Brad Tousley (Raytheon Intelligence & Space) & Dr. Tim Chung (DARPA)

Brad Tousley (Raytheon Intelligence & Space) & Dr. Tim Chung (DARPA)

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so today we have two speakers one from the defense industry and one from um from darpa and they're both going to give you some very interesting talks on emerging technologies disruptive technology and a concentration in robotics and autonomy which i know is a topic you are all very very engaged in so today we first have dr brad towsley who is the acting vp of advanced concepts in technology for raytheon intelligence and space before joining raytheon technologies he has had a very impressive career that spanned both private industry the dod and the military he served as the director of the darpa tactical technologies office that's a very high position at darpa that has a lot of influence over the technical technology development relating to advanced platforms and systems and it spans all domains all the way from space air land sea and undersea um he was a graduate of the united states military academy at west point and he received both his master's degree and phd in electrical engineering from the university of rochester in addition to dr tosley we have dr timothy chung who is currently a program manager at darpa in that same office the tactical technologies office before joining darpa he was the deputy director of the secretary of the navy's initiative for the consortium for robotics and unmanned systems education and research he served as an assistant professor at the naval post graduate school and also at the same time as the director of the advanced robotics systems engineering laboratory he holds a bachelor's degree and uh in mechanical engineering and also aerospace engineering from cornell and his master's degree and phd from caltech and his research interests include autonomous vehicles unmanned air vehicles collaborative autonomy and distributed decision making so you have an opportunity here to talk to folks who are on the very leading edge of some very important emerging technologies so please make sure to ask your questions in the chat don't forget to sign in and uh with that thank you both very much for joining us today as our speakers and i'll turn it over to brad thanks jen very much i really appreciate that wonderful introduction and it's a pleasure to be here today virtually and to talk to all these great young people as they you know part of their part of the young career getting into science and technology i i'm really really happy to be able to talk to you and after i talk i'm happy to be able to hand it over to dr tim chung he's just a super individual and i know you'll be engaged with his presentation so i'm going to talk a little bit about emerging and disruptive technologies today and and wrap up with some predictions that hopefully uh may come true in your lifetime so first come talk a little bit about me i'll talk about raytheon technologies and then talk about some technology predictions dr watson really covered it um i had a varied education background i spent some time in the u.s military while i was in the military they gave me a chance to go back to graduate school while i was in graduate school that's where i truly discovered my love for science and technology i think many of you have already discovered that um and then after some time in the military i was able to spend some time in the in the us government the intelligence community i did work at darpa for a long period of time and that was just a just a wonderful experience and then on the right hand side i've been fortunate enough to work in small medium and large businesses of course in my career and you know i always tell people that once they get their education and if they spend some time in the government the military and you got in the private sector try all different kinds of businesses they're all different and unique and they're all just a blast and uh at present i'm in raytheon technologies and very happy to be there so raytheon technologies um is is a very large company it was formed as an integration of raytheon and united technologies in april of 2020. and really what what just to give you some idea of what we do today uh this chart just kind of gives you a list of all kinds of things that raytheon technologies does from you know actuation cargo propeller systems aerostructures pratt whitney is now part of you know raytheon technologies and they make engines so if you're flying on a on a commercial airliner on a trip someday and you look down there at the engine off the right side of the wing or the left side you may be looking at one of our engines we do things like avionics we work cyber security we have a huge number of people working data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning we do missile defense we do mission systems we do power controls you see in the lower right there a picture of a satellite we do all kinds of stuff like that so very big company and all kinds of capabilities and all focused on advanced technology i'm a part of one of those four businesses so raytheon technologies has four individual businesses and i actually work as a technology executive in raytheon intelligence and space we have about 37 000 people over the united states about 15 billion dollars in sales and on the left-hand side there we do things like advanced sensors we do cyber and training and software solutions and really our focus is to deliver disruptive technologies to support our customers and the largely in the military and intelligence community to succeed in any domain against any challenge that that is our commitment as we say challenge accepted we take on that challenge i specifically work in the advanced technology piece of that where we focus on disruptive capabilities and and trying to solve really really hard problems the kinds of things that we do in advanced concept and technology we have people that work on quantum computing which is a new form of computing where it fuses computer science and engineering and physics for new ideas we have large numbers of people that work on electro optical and infrared sensors you know thermal detection sensors because we're worried about situational awareness on the battlefield for our warfighter customers believe it or not we're working on synthetic biology just like software science computer science and software engineering has been maturing