The proliferation of UAVs and fighters equipped with stabilized, high-magnification video pods and imaging radars has a number of corollary consequences. Bandwidth has become a key battlefield constraint. Specialized reconnaissance fighter aircraft are a dead concept. And some poor analyst has to sift through the video tsunami at the other end, in order to find items of interest.
That last item explains why Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control, Orlando, FL kicked off FY 2009 with a $5.5 million cost plus fixed fee contract to “develop and demonstrate a Video and Image Retrieval and analysis tool system for video data exploitation.” One that lets an analyst quickly find and retrieve video content of interest from archives containing thousands of hours of video data. One that also provide alerts of “events of interest” during live operations, forwarding them to an analyst’s attention. That last item is rather double-edged. If it works – which DARPA projects by their very nature cannot say with assurance – it could trigger timely, lifesaving assistance to combat missions. It could also be used for annoying, soldier-killing battlefield micromanagement. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, work will be performed in Cherry Hill, NJ; Orlando, FL; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; and Littleton, CO, with an estimated completion date of March 29/10. Bids were solicited via the Web, and 20 bids were received by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, VA (HR0011-09-C-0027).
Three teams have now received Phase 1 contracts to begin developing develop a radical new aircraft, under a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program known as “Vulture.”
DARPA’s goals for Vulture are not trivial: 5 years on station with a 450kg/ 1,000lb payload, 5kW of onboard power, and sufficient