Navy To Turn Aircraft Carriers Into Mobile Drone and Weapons Factories Using 3D Printing
Realistic military applications are limited almost entirely by size; an F-35 is quite a way out, whether printed as a whole or as tens of thousands of parts, but a small, unmanned drone with only a few moving pieces? Not only is this plausible, it’s already happening.
It’s not difficult to imagine a carrier, or perhaps even a large land vehicle, outfitted with a high-quality 3D printer, several tons of raw materials, and a few pre-fabricated cameras and circuit boards. Such a mobile manufacturing base could churn out precisely the type of drones needed for a given situation.
Are you dealing with four insurgents hiding in a reinforced bunker with locked windows less than two feet wide? Your military could create a drone with the size and grasper needed to deal with that specific situation.
Military Drones to Police Civilians at Brazil World Cup. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
iRobot announced today $7.2 million in contracts to provide Brazil with military PackBot robots for security at the 2014 World Cup.
…As part of the deal, Brazil will get 30 PackBot 510 units, which usually cost about $100,000 to $200,000 apiece. The contracts include services, spares, and associated equipment.
The camera-equipped, remote-operated robots can give users a close-up look at suspicious objects, or explore dangerous environments, while keeping operators safe from harm.
The PackBots will be working alongside thousands of soldiers deployed to each of the 12 host cities in Brazil. To spot troublemakers, Brazilian police will be equipped with facial-recognition camera glasses that reportedly can capture 400 facial images per second, storing them in a central database of up to 13 million faces.
The country reportedly purchased four Israeli-made drones to help with security for the FIFA Confederations Cup next month. It is spending $900 million to boost its security forces ahead of the World Cup, including surveillance equipment and helicopters, in a bid to make it “one of the most protected sports events in history.”
(via iRobot military bots to patrol 2014 World Cup in Brazil | Crave - CNET)
Laser Weaponry Update: Lockheed Destroys Missiles at 1.5 Km
In a series of tests in March and April, the prototype directed-energy system destroyed eight small-caliber rocket targets in flight at a range of approximately 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mile), Lockheed said Wednesday. The defense contractor described the targets as “free-flying Qassam-like rockets,” making reference to the simple but deadly projectiles developed by the military arm of the Palestinian group Hamas.
(via Lockheed laser weapon hits its mark again | Cutting Edge - CNET News)
New Technique Fires Plasma RIngs in Open AIr for Navy
Researchers at the University of Missouri have devised a method of creating and launching rings of plasma through open air. Depending on your point of view, this could have significant repercussions for the energy generation and storage industry… or, more realistically, this could be exactly what the nascent plasma weapons industry needs to finally get plasma rifles and shields onto the market.
…The University of Missouri claims that this technique could “revolutionize energy generation and storage,” but doesn’t actually say how. Presumably there is some basis to this claim, though there seems to be very little in the way of peer-reviewed science in this area. Much more likely is the weaponization of the technology — imagine a plasma rifle that can cut through just about anything, or a plasma shield that can instantly incinerate incoming ammunition and missiles. This theory is made all the more plausible by the research group’s primary source of funding: the Office of Naval Research…
(via Open-air plasma device could revolutionize energy generation, US Navy’s weaponry | ExtremeTech)
The Future of Reconnaissance: Disposable Personal Drones for Every Infantryman
The US Air Force Research Lab put out the call for a new kind of drone in August last year, an ultralight one that every soldier could carry and launch unaided to give them a detailed 360-degree view of their surroundings. The system would need to work independently under a wide range of conditions.
Taskin Padir and a group of researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts have answered with a prototype they call IPASS: a portable, inexpensive and robust flying drone that the everyday soldier can use.
Drones that can be operated by one person exist, but the US Air Force came to Padir’s group to develop something that was cheap enough to be disposable, and simple enough to require no training.
IPASS uses three cameras, which cover a 360-degree view, to build an image of the surrounding landscape in all directions. The images are currently downloaded to a laptop, but the team plan to have them transmit wirelessly to a mobile device. Stabilising aerofoils are clipped to the body of the drone before launch. The craft uses an electric motor to drive two rotors for propulsion.
It still needs some work: IPASS currently does not reach the full 100 feet (30 metres) altitude required by the air force, and it is susceptible to crosswinds blowing it off course.
