DARPA Project Reveals One Person Can Control Dozens of Robots
48 comments
·February 28, 2025teeray
szvsw
> 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
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.
bluGill
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.
some_random
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.
colechristensen
>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".
alpaca128
That sentence could come from an Onion news report about worker productivity.
colechristensen
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.
thrance
Congratulations, you cured the mental illness epidemic, depressed people just had to push their limits! Why didn't anyone think of that before?
szvsw
> 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.
_carbyau_
But not everyone is a Professional Starcraft player, even with training.
Besides, I'd prefer a Supreme Commander interface where patrol points can be added/deleted/moved on the fly while factories produce more into that loop including ferry points along the way. Supreme Commander made me feel it was more about strategy than action count.
nickpinkston
DARPA needs to partner with our Korean allies who already know how to push up their APMs in these scenarios.
KumaBear
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
The real limiter is (unironically) the quality of the drone pathfinding.
parsimo2010
> 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.
TeMPOraL
>> to generate multiple new tactics or inspect which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment
Following up on GP's analogy, I read this as "human overwhelmed by micro" and "human overwhelmed by macro", which... tracks.
From my own StarCraft experience, the two most taxing parts of the game - the ones where I could easily get confused and lose track of the battle, or even forget what I was doing and why, were:
1) Micro, i.e. "generating new multiple new tactics" on the fly, manually controlling a bunch of units, whose survival depended entirely on me being able to do it faster than my opponent.
2) Macro, i.e. "inspecting which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment" and deploying them, while queuing production of new ones - while trying to keep track of the front line(s) and spot potential sneak attacks and overall pay attention to the whole map. "Macro management" is easy when it's the only thing you do - but when there's a battle going on, you end up looking at a different part of the map for a second, every second; it basically becomes a form of "micro", except you're micromanaging your attention.
In both cases, the source of the overwhelm is the pressure of battle - things are changing so fast that few seconds can decide the fate of the battle, possibly of the overall game - but the battles between peers can drag on for minutes, requiring you to sustain that level of focus for extended time, and keep it split between the fighting and the base management; as there too, few seconds of error can put you at a large disadvantage down the line.
All this to say - I'm not a soldier, so I might be wrong, but I feel that real-life warfare, at least now, isn't this fast-paced. That may change in drone vs. drone scenarios, but with humans on the ground, I imagine taking it slow and methodical will remain the dominant approach.
datadrivenangel
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
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
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
Both
mkoubaa
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
itishappy
Professional Starcraft players prove that this is possible, but my own experience playing Starcraft indicates it's not all that common.
sampton
Coincidentally EA just open sourced C&C games.
Ajedi32
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.
hooverd
I hope the robots have funny voice lines if you click on their icons enough.
WD-42
Me not that kind of robot
foobarian
"Your soundcard works perfectly!"
mystified5016
"I'm no milkmaid!"
excalibur
> 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
Unintended surplus collateral loss.
tehjoker
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.
lenerdenator
This really is the sort of technology that I want the government to be looking into.
kevin_thibedeau
Until your local paramilitary cosplay group decides to equip their SWAT team with them.
kiddico
I think that was sarcasm... I hope that was sarcasm.
kevin_thibedeau
Don't worry. They'll use non-lethal weaponry to merely blind innocent civilians with their military surplus gun bots.
lenerdenator
I mean my response was sarcasm, idk about theirs ^
deadbabe
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
Latency will always be an issue with distant 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. Usually the control source is not across the globe, but in the closest safe distance. For pack-drones that is close enough that latency isn't an issue.
danielmarkbruce
This won't age well. 100 ?
> 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.