over the last 25 years from a nascent discipline to something that's really rigorous now biology is undergoing the same sorts of rigorous development from an analog domain to what i call a digital domain and in that we're combining biology and engineering to look at new capabilities and materials we do a lot of work with active optical systems like light detection and ranging systems that can be used in all kinds of military and commercial applications for many of the things that we develop we we start with a physics-based modeling and simulation approach because we can do that from a digital engineering thread now in the past everything might be done in pen and paper but in the future we try and model and simulate almost everything we do first to minimize the you know the number of iterations of an engineering design cycle or a scientific experiment cycle before we try it the first time we work a lot on secure processors and what i mean by that is if you have an iphone or an android in your hand every day you have a processor within that and in that we implicitly trust that those processors are going to do what we ask them to do well the military is very concerned as processors are made globally that we have processors that we can use and trust and so we do a lot of work of looking at the next generation of that computing and trying to make this sure those systems are are secure distributed battle management we do a lot of work and software and you know the us military is scattered all over the world doing different things and a big part of that is how the software that underlays all of our command and control systems operates efficiently and allocates resources and enables the warfighters to protect themselves in real time and so that piece of software we call that distributed battle management we do a lot of work in that i'm sure you've heard the the buzzword artificial intelligence and machine learning um it's been it's been under development for probably 40 years but it's really come to to the forefront in the last five or 10 years and the way i think about artificial intelligence that at least raytheon technology applies it overlays everything we do because the improvement in the analysis of the data that we collect will allow us to do our job even better and so it's not like it's one focused area it's in everything we do now and last but not least we do a lot of work in advanced concept and technology and cyber security you can read the paper almost any day and find out some new nascent cyber security threat and because we're so dependent on the digital domain now applying cyber security emerging technologies that fifth domain is so important those are kind of just like a small nugget of the expand we have about 2000 people in act working on projects at any one time and these are just a sampling of some of the areas that we work on and then perhaps at some point in the future you'd like to work on those some area some of those areas as well once you complete your schooling so i want to take a few minutes to just throw out some tech predictions um for you to think about and then maybe four or five years down the line you're going to say yeah hey i heard that in the past that was right or hey that didn't happen so the first one autonomous race car grand prix i know tim jim would have a lot he could talk about here but you know we still predict that in five years cars are not going to be fully autonomous and that we're not going to have a complete grand prix that is you know without humans i'm not sure how exciting that would be um there's still a lot of interest in having a human drive a car so i would encourage you to go ahead and get your driver's license yeah i think uber is good i think lyft is great in terms of getting from point a to point b but we still think in five years that uh we're not certain we're gonna have a completely autonomous grand prix yet but we'll have to see um autonomous air vehicle racing i'm not sure i'm gonna comment on that i'm gonna let tim talk about that but i think in the future you're going to see more and more drones in the area i think there'll be more and more of this integration of humans and autonomous systems working together i really think that that that is a future of how how we work together with autonomous systems and racing may be one way um autonomous cognitive assistance i think this one is definitely going to happen that that the ability of artificial intelligence to help the commander or a warfighter on the ground in the battlefield make decisions and do their job better i think that's going to happen it's happening quickly the only question is how much assistance and how much data will be involved but i think we're going to see that remote sensing this is kind of already happening but we think future a artificial intelligence was going to analyze imagery for earth science business and intelligence it's already happening to certain degree but i think it's going to be just even more dominant in the future many of you may have read articles where you see about these constellations of small satellites that we call proliferated leo or p leo we just think that the you know that that the low and medium and geosynchronous orbit and beyond are going to be dominated with more and more satellites with remote sensing capability and all that data is going to get analyzed and we think it's going to help whether it's with earth science or for business and intelligence cubesats you may have already had the opportunity this or you may have the opportunity to do it as an undergraduate but i can't tell you how many universities the united states are starting to work on cubesats and what's going to happen is the lower launch costs that are happening from a variety of launch companies spacex and blue origin and others those lower launch costs are going to increase opportunities for you to launch a satellite i think that's something if in college if you want to do that that's definitely going to be a possibility serious game design um you know you probably know a lot more about gaming than i do i know my three kids do but i really think that the virtual training that's enabled by serious game design is really going to improve um the ability of our of our soldiers sailors airmen and and marines and and air women and marines to do their job um to train on any system from anywhere in the world that anybody that spent time in the military like i have the