Robots could auto-complete soldiers' task on the battlefield in future, thanks to AI

The US scientists are working on artificial intelligence (AI) systems that could help robots assist soldiers on the battlefield in future. As part of the new study, the team of researchers examined soldiers' brain activity during certain tasks and objectives. This way, researchers are training AI systems to help soldiers dynamically finish their tasks and responsibilities.

According to a senior neuroscientist at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in the US, Jean Vettel, technologies predict states and behaviours of soldiers may help build a more optimised team.

The work between the University at Buffalo and ARL is looking at how the dynamics and architecture of the human brain may be synchronised to predict such behaviours and consequently optimise team performance.

"In military operations, soldiers perform multiple tasks at once. They're analysing information from multiple sources, navigating environments while simultaneously assessing threats, sharing situational awareness, and communicating with a distributed team,"  said Vettel. 

"This requires soldiers to constantly switch among these tasks, which means that the brain is also rapidly shifting among the different brain regions needed for these different tasks," he said.

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"If we can use brain data in the moment to indicate what task they're doing, AI could dynamically respond and adapt to assist the Soldier in completing the task," he added.

To accomplish this, researchers first tried to understand how the brain coordinates its different regions while working a specific task. Researchers relied upon a computational approach to understand how this may be characterised to inform the behavioural prediction.

In order to finish the study, scientists mapped how different regions of the brain were connected in 30 different individuals via tracts of tissue called white matter. 

Scientists turned these maps into computational models of each subject's brain and used computers to duplicate the effect of what would happen when a single region of a person's brain was stimulated.

Scientists also made use of a mathematical framework to measure how brain activity coordinated with different cognitive systems in the simulations.

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"While the work has been deployed on individual brains of a finite brain structure, it would be very interesting to see if coordination of Soldiers and autonomous systems may also be described with this method, too," said Javier Garcia, an ARL neuroscientist. 

"Much how the brain coordinates regions that carry out specific functions, you can think of how this method may describe coordinated teams of individuals and autonomous systems of varied skills work together to complete a mission," Garcia said.

(With PTI inputs)