Artificial Intelligence Meets Tactical Autonomy: Challenges and Perspectives

Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled systems have shown tremendous impact in our national defense and in our society due to recent advances in artificial neural networks, deep learning, machine learning, and Internet of Things, big data, computing and communications. New AI capabilities can improve efficiency, trust, and efficacy for mission critical applications for tactical autonomy with minimal supervision from human operators in multi-domain battlefield (MDB) environments that are complex, contested and unpredictable. Although AI-enabled tools have been responsive to people and complementary to human capabilities, in order to realize its full potential in tactical applications, there are several challenges to be addressed for making trustworthy, ethical, fair, real-time explainable AI-enabled autonomous systems. Collaborations between platforms/systems as well as joint human-machine learning/teaming could address many of these issues to provide trusted and shared understanding and delivering cost-effective and adaptive systems to assist operations across military domains (space, air, land, maritime, and cyber) at combat speed using a shared set of resources. In this paper, we present some challenges and perspectives for AI enabled tactical autonomy.