cost of training to do your job is really really significant and anything that we can do to make that virtual is going to allow people to do their job better and i really think that serious game designs are going to get even better with improvements in the graphical processing units and things like that i really think that's going to really help that and maybe you can be a part of that embedded security and hardware hacking you know there's always this generation every year that says hey you know future systems are going to be hack-proof and we're going to fix that and it's not going to happen well i think the general view in in in the defense ecosystem community is that future systems aren't going to be hack-proof we are just going to have to live with the fact that cyber security is imperative and that we're going to have to build systems that are resilient despite the fact that they can get hacked and i think that's going to continue to be the point the future although i would love to see each and every one of the 329 of you work on you know making that a reality and developing a hack-proof system in the future i think it's good for all of us metallics data science for health and medicine this is happening already but it's going to happen even more the ability to take advantage of artificial intelligence and and all this processing horsepower and big data tools to help us screen for pathogens um to help us with healthcare all that stuff is going to happen the only question is how big is it going to be but but i really think you know there was a it was in darpa from 2013 to 17. i remember listening to the leadership to really say that they thought that the you know the 20th century was was the era of silicon i really think the 21st century is going to be the era of biology and medicine and data in the integration of all three together underwater autonomous vehicle challenge i'll let tim talk about this one but i really believe that the same sorts of things that autonomy in the air and the ground even in space that are happening are really going to happen under sea and we're going to be able to do all kinds of good things for the environment keeping in mind that 75 of the earth's surface is covered with water what kinds of things can we do from a from an underwater autonomous standpoint to help our environment to understand it better you know the ocean bottoms are not all completely mapped and we just don't know everything about it so maybe that'll be a help there quantum software i really believe in this that that you know traditional what's called pipeline processors are going we will evolve into quantum computation systems there are certain classes of problems that a quantum computer can solve that classical computers cannot we've been working on for about 20 or 25 years and i really believe that qubits will become a term that all of you will know not simply you know bits of information or digits but you're going to understand the next five years what qubits are all about and how those will help us solve problems that we simply can't solve today and last but not least unmanned air systems you know all kinds of unmanned air systems you know once they completely clear through the faa you know certification and air worthiness and that process i really think that these unmanned systems in the air are going to do all kinds of things for us this is just one example of a new type of a radar system that might be capable for collecting imagery through you know bad weather on the ground but i think that that swarms of information that can be collected from these unmanned air systems are going to be really amazing and there'll be all kinds of commercial applications and others that we simply haven't thought through so i encourage you all to make your own predictions but those are just possible ideas for you to think about for the next five years so the last thing i wanted to say is that you know raytheon intelligence and space and and have been doing beep if i've been doing internships for a long time we love internships we love in you know interacting and having high school and college students work with us and for us over the summer time or any other time of the year um you know the fundamental point about an internship it helps you because you get experience to see what industry's doing and what life is like outside of school frankly it also helps those of us that that host the internships because it gives us a chance to interact with young people and to see how you're doing and to hopefully inspire you to stay in science and technology and it's also frankly a chance to do some sort of a long-term job interview and so i think for everybody internships are great and i can't strongly recommend it highly enough that in your college years that you really and in your high school years both of them beaver works that internships are a great thing and a great way to spend some of your time and this is just a web link that you can do to apply for at least for raytheon internship i'm with raytheon or you can email a recruiter or you can email me any one of the three um and with that i'd like to hand it over to tim i know he's gonna do a great job of talking about all kinds of things autonomy so tim over to you all right good morning everyone good afternoon good afternoon uh can i get a thumbs up or a check mark if you can see my presentation perfect okay great well brad thank you so much and um pleased to be here uh as was mentioned earlier i'm here at garpa you might have seen or learned about darpa in the movies but the defense advanced research projects agency i'm going to share a little bit about what darpa does and and and my little piece of the puzzle here um and i'm um excited to share that i'm a robot assist by training and i went to college and did robocup which is building teams of robots playing soccer together and that's kind of what i did for my whole career thus far is how do i work with teams of robots get them to do really cool and important things and do so in complex environments and that's going to be the theme of the types of projects i share with you today just a little bit about darpa and and highlighting how this relates to you all at beaverworks darpa's interested in the nugget of of uh the commodity that darpa's interested in is this notion of technological surprise we're interested in creating technological surprise the thing that's gonna wow and totally disrupt the space