The Rise of Robotics in WarfareOctober 02, 2009

 

Vice Admiral Joe Dyer has experienced much of the U.S. Navy's technologies up close and in detail. Early in his career, he was the Navy's chief test pilot and he rose to commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, where he oversaw research, development, test and evaluation, and engineering and logistics for the Navy's aircraft, sensors and weapons launched from the air.

When he retired in 2003 he asked himself if he wanted to join what he calls the "big Eisenhower companies" as his former colleagues had done. He decided, instead, that he was more interested in finding an emerging technology trend—something akin to the personal computing industry's phenomenal rise in the 1980s.

"I was looking for an opportunity with a technology," he says, "that was going to a make substantial difference in how we live and how we fight."

He decided to join iRobot, a small company that had been incubated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was slowly breaking ground with its innovative land robots." was involved pretty substantially with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) but not with UGVs—Unmanned Ground Vehicles," he says. "But I believed then and now that the UAV market was a leading indicator for what was going to happen with UGV."

As the president of iRobot's Government & Industrial Robots division since 2006, Dryer is now pushing to make ground and water-based robots a standard part of U.S. military arsenal.

Knowledge@Wharton spoke to Dyer about how the field of robotics is changing the way the Pentagon fights wars and is influencing its weapons acquisition focus. Dyer also addressed the role iRobot hopes to play as it competes with the "Eisenhower-era" defense companies.