We have already seen many robots that can fight alongside humans and save lives on the battlefield. Army is working a technique that enables robots to remain resilient when losing communication on the battlefield. The a-shape technique is all about resolving goal conflicts between multiple robots. This is done through
sharing their next task with the team, and select team members will remember this information, allowing other robots to ask if any other robot will perform that task without needing to communicate directly with the robot that selected the task… Each robot is assigned a bounding shape representing the area of the environment that they are caching goal locations for, which enables a quick search in the communications network to find the robot that would know if there were any goals requested in that area.
This approach enables robots to make decisions about next tasks without checking on the rest of the team. More info is available here.
