In 2019, the US undersecretary of defense for research and engineering predicted that the army would have driverless vehicles before they were commercially available. More recently, Elon Musk has claimed that Tesla will have the technology for fully autonomous vehicles within a year. So, who is winning the race for autonomous vehicle (AV) technology? Here, Roger Brereton, head of sales at steering systems specialist Pailton Engineering, surveys the AV landscape in the military sector.

In 2020, scientists from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) carried out an experiment to see how humans and a new generation of smart machines can work together to change military operations. This most recent test was part of a decade-long annual testing regime known as the Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE). Here, Roger Brereton head of sales at military steering system specialist, Pailton Engineering, explains how projects like this will help the military vehicle industry get over the technical and ethical hurdles it currently faces.

The trolley problem is a classical philosophical dilemma that is used to illustrate the moral conundrum surrounding how to program autonomous vehicles to react to different situations. However, this particular thought experiment may be just the tip of the iceberg. Here Kostas Poulios, principal design and development engineer at steering systems specialist Pailton Engineering, takes a closer look at the ethical dilemmas of fully autonomous vehicles.