and technology but also preventing technological surprise that means getting there first anticipating where the ins and outs might be and being able to prevent the united states from being surprised if other technologies arise so in the context of technology and and its surprise i wanted to share these sets of questions that i hope you maybe print out or snap a picture i actually keep it on my wall and on my badge um but this is called hellmeyer catechism or hellmeyer questions you could wikipedia this and these sets of questions get asked not only to all program managers here at darpa but to anyone who wants to do a project i used it for even my graduate work and so what are you trying to do so i encourage you as you're working through all of your future projects to ask these types of questions and be able to maybe jot down some notes see how well you can answer these questions and it really helps uh to define the types of problems that you're gonna be overcoming in your research and so to highlight how i used these hal meyer questions and applied it to a handful of projects that i've been able to do here at darpa the first one i wanted to share was the notion of the service academy swarm challenge this was a case where i'm handing large teams uh 25 drones uh on two sides and they're basically playing capture the flag and laser tag simultaneously over the fields of a flight test range so let me show you this [Music] and this occurred a couple of years ago happened to release this video on may 4th for those of you who get it 4th of may [Music] and what you'll see are seniors at these universities taking these technologies in the field deploying them and being able to develop the software and the know-how to go and take out each other's perspectives [Music] [Music] drones have to land on opposing bouncy castles with four points you can also tag each other in the sky to four points that way [Music] and so i encourage you to go on youtube just type darpa swarm challenge you'll be able to get the full length videos and see all the research that was done again at the at the senior in college levels uh you're able to go and do that another area that's currently ongoing this is called the offset offset program and so now before we were dealing with maybe 25 30 drones on a given team now let's imagine what would happen if you had let's say 250 robots air and ground robots now trying to work in really complex environments so the key takeaway here is i like to imagine what if aliens had taken over manhattan or downtown los angeles or cambridge and you needed to use a swarm of robots to go and retake the city how would you go about doing that and the idea here is we want to go and uh you know i can't have 250 uh soldiers driving with joysticks there might be novel ways that we want to team with these forms of robots to go and support this type of a mission so we're going to go retake boston from from the aliens how do we use robots to go do that and so here's a short video that kind of highlights uh what that kind of scenario might be this this program's using technologies that you can go to the nearest best buy or order commercially off the shelf and think about how do we stitch all of this together and so imagine you're now that orchestra symphony conductor you don't tell each musician what note to play and when and similarly we want our swarm commander to be able to gesture or wave or think or speak the types of commands that would be useful for weaving together this large scale mission so you see you know 20 30 40 drones being taking off from one side of the this urban environment you'll have another 20 30 40 from the other side you'll have rovers that are following along the the road network that they were able to get from google maps um and and and start moving into the city they're going to go look for windows and doors and so you can imagine applying this to something like firefighting where you need to deploy a set of unmanned systems to go and find out where the the danger parts are to make sure that the avenues the roadways are clear for the first responders to come in to be able to locate where there might be trapped individuals in upper story buildings and uh rapidly be able to get access to those buildings to be able to to help help those people out and so you imagine how do i orchestrate these forms of robots well you can imagine all sorts of ways but you're certainly not going to be telling each robot which gps waypoint you're going to be sending them to but rather you're going to be using these things we like to call swarm tactics and you might be for example under virtual reality so that bottom two videos that hopefully you can see that's a virtual reality setup looking at a 3d virtual world you can click and point at buildings and say i want to go and inspect that building and and and off they go the swarm of agents figure out which air and ground robot should go off and and go search that building again let's say we need to find that that that trap survivor in the upper story of a building or you might have your your tablet i'm just gonna pen sketch out hey these are the places that i want you to go and inspect here's the red zones that i want you to stay away because there might be power lines or other people or things of that nature so these swarm tactics and how we communicate with the swarm is what the offset program's all about so that's been a lot of fun as well another area so i've talked about the the skies for swarm on swarm battles i've talked about the urban environment where there are those really challenging super structures that you're going to have to deal with but another subdomain or another domain that's really hard is the underground environment that underground environment is what inspired the darpa subterranean challenge this is where it's a little bit of um the amazing race uh meets the hunger games you have to go send teams of robots underground to go find artifacts or objects of interest so it's a scavenger hunt underground and it's a little bit like hunger games because we throw darpa goes and figures out what are all the different challenges that these robot teams need to go and be able to overcome so we'll throw mud we'll throw stairs we'll have elevator shafts we'll have uh natural to cave-like terrain really confined spaces and things of that nature to really put these robot teams to the test and so the idea is you can't be just the best swimmer