(via One Per Cent: Disposable army drone makes eyes in the sky easy)
DARPA Develops Robot With Hands Dextrous Enough to Use Tools, Change a Tire
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a robot that can change a tire, picking up the tire, getting it off and on the (simulated) wheel and using the lug wrench. This may sound pretty simple, but the point isn’t the changing of the tire — it’s holding the tools.
Robots that can hold tools are a lot more versatile than those built for a specific task, because then they can adapt to doing whatever is asked of them — instead of a robot that only tightens nuts, it’s possible to ask one to pick up a screwdriver as well.
(via Robot Changes Tires So You Don’t Have To : Discovery News)
Here Come The Laser Jeeps: Navy Working on Vehicle-Mounted Lasers For Mobile Anti-Drone Warfighting
Today, the Office of Naval Research revealed its latest energy weapon craving: vehicle-mounted lasers that shoot down drones.
Dubbed Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-The-Move, the project is offering private outfits up to $400,000 each to develop such a system that blasts at full power for 120 seconds and juices back up to 80 percent after a 20 minute charge. The beam is required to pack a punch of at least 25 kilowatts, while the ability to ratchet up to 50 kilowatts is optional.
Given that kind of power, Wired points out that making such a solution fit in a Humvee is going to be a feat — especially when the Navy says it can’t weigh more than 2,000 pounds and must fit entirely within a vehicle’s cargo area.
(via US Navy to fund development of vehicle-mounted, drone-shooting lasers)
Retro Computing: Inside SAGE - IBM’s 20 Acre Cold War Supercomputer
In 1957, IBM began the construction of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, by far the world’s largest computer. Spanning more than 20 different locations, each equipped with acre-sized computers and connected by a nation-wide network of bleeding-edge 1,300-baud modems, SAGE was the pinnacle of the United States’ Cold War radar and missile air defenses.
SAGE, like most supercomputers, was built to solve a big data problem. During the Cold War, hundreds of radar installations across North America were constantly on the lookout for Soviet missiles and bombers. As you can imagine, these stations produced a lot of data — a lot of data that needed to be analyzed and acted upon immediately.
With the physical size of the US, the high speed of modern jet aircraft, and the sheer number of possible attack vectors, the US military decided that a network of computers was the only viable solution.
SAGE consisted of 20 or so Direction Centers, each of which was a windowless, one-acre-large concrete cube. Inside each DC were two CPUs, each one measuring 7,500 sq ft and consisting of 60,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes, 13,000 newfangled transistors, and 256KB of magnetic core RAM, consuming a total of 3MW of power and weighing in at 250 tons. Each CPU — only one operated at a time; the other was kept as a hot spare to minimize downtime — was capable of executing 75,000 instructions per second, which was enough to spit out tons of radar data to 150 CRT consoles.
(via Inside IBM’s $67 billion SAGE, the largest computer ever built | ExtremeTech)
![DARPA’s “Augmented Cognition” Program Raises Ethical Problems for Neuroscientists
The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.
But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.
While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).
[This raises] questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.” In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.
The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”
(via Ten extraordinary Pentagon mind experiments | KurzweilAI)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/58911cd010851c6a343a8c9e850f9ae6/tumblr_mjplbuFPTt1qgpcs1o1_500.jpg)
DARPA’s “Augmented Cognition” Program Raises Ethical Problems for Neuroscientists
The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.
But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.
While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).
[This raises] questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.” In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.
The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”
(via Ten extraordinary Pentagon mind experiments | KurzweilAI)
UK MIlitary Deploys Four-inch Mini Drones in Afghanistan
It’s been a few years since news of Prox Dynamics’ Black Hornet mini-copter has swung our way. But now it appears the wee reconnaissance drones have moved out of the prototype phase and into the war zone.
As part of the British government’s £20 million contract with the Norway-based outfit and defense contractor Marlborough Communications, 160 of these camera-equipped spy copters have been commissioned, with a portion of those units employed by troops stationed in Afghanistan.
That might seem like a huge sum to pay for a fleet of remote-controllable war toys, but these 4 x 1-inch copters do present a definite advantage: they can deliver full video and stills, ably maneuver in high winds and help navigate troops past “insurgent firing points” and open terrain. All of which has the Ministry of Defence quite pleased, even prompting one Minister to call the fleet of Black Hornets a “key component” of the MoD’s current budget.
That’s not surprising really, considering the governmental arm’s plans to pump nearly £20 billion into the development of similar tech for its ISS (Information Systems and Services) and ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) programs. So, as of today, we have mini copters with cameras.
(via UK Ministry of Defence puts Black Hornet spy copter in Afghani skies)
