How the Army plans to revolutionize tanks with artificial intelligence

with the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Aided System, or ATLAS, the U.S. Army hopes to transform the way tank crews operate using artificial intelligence. (U.S. Army)

 

Even as the U.S. Army attempts to integrate cutting edge technologies into its operations, many of its platforms remain fundamentally in the 20th century.

Take tanks, for example.

The way tank crews operate their machine has gone essentially unchanged over the last 40 years. At a time when the military is enamored with robotics, artificial intelligence and next generation networks, operating a tank relies entirely on manual inputs from highly trained operators.

“Currently, tank crews use a very manual process to detect, identify and engage targets,” explained Abrams Master Gunner Sgt. 1st Class Dustin Harris. “Tank commanders and gunners are manually slewing, trying to detect targets using their sensors. Once they come across a target they have to manually select the ammunition that they’re going to use to service that target, lase the target to get an accurate range to it, and a few other factors.”

The process has to be repeated for each target.

“That can take time,” he added. “Everything is done manually still.”

On the 21st century battlefield, it’s an anachronism.

“Army senior leaders recognize that the way the crews in the tank operate is largely analogous to how these things were done 30, 45 years ago,” said Richard Nabors, acting principal deputy for systems and modeling at the DEVCOM C5ISR Center.

“These senior leaders, many of them with extensive technical expertise, recognized that there were opportunities to improve the way that these crews operate,” he added. “So they challenged the Combat Capabilities Development Command, the Armaments Center and the C5ISR Center to look at the problem.”

On Oct. 28, the Army invited reporters to Aberdeen Proving Ground to see their solution: the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Aided System, or ATLAS.

ATLAS uses advanced sensors, machine learning algorithms and a new touchscreen display to automate the process of finding and firing targets, allowing crews to respond to threats faster than ever before.

“The assistance that we’re providing to the soldiers will speed up those engagement times [and] allow them to execute multiple targets in the same time that they currently take to execute a single target,” said Dawne Deaver, C5ISR project lead for ATLAS.

At first glance, the ATLAS prototype the Army had set up looked like something out of a Star Wars film, albeit with treads and not easily harpooned legs. The system was installed on a mishmash of systems — a sleek black General Dynamics Griffin I chassis with the Army’s Advance Lethality and Accuracy System for Medium Calibur (ALAS-MC) auto-loading 50mm turret stacked on top.

And mounted on top of the turret was a small round Aided Target Recognition (AiTR) sensor — a mid-wave infrared imaging sensor to be more exact. Constantly rotating to scan the battlefield, the sensor almost had a life of its own, not unlike an R2 unit on the back of an X-Wing.

Trailing behind the tank and connected via a series of long black cables was a black M113. For this demonstration, the crew station was located inside the M113, not the tank itself. Cavernous compared to the inside of an Abrams tank, the M113 had three short seats lined up. At the forward-most seat was a touchscreen display and a video game-like controller for operating the tank, while further back computer monitors displayed ATLAS' internal processes.

Of course, ATLAS isn’t the tank itself, or even the M113 connected to it. The chassis served as a surrogate for either a future tank, fighting vehicle or even a retrofit of current vehicles, while the turret was an available program being developed by the Armaments Center. The M113 is not really meant to be involved at all, but the Army decided to remotely locate the crew station inside of it for safety concerns during a live fire demonstration expected to take place in the coming weeks. ATLAS, Army officials reminded observers again and again, is agnostic to the chassis or turret it’s installed on.

So if ATLAS isn’t the tank, what is it?

Roughly speaking, ATLAS is the mounted sensor collecting data, the machine learning algorithm processing that data, and the display/controller that the crew uses to operate the tank.

Here’s how it works: full story here

A view of the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Aided System, or ATLAS, prototype set up inside an M113. (U.S. Army)