or the best runner but in fact all around best triathlete and so we do that in the context of human-made tunnels like in mines for mine search and rescue the urban underground let's say in subways of sewer systems or parking garages where you might need to send robots in and then also the naturally occurring cave environments this is nature's best effort to make it really hard for robots to try to navigate these environments and so darpa's interested in the subtee challenge we like to call the subtee challenge in generating this actionable situational awareness that means going and finding these artifacts and reporting back where they are and what you found and doing that all within let's say the span of an hour as i mentioned we're interested in doing this in a way kind of triathlon but we just don't want uh the type of robots that will work in one place only we want the types of robots to be resilient across a variety of different technical challenges that they'll face so we held the tunnel circuit which was in a in a coal mine we did an urban circuit which was in an unfinished nuclear power plant uh three stories of a nuclear power plant it intended to do a cave circuit uh but of course last year was rather challenging for everyone so we were able to identify a new way to study that problem and we'll have our final event in september but it's going to be a mashup of all three of these environments and really put these robot systems to the test so because that's coming up i wanted to spend just another minute or two sharing a little bit about that subtee challenge here's how we structured here's how to win an event in the darpa subterranean challenge find the most artifacts in the shortest amount of time when or if a team system locates an artifact it has to report not only the type of artifact but also its spatially referenced location to an accuracy within 5 meters a valid report earns one point but teams are granted only a limited number of reports so they can't just guess until they get lucky sound easy enough think again teams have to send their systems through dynamic terrain over under and around obstacles in austere navigation conditions pushing the limits of their endurance and in conditions degrading sensing capabilities and severely constraining communications so teams need to be agile adaptive and accurate if they want to emerge victorious in the subtea challenge [Music] so come follow along at hashtag sub t challenge of course um you may have seen a variety of uh robots out there now this is some footage from our urban circuit we're sending in these robots humans are not allowed to see the course they've not they don't know what's around the first bends here is a legged robot going downstairs or tracked robots or tethered robots or or flying robots uh it's um amazing what these different teams are thinking about of building and demonstrating in these underground environments so this again being that urban built up type environment as i mentioned the cave circuits was hampered by covet of course but all along we've understood the value of simulation and virtual environments it was mentioned earlier about using serious games this is the role of simulation and helping facilitate that so alongside these real world robots we've had a virtual competition and for the cave circuit we were only able to hold a virtual competition but in this game you have a simulation that allows for teams to basically fantasy football league style develop their squad of robots that they're gonna go send in the virtual environments that darpa creates of massive scales and proportions and have to do the same thing they have to go and report out where these artifacts are located in those virtual environments and that's all open source so any of you want to go play you're welcome to do so and so as i mentioned the finals are coming up uh you'll be able to check us out online follow along and see that live broadcast as that happens september 21st the 24th but again the key takeaway here is how do you get teams of robots to work in complex environments and what are the technologies that all start from ideas like the ones that you probably are thinking about right now and how do you materialize that into a fielded and resilient system and so with that if you have any questions i always welcome engagement feel free to reach me at any of these emails or follow along at sub t challenge and again very much looking forward to all your questions good luck with your internship as well thanks all right those that was exciting and so the students are actually uh very interested and and uh excited about some of these challenges um maybe we could start a start at the beginning um there there's a question from um dia about i think for brad about some of the synthetic biology work would you like to unmute ask your question yeah hi i think someone um already helped like answer my question by like putting a link in the chat about what your company does but basically my question was um could you explain some of the projects or endeavors you have going on in relation to synthetic biology or anything in biology yeah there's there's uh let's say there's two or three let me talk with the first one that um raytheon has been working on for about 10 years now and it was actually just licensed to a company called idt in the last two weeks but what raytheon has done is take essentially cyber tools that are used to analyze packets of information on networks and adapt that approach to analyzing dna sequences that you know are digitally provided to a a house that's responsible to fabricate from the sequence that they're given and what raytheon was paid by the government to do was to develop cyber tools that would allow us to look through the digital dna sequences to make sure that there's no pathogens in there because we have we have snippets of information pathogens you have these long dna sequences and the ability to break that data apart and analyze it for anything that's nefarious is very difficult and raytheon's been working over that um paid by the government to develop tools that like the last 10 years and they've successfully done that and they've now licensed that technology out so there are a bunch of there are a bunch of companies actually in the boston area biotech companies that will take in a dna sequence that they're provided and manufactured whatever it is that's in that sequence and obviously these companies