Cadets Improved the Programming of Their Robots

Department of English and Philosophy: PY201 & EECS Interdisciplinary Effort. This semester, cadets in LTC Saxon's PY201 class, in an interdisciplinary effort with LTC Chris Korpela and EECS, were given a "challenge" type project to assist in developing a program that would help a robotic weapons system operate in accordance with moral reasoning required by just war theory. This was a conceptual problem made real by the philosophy students programming Arduino bots with an algorithm to decide whether or not to attack balloons that represented friendly forces, enemy combatants, and noncombatants by color. Recently, the cadets briefed the ethical and engineering challenges they encountered with the project and demonstrated the results of their work with their robots in a small "battle bot" arena. Over the course of the block, several teams improved the programming of their robots to execute more discriminate "attacks," and some created innovative movement and search patterns for their robots. The project aimed to make just war theory more tangible and mirrored real-world opportunities and dilemmas with autonomous weapons systems and AI development.