An acceptable loss, also known as acceptable damage or acceptable casualties, is a military euphemism used to indicate casualties or destruction inflicted by the enemy that is considered minor or tolerable. [1] In combat situations, leaders have to often choose between options where no one solution is perfect and all choices will lead to casualties or other costs to their own troops. [2]
A small scale practical example might be when the advancement of troops is halted by a minefield. In many military operations, the speed of advancement is more important than the safety of troops. Thus, the minefield must be "breached" even if this means some casualties. [3]
On a larger strategic level, there is a limit to how many casualties a nation's military or the public are willing to withstand when they go to war. For example, there is an ongoing debate on how the conceptions of acceptable losses affect how the United States conducts its military operations. [4]
The concept of acceptable losses has also been adopted to business use, meaning taking necessary risks [5] and the general costs of doing business, also covered with terms such as waste or shrinkage. [6]
The euphemism is related to the concept of acceptable risk, which is used in many areas such as medicine and politics, to describe a situation where a course of action is taken because the expected benefits outweigh the potential hazards. [7]
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g. in the forms of decisions. Understanding in this context means the transformation of visual images into descriptions of the world that make sense to thought processes and can elicit appropriate action. This image understanding can be seen as the disentangling of symbolic information from image data using models constructed with the aid of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.
A land mine, or landmine, is an explosive weapon concealed under or camouflaged on the ground, and designed to destroy or disable enemy targets, ranging from combatants to vehicles and tanks, as they pass over or near it.
Management science is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is closely related to management, economics, business, engineering, management consulting, and other fields. It uses various scientific research-based principles, strategies, and analytical methods including mathematical modeling, statistics and numerical algorithms and aims to improve an organization's ability to enact rational and accurate management decisions by arriving at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex decision problems.
"Collateral damage" is a term for any incidental and undesired death, injury or other damage inflicted, especially on civilians, as the result of an activity. Originally coined to describe military operations, it is now also used in non-military contexts to refer to any unwanted fallout from an action.
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines. Automation has been achieved by various means including mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic devices, and computers, usually in combination. Complicated systems, such as modern factories, airplanes, and ships typically use combinations of all of these techniques. The benefit of automation includes labor savings, reducing waste, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy, and precision.
James Sacra Albus was an American engineer, Senior NIST Fellow and founder and former chief of the Intelligent Systems Division of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
In computer animation and robotics, inverse kinematics is the mathematical process of calculating the variable joint parameters needed to place the end of a kinematic chain, such as a robot manipulator or animation character's skeleton, in a given position and orientation relative to the start of the chain. Given joint parameters, the position and orientation of the chain's end, e.g. the hand of the character or robot, can typically be calculated directly using multiple applications of trigonometric formulas, a process known as forward kinematics. However, the reverse operation is, in general, much more challenging.
In anti-tank warfare, an anti-tank mine is a type of land mine designed to damage or destroy vehicles including tanks and armored fighting vehicles.
An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.
In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-playable characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in the 1948, first seen in the game Nim. AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI. It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making. During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on the player's input. Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs. AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user, such as data mining and procedural-content generation. One of the most infamous examples of this NPC technology and gradual difficulty levels can be found in the game Punch-Out!!.
Demining or mine clearance is the process of removing land mines from an area. In military operations, the object is to rapidly clear a path through a minefield, and this is often done with devices such as mine plows and blast waves. By contrast, the goal of humanitarian demining is to remove all of the landmines to a given depth and make the land safe for human use. Specially trained dogs are also used to narrow down the search and verify that an area is cleared. Mechanical devices such as flails and excavators are sometimes used to clear mines.
Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots. Robotics is related to the sciences of electronics, engineering, mechanics, and software. The word "robot" was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R., published in 1920. The term "robotics" was coined by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 science fiction short-story "Liar!"
The stereo cameras approach is a method of distilling a noisy video signal into a coherent data set that a computer can begin to process into actionable symbolic objects, or abstractions. Stereo cameras is one of many approaches used in the broader fields of computer vision and machine vision.
Mark William Wright, GC was a soldier in the British Army and a recipient of the George Cross. He died in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, after entering a minefield in an attempt to save the lives of other injured soldiers. His actions were posthumously recognised with the award of the George Cross on 14 December 2006, and gazetted the next day. Wright had served in the 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ernest Lenard (Ernie) Hall, PhD, PE, is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Dynamic Systems in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati. He was also the Paul E. Geier Professor of Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He has also held joint appointments at the University of Cincinnati with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. He regularly collaborates with faculty and students in other colleges at University of Cincinnati, as well as civic groups, including the FIRST Lego League, the Ohio Academy of Science, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. While consulting with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he became interested in efforts to make useful robots for some of the dangerous tasks encountered by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and NASA. He noted the importance of combining image processing algorithms with manipulators and controller to build intelligent robots, especially in automatic target recognition. He has founded and has co-chaired an annual conference on Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision for the past 25 years to provide a forum for new innovations in this field. He sits as the first Paul. E. Geier Professor of Robotics at the University of Cincinnati. At the University of Cincinnati, he established the Center for Robotics Research, which encourages robotics activities in industry, medicine, defense, and even at home with projects like a robot lawn mower. He also founded the UC Robot Team that has participated in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition for the past 15 years and the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007. He has also served as a judge for the Cincinnati FIRST Lego League for two years and has been called the Woodie Flowers of Cincinnati for giving the Gracious Professionalism award. In 2006, Ernest L. Hall won the Grand Prize in the "Made in Express" contest sponsored by Microsoft. His entry for the contest was an all-terrain self-maneuverable robot developed using Microsoft Visual Studio Express. He donated the $10,000 cash prize from the contest back to the University of Cincinnati to support robotics.
The Guidance, Control and Decision Systems Laboratory (GCDSL) is situated in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. The Mobile Robotics Laboratory (MRL) is its experimental division. They are headed by Dr. Debasish Ghose, Full Professor.
Machine ethics is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence concerned with adding or ensuring moral behaviors of man-made machines that use artificial intelligence, otherwise known as artificial intelligent agents. Machine ethics differs from other ethical fields related to engineering and technology. It should not be confused with computer ethics, which focuses on human use of computers. It should also be distinguished from the philosophy of technology, which concerns itself with technology's grander social effects.