don't want to manufacture something that's bad the pathogenic sequence and but in order to find out if something bad is in the toilet sequence that data has to be analyzed so that's the first tool that was worked on the last few years it's largely software applied to biology a second project that raytheon was working on was believe it or not using a form of surface algae that can penetrate down in the soil and look under the soil for tnt for explosive materials the military application of that is obviously looking for explosives in the battlefield trying to find them and as opposed to digging up all the soil could we develop approaches to allow you know non-threatening algae to basically penetrate from the surface down up to three or four feet down to look for um you know explosives and then if they found the explosives they would automatically fluoresce fluoresce at the surface so you could look for the fluorescence to find out something bad there um they're also working on some some approaches today to look at um detection of certain biologic fungi and things like that um that that's a particular approach so those are examples of the application of of biology from a defensive standpoint and from a data analytics standpoint thank you so much that was really interesting to hear about great um senate you had a question on uses of drones for the future okay yeah so um uh i think uh uh a while back you showed your you showed your presentation on how like the prediction of drone usage in the next five years and they said that drones would be a lot more uh closely used with humans and based off of that prediction that's why that's why i wanted to ask you what do you think are the uses of drones for in the next five years uh i'll i'll take a stab at it for and then i'll i'll turn over to tim see what he thinks because he spends a lot of time working this no i think i think um you know drones are limited by range and payload right so from an aerodynamic standpoint your ability i'll use a quad as an example a vertical drone so in order to to take off and land you've got to and go over a certain range you've got to have payload you've got to have propulsion system you've got the ability to sustain yourself you're sustaining the system a lot so once you get past that you understand okay i can i can have this drone or quad fly a certain distance and carry a certain payload then it determines what payload you can provide there are all kinds of payloads that are being developed you know small cameras small radar small sensors that could be looking for acoustics or biological information all that's being done and so that's happening the second piece of it though that that has to pass muster is the air worthiness and the certification the ability to fly that in the national airspace it's one thing to have a drone or a quad you can use on a battlefield where you're not as concerned about commercial aviation but when the when the federal aviation administration has to worry about safe transport for everybody around the united states they get really worried about what's flying around in the air and so the national airspace in the united states is carefully regulated first and foremost to be very conservative from a safety standpoint so we don't have accidents so once that process gets sorted out with autonomous drones from a safety standpoint and regulation and who flies it as that evolves my prediction is you'll see more and more drones all over the place you know a big part of like i think amazon's desire to deliver you know to remote sites was it necessary could they do it but it was getting the certification approval to do it so if something went wrong it was all insured and it was all proper that makes sense that's that's my thoughts i think you're gonna see it everywhere tim what do you think yeah no you know drones have taken off pun intended uh in terms of usage and so forth um i i think you know payload delivery just like you mentioned brad i think that's going to be an interesting area right once we sort out how to get how to deliver medicine how to deliver food and resources we see folks from a humanitarian and disaster response perspective you know the trucks can't make it through all the debris and so maybe we can airlift some things in there it could be at the small scale it could be at the much larger scale at that point now you can even imagine bringing bringing in supplies or evacuating personnel so you can you can imagine a lot of really interesting things happening there personally i i think that uh when you have teams of robots going out and do things you'll get way more than just drone light shows over the super bowl but in fact um a lot more things happening um you know when when you can use all these things in concert should be pretty cool yeah uh yeah thank you for your response yeah i really i really appreciated it hey um maddie you had a question on some new applications of swarms yeah thank you um i was wondering if darpa had ventured into using swarm robotics to collect data for environmental sciences or ecological initiatives since that seems like an interesting future direction yeah so there's there's a lot of work in uh leveraging not just onesies and twosies but larger numbers of being able to do things for example like agriculture being able to scour agricultural fields know where there are pests you know pests or infections or or need for more water um there's been applications of deploying uh swarms for uh wildlife preservation in fact even in antarctica trying to count penguins and making sure that they're uh all safe and accounted for so i think there are a lot of really interesting opportunities uh countering poachers uh is one application um forest management and in fact things like even fighting wildfires and early response to those kind of scenarios so i think there's a broad range of applications that these types of technologies uh can and have been thought about awesome thank you okay so um there's a question on uh from joseph chai on autonomy and space exploration yeah uh thank you so much so out my question is would raytheon or darpa ever consider like moving into the planetary formation field on like for um interplanetary like space travel and like uh you know people humanity being an interplanetary species and use storm technologies for like topography and reconnaissance missions um to better understand planets such as mars wow that's a that's a great question