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 * US Marines Defeat DARPA Robot by Hiding Under a Cardboard Box


US MARINES DEFEAT DARPA ROBOT BY HIDING UNDER A CARDBOARD BOX

 * By Adrianna Nine on January 19, 2023 at 3:16 pm
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Could this defeat the Pentagon’s latest human-identifying robot? Apparently so.
(Image: Kelli McClintock/Unsplash)The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested some of its resources into a robot that’s
been trained—likely among other things—to identify humans. There’s just one
little problem: The robot is cartoonishly easy to confuse.



Army veteran, former Pentagon policy analyst, and author Paul Scharre is gearing
up to release a new book called Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of
Artificial Intelligence. Despite the fact that the book isn’t scheduled to hit
shelves until Feb. 28, Twitter users are already sharing excerpts via social
media. This includes The Economist‘s defense editor, Shashank Joshi, who shared
a particularly laughable passage on Twitter.



In the excerpt, Scharre describes a week during which DARPA calibrated its
robot’s human recognition algorithm alongside a group of US Marines. The Marines
and a team of DARPA engineers spent six days walking around the robot, training
it to identify the moving human form. On the seventh day, the engineers placed
the robot at the center of a traffic circle and devised a little game: The
Marines had to approach the robot from a distance and touch the robot without
being detected.

Solid Snake using a cardboard box as a disguise in Metal Gear Solid.

DARPA was quickly humbled. Scharre writes that all eight Marines were able to
defeat the robot using techniques that could have come straight out of a Looney
Tunes episode. Two of the Marines somersaulted toward the center of the traffic
circle, thus using a form of movement the robot hadn’t been trained to identify.
Another pair shuffled toward the robot under a cardboard box. One Marine even
stripped a nearby fir tree and was able to reach the robot by walking “like a
fir tree” (the meaning of which Twitter users are still working to figure out).



While it’s funny to imagine a team of Marines using Metal Gear Solid’s cardboard
box strategy to defeat what’s likely a very expensive robot, the incident
detailed in Scharre’s book fortifies something we already know: AI is only as
useful as the data we give it. Similar to the way AI becomes biased once it’s
fed biased data, algorithms can be as ignorant as their foundational data is
flat. Without being shown what a somersaulting human or a human under a box
looks like in action, a robot won’t be able to discern that image from all the
surrounding noise, no matter how skilled its engineers are.

Now Read:

 * Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot Gets Hands to Grab and Throw
 * Researchers Use Cheap Wi-Fi Routers to Detect Human Posture
 * Airbus Begins Testing Autonomous Emergency Flight Tech








TAGGED IN

 * ai
 * military
 * darpa
 * defense
 * Pentagon
 * military technology
 * Marines
 * ai algorithms
 * human detection


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