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  How Robots and Autonomous Weapon Systems are Changing the Norms and Laws of War

  Christopher Korpela, Dominic M. Larkin, David Parsons, and William J. Barry

  An interdisciplinary team of military and civilian professors of philosophy, electrical engineering, computer science, and robot engineers in the Robotic Research Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point are currently teaching a cutting-edge interdisciplinary project designed for cadets to explore, both in the classroom and in robotic lab environments, artificial intelligence (AI) powered robots, drones, self-driving cars, and emerging human on and out of the loop technologies such as robot swarms. Cadets learn how the increasing sophistication and autonomous decision-making capabilities of AI robots and autonomous weapon systems (AWS) on the battlefield, and in conflict operations, is disrupting existing status quo legal and moral norms and requires rethinking the sacrosanct idea of traditional Just War Theory as the moral compass for justice in declaring and fighting a war. The unpredictable pace of change is revolutionizing the concepts of just war, agency, and human purpose in war.

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  Row Row Row Your Bot – Trust Me or Not: Investigating the Performance of Human-Robot Teams

  Ericka Rovira, Dominic Larkin, Michael Novitzky, Nikiay Comer, Kaley Rose, and Britany Van Lange

  In this work we present the latest results in Project Aquaticus manned-unmanned teaming looking at the interactions of robot autonomy, human-robot trust, robot reliability, and participant executive attention capability. Project Aquaticus enables manned-unmanned teaming research in the marine domain. It creates exciting and stressful environments for participants based on playing games of capture the flag on the water. For these experiments, a participant was teamed up with an autonomous robot teammate. For consistency, they played against a team composed of two autonomous robots. The independent variables included autonomous teammate reliability, autonomous teammate autonomy level, and task load based on opponent tactics. Forty-eight Cadets at the United State military Academy, West Point, NY played Project Aquaticus simulations using our simulation engine and a game controller. Participants performed executive attention tasks and then played four rounds of capture the flag with several questionnaires interspersed including the NASA TLX and Schaefer trust scale. We present the adaptations to the autonomous robot teammate and opponent AI for the reliability and autonomy level of the autonomous robot teammate and the scenarios performed by the opposing team. We also present the general findings of team performance based on reliability, autonomy level, and scenario difficulty.