Move over Tesla, Pentagon has lead in race over self-driving vehicles
The Pentagon has a long history of support that helped to develop or refine key technologies that become widespread later, including space flight and the internet.
Forget Uber, Waymo and Tesla: the next big name in self-driving vehicles could be the Pentagon.
“We’re going to have self-driving vehicles in theater for the Army before we’ll have self-driving cars on the streets,” Michael Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill this month. “But the core technologies will be the same.”
The stakes for the military are high. According to Griffin, 52 percent of casualties in combat zones can been attributed to military personnel delivering food, fuel and other logistics. Removing people from that equation with systems run on artificial intelligence could reduce injuries and deaths significantly, he added.
“You’re in a very vulnerable position when you’re doing that kind of activity,” Griffin said. “If that can be done by an automated unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving algorithm where I don’t have to worry about pedestrians and road signs and all of that, why wouldn’t I do that?”
Beyond the technical challenge of engineering a car that can safely traverse chaotic city streets on its own, civilian self-driving developers must navigate a still-evolving legal and regulatory environment. Passenger vehicles must comply with scores of federal vehicle safety requirements governing everything from turn indicators to braking systems, many of which assume drivers will be human.