um well i'll let tim answer the darpa one specifically i know they they have a program doing nuclear thermal propulsion and one of the purposes of that is to increase the sun it's not necessarily interplanetary but it's to do a much better job propulsion in space he can talk about that um what i will say is is um raytheon there are some scientists at raytheon that are talking to nasa today about the applications of synthetic biology not necessarily to terraforming but but to provide in-situ logistic support on the moon and mars in other words are there ways of of developing synthetic biology capabilities so that we don't have to transport everything from one planet to another i mean there's just it's it's uh interplanetary travel is a big giant logistical nightmare separate from how long it takes it's just it's heavy on logistics but tim what do you think about that yeah brad thanks um you know i think i think there are a number of initiatives that are going on right now that might actually have impact in those kind of environments uh brad mentioned the the ability to to travel long distances what's the next kind of propulsion approach that we can imagine are energy sources we can take advantage of uh for for things like space travel um there's uh the extraction of water from the atmosphere it turns out of course a large part of the lift is being able to provide water for humans and so being able to extract that wherever you might be and of course mars might be a tough place to go and execute that but you can imagine many of the arid environments that we have to operate in uh could be great to kind of see what it means to leverage uh that kind of uh water extraction technology uh similarly being able to convert you know raw mark throw away materials into uh either construction materials or other things being able to repurpose scavenge um and and study that aspect uh can help out in austere environments but one can imagine that being applied to space as well and i'll throw out that the subtee challenge we have a nasa team in the competition and one of the main interests there are things like the lava tubes on the surface of mars being able to explore those environments and understand if those could be potentially hospitable for housing that next mars base or whatnot so i think there are a number of opportunities there that many of the technologies as well as the partnerships with places like nasa will really open up some of the some of that aperture thanks for the question yeah thank you so much um so ozone you have a question um i think for maybe both of them so it's no secret that scientific innovations are to be considered alongside their ethical ramifications so i was wondering what would you say to the many engineers who could potentially feel innovation within the defense sector but ultimately uncomfortable with the possibility of their work being employed in military aggression yeah that's that's a great question um i think that uh from the standpoint of i'll talk about raytheon and intelligence space no i think from the standpoint of raytheon intelligence space there are many engineers and scientists that want to work on technology for both commercial and for defense purposes and i think most everybody finds a natural place for them to do that if they have an ethical concern i'm sure they voiced that i know that the department of defense considers um technology i know typically darpa does that they consider the ramifications of technology from an ethical standpoint and autonomy is a great example it's it's pretty well known that the the u.s defense and intelligence community establishment is extremely rigorous on the utilization employment of two things autonomous systems um and also on on the application of biology we're much more rigorous and ethically minded on that than many of our adversaries are but you're right every every scientist and engineer has to analyze the work they're doing and decide is something they want to do or not and i think that's you know we're in a free society and that's part of that tim what do you think yeah i'm i'm right there with you uh fantastic question and it's certainly something that um you know all technologists uh can and should be thinking about as brad mentioned here at darpa one of the things in the department of defense and at darpa specifically we take that responsibility pretty seriously in the technologies that we're interested in uh for example for autonomy uh department as defense has a directive that basically says that we can't and shouldn't be developing those types of autonomous uh lethal capabilities at darpa we have a review board that looks at the legal social and ethical implications of many of the technologies such as autonomy that we develop so i think that's less um you know if you're already working within the department of defense or darpa then we're already developing technologies with that ethical mindset in place i think your question about those who are kind of on the edge and might have misgivings i think that's exactly a reason why we want those people who are critical thinkers always wondering thinking about being conscientious about the legal ethical and social ramifications of the technologies that we are interested in and bringing that conversation to the fore not um not shying away from being able to uh to have those discussions and and and i'm glad that the that question came up today because it means that we're all thinking about precisely the right things as we advance these technologies that was great great question aidan you had a question about how to get involved in uh challenges oh okay yeah if we wanted to participate in a darpa challenge or program what would be the academic steps that you would suggest um to work our way to doing so oh fantastic question this music's my years right i'll go ahead and also before i say when i was in fifth grade there was a darpa robotics challenge and i really wanted to enter and i and i did like a ton of stuff trying to get uh like like my fellow middle schoolers to help out and trying to get into it unfortunately it never worked out and i became really sad about it well i'm i'm sorry that you're so sad but you know maybe now is a good chance to reconnect um i think uh to speak to your point it really depends on the nature of the challenge but for example the sub-tea challenge is really wide open so we have uh college students we've had a team with a middle