Calibration of Ethical Trust for Lethal Autonomous Weapons (CETLAWS)

This proposal is for Phase II continuation of our project to develop a software framework for Calibration of Ethical Trust for Lethal Autonomous Weapons (CETLAWS) that can be used by Air Force, other DoD organizations and commercial enterprises. The mission impact of this project on the Department of the Air Force will be an enhanced understanding of the roles of ethics and trust in lethal autonomous systems and the availability of new methods to facilitate calibrated trust in human-autonomy teaming scenarios. Ethical trust calibration will increase military users’ willingness to collaborate with lethal robotic technology and will also overlap with key commercial applications in trusted artificial intelligence (AI) and social computing. In Phase I of the present project, we demonstrated and validated an initial CETLAWS using a simulation of a swarm of autonomous lethal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a set of ethical equations for making autonomous Shoot/No-Shoot decisions. In Phase II we will implement a complete CETLAWS prototype using both ethical equations and Bayesian modeling for trust calibration, validate this prototype; and begin our transition and commercialization activities with an initial focus on insertion into DAF wargames and test events with the help and collaboration of our USMC end-user.