Army Futures Command’s 75th Innovation Command. “This is probably the most complex and interesting environment for a test place anywhere in the world,” said Art Mogil, Innovation Officer for the U.S. New York City served as the perfect laboratory for the experiment. “We are working in close coordination with the local and federal partners to conduct an experiment that can only be accomplished effectively in a place like New York City,” said the Dense Urban Counter Unmanned Aircraft System Materiel Experiment 21-1 leader, Robert Hesse from the DEVCOM Armaments Center. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s (DEVCOM) Armaments Center, C5ISR Center, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. government organizations, including the U.S. The sensors were designed to find the aircraft using either radar or by detecting the signals that were emitted during communications between the aircraft and their pilots.įive different sensor systems were tested at the experiment with coordination from U.S.
Their mission was to detect, track, identify and classify small unmanned aircraft systems in a dense urban environment. Army Futures Command Subterranean Dense Urban Community of Practice in partnership with the New York Police Department Counter Terrorism Division. On a nearby rooftop, dozens of personnel were monitoring LED screens and participating in an experiment led by the U.S.
#Military drone trial#
Over the course of the two days officers from the New York Police Department Technical Assistance Response Unit flew 49 scripted small unmanned aircraft system trial flights, sometimes with multiple aircraft, and performing a host of intentional maneuvers: shooting straight up and down, scooting low between buildings, buzzing down alley ways and hovering next to courthouse buildings.Īn observer would have a hard time finding the tiny blinking red and green lights emitting from these relatively small aircraft when seeking them amongst the vastness of the city-scape.īut the aircraft were most definitely being watched.ĭozens of exotic antennas were mounted on building and in vehicles, many directed into a blocked-off area. 24 and 25, few pedestrians could be seen, traffic was blocked into the square, and for the most part, noise was distant and subdued. on a weekend, and on the streets near Foley Square, it sure slows down. NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. – This city may not sleep, but between 3-9 a.m. New York City Police Department Counterterrorism Division, observes CUASĭetection testing from a rooftop as Dense Urban CUAS Materiel ExperimentĢ1-1 was underway in lower Manhattan on Oct. Rider) VIEW ORIGINAL 2 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption –ĭetective Ralph Gonzalez, Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems Team Lead, 24 during the Dense Urban Counter Unmanned Aircraft System Materiel Experiment 21-1, which examined the performance of a number of UAS detection systems in a dense urban environment. They have also warned of the “black box” in machine learning, in which the decision making process in AI systems is often opaque, posing a real risk of fully autonomous military drones executing the wrong targets with the reasons remaining difficult to unravel.A unmanned aerial system is flown above a building in lower Manhattan Many robotics and AI researchers in the past, including Elon Musk, and several other prominent personalities like Stephen Hawking and Noam Chomsky have called for a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons", such as those with the potential to search for and kill specific people based on their programming.Įxperts have cautioned that the datasets used to train these autonomous killer robots to classify and identify objects such as buses, cars and civilians may not be sufficiently complex or robust, and that the artificial intelligence (AI) system may learn wrong lessons. “The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability,” the experts wrote in the report.