school so maybe a little too late for your middle school experience but we had a team of middle schoolers develop a small ground robot that was deployed at the urban circuit uh and that was part of a team we have uh teams that employ their undergraduates from their university so it really spans uh the gamut from professional engineer all the way down to middle schoolers and that's the nature of you never know when you're gonna get the next best idea and that could happen in a garage workshop or in a in a lab somewhere so uh to answer your question i'd say just what you all all 300 plus of you doing right now is taking the initiative to go and learn right learn do projects take internships find mentors latch on to them and all of that initiative boils down to finding a path to challenge like projects and if there's a darker challenge that's going on much like the robotics challenge or the subtee challenge or whatever happens in the future um you'll be well positioned i think to be able to bring your skill sets and that that drive that enthusiasm um but that's you know that's music's my ears uh that you as fifth grade and you as um you know junior sophomore maybe rising senior uh is interested that that means these challenges are doing their job of inspiring young minds like yourself and uh the next best way to get involved in their challenge is to propose ideas for what that next challenge should be so i encourage you to think about what a next carpet challenge should look like and uh send it over our way scott hastary you have a question um for both of them looking for some advice for all the students uh yeah so i was just gonna ask um what's like the largest piece of advice that you would give yourself as a high schooler like knowing what you already know now because we're obviously all high schoolers and just looking for some advice oh wow that that's a that's a great question um boy i'm trying to think because i've got three kids and all three of them older than you so um i think you know look first first off the fact that 330 of you are on this call and then you're in this program means you're already curious that's the most important thing never ever inhibit your curiosity or to desire to continue to learn um you know the only limit of what i spend my time on every day learning technically is the hours and the day because i have other responsibilities but you know i've had i've had a lifelong curiosity of technology and the most important thing is just to sustain it and keep learning something new because in the area of technology your entire life it is going to change and what that means is um continuous learning is so important and keeping that spirit alive and if you do that and you stay involved you'll satisfy that curiosity and you'll just enjoy the day that's that's my best thought yeah we get this question a lot as you might imagine and there's no one path to you know to go forward and many of you i think will discover your own paths one way to help that in addition to always having that lifelong learning which was number one on my list as well um is uh you know feel free to reach out feel free to ask questions much like you're doing right now uh ask questions from potential mentors or actual mentors or uh you know students that were in the upper class ahead of you or or things like that i think asking questions in all sorts of ways and and to whomever you get the opportunity to that one sentence or one conversation could really be uh pretty pretty exciting for you it could be where you find a lot of inspiration and um i think that's the nugget is whether you're lifelong learning whether you're engaging with other people whether you're uh having those kind of discussions it's where you find inspiration and that inspiration is what's going to continue to drive you so take every opportunity you can to go uh meet someone you talk with somebody different uh learn something uh each and every day yeah and the other thing is don't assume that the path to all this for you will be linear don't assume that while i lay out this path i do this next and this happens it's not the way it works for many of us i don't want to say it's a random it's a random walk experiment but for many of us we do different things at different times in different places and opportunities arrive so what you can do is just do the best of whatever you're doing and and grow your network of people that you know and as you do that that intersection of your desire and your ability plus your network opportunities will open themselves up to you and that is just a question of hey do i want to take advantage of that opportunity and try something new i've done three completely different things in my adult career completely different i had no idea that the start that was going to happen so my career certainly wasn't linear by any stretch so don't assume it will be that's fantastic so i want to thank you both once again for for joining us today these talks were fantastic and your your advice to the students is spot on for sure um right now i'd like to um ask allison wu and danielle truong to unmute and they'd like to thank you personally all right hi everyone um i'm daniel a student from race car and beaverworks uh my peer allison and i are here today to express the gratitude that our students have towards darpa beaver works and of course our distinguished speakers mr tusley thank you for sharing your professional insights offering us with internship opportunities and providing us with your predictions for all of our respective courses that was one of the most unique things i've seen in a presentation moreover thank you for sending all the arduino kits over us uh over to us and i'll be on the lookout for raytheon components the next time i'm on a plane mr chung the excitement that you had while you were speaking was very infectious um thank you for providing us with the i don't i don't represent pronounce it but the hail mayer framework and telling us about their storm drone challenge and the sub t challenge which are probably some of the coolest robotics things i've ever seen um i've said a lot now so allison you can take it away from here thank you daniel yes we're so grateful that both of you were able to speak to us today and on behalf of beaverworks we would like to present you both with um t-shirts virtually so thank you so much thank thank you

2021-07-30 06:53

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