Mario Gerla, UCLA researcher and director of the U.S. Navy's MinuteMan project

With a lilting Italian accent, Dr. Mario Gerla describes how the robot wars will commence: A fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will converge in the airspace above a battlefield, dynamically configuring a mobile data network between them. Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) may begin a land assault ahead of, or possibly along with, human infantry outfitted with various sensors and automated photographic scanning equipment.

These UAVs, UGVs and infantry will use wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology in a specialized protocol on military-exclusive radio spectrum to share data about enemy positions, targets and numbers. And they will be in constant communication with U.S. Navy ships that control their every action.

This futuristic vision is the bailiwick of the Office of Naval Research, which has commissioned an $11 million, five-year exploration of the concept under the imposing banner of the Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents project — a.k.a. MinuteMan. Right now, the flesh-and-blood men and women behind MinuteMan are not seafarers, but a team of UCLA researchers that Gerla leads.

Gerla, who emigrated from Italy in the late 1960s to pursue a Ph.D. at UCLA, has been working on MinuteMan since early 2000, when the ONR approached him to expand on wireless research he did for the U.S. Department of Defense. To prove the concept, Gerla and his staff designed special packet radios and built a test bed on which UAVs and UGVs transmit at the 2.4 GHz unlicensed frequency, also exchanging data via 802.11a and 802.11b Wi-Fi standards.

A commercial network based on MinuteMan will be challenging to implement on a live battlefield, Gerla admitted. The network would have to be reconfigured as agents move, and degradation of the radio links is possible. Also, enemy forces could destroy UAVs or jam their radio frequencies, which could crash the entire network.

But the MinuteMan research team doesn't plan to embroil itself in military affairs after its test bed provides proof of concept. “This is a science project,” Gerla said. “We're not going to be responsible for the beta tests or the actual construction of these networks.” When that happens, let's hope our robo-soldiers are tougher than theirs.