we
| can't do when overwhelmed. Being able to handle dozens of bots
| in a calm situation is meaningless. We need to staff our bot
| controllers/monitors/commanders at a level that they can handle
| those top 3% complex wartime scenarios.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| DARPA needs to partner with our Korean allies who already know
| how to push up their APMs in these scenarios.
| itishappy wrote:
| Professional Starcraft players prove that this is possible, but
| my own experience playing Starcraft indicates it's not all that
| common.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| This is why we can't deal with China right now
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Or AlphaStar from DeepMind.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Starcraft players presumably not surprised.
|
| But seriously, isn't this just a function of how much babysitting
| the robots require and how good the UI is for controlling them? I
| don't see why there should be any fundamental limits here.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| This really is the sort of technology that I want the government
| to be looking into.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Until your local paramilitary cosplay group decides to equip
| their SWAT team with them.
| kiddico wrote:
| I think that was sarcasm... I hope that was sarcasm.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Don't worry. They'll use non-lethal weaponry to merely
| blind innocent civilians with their military surplus gun
| bots.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I mean my response was sarcasm, idk about theirs ^
| hooverd wrote:
| I hope the robots have funny voice lines if you click on their
| icons enough.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| "I'm no milkmaid!"
| WD-42 wrote:
| Me not that kind of robot
| foobarian wrote:
| "Your soundcard works perfectly!"
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This won't age well. 100 ?
| excalibur wrote:
| > For instance, in a particularly challenging, multiday
| experiment in an urban setting, human controllers were overloaded
| with the workload only 3 percent of the time.
|
| That 3 percent is definitely the part where the innocent people
| are killed
| sitkack wrote:
| Unintended surplus collateral loss.
| tehjoker wrote:
| given the performance of the Israelis recently, it may be more
| like the opposite. they would authorize collateral damage of
| 300 people to get 1 militant, so their "off-target" ratio could
| be as high as 99.7%
|
| Israel does path finding for what the U.S. military can get
| away with.
| sampton wrote:
| Coincidentally EA just open sourced C&C games.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Will we ever be able to build a war interface for remote
| controlled drones that is so good it just feels like an RTS game?
| Or will latency be an issue.
| daveguy wrote:
| Latency will always be an issue with tele-operation from the
| control source. Best to have local autonomy while waiting for
| latent instructions. The more autonomous the drone is, the
| farther away an effective control source can be.
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