The Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) program aims to develop benchmarks to objectively and quantitatively measure the ethical difficulty of future autonomy use cases and readiness of autonomous systems to perform in those use cases within the context of military operational values. DARPA has awarded seven contracts to an array of research performers, each of which explores a different approach to addressing this challenge.
The ASIMOV program is striving to create the ethical autonomy common language to enable the developmental testing/operational testing (DT/OT) community to meaningfully evaluate the ethical difficulty of specific military scenarios and the ability of autonomous systems to perform ethically within those scenarios.