Delivering on the Promise of Autonomous Agents in the Battlefield

As the Army begins to deliver on the promise of autonomous agents including unmanned ground and air vehicles and other intelligent agents the focus has shifted from functionality to robustness and resilience. Intelligent systems must not only be capable of performing specific tasks, but they must also do it in a manner that is resilient to the dynamism of real-world environments and adapt to the unexpected including adversaries. This paper surveys some of the recent research and breakthroughs towards robust and resilient autonomy, some of the keys to achieving systems that learn rapidly in new environments, and that demonstrate the ability deal with uncertainty through various means including leveraging human knowledge to greatly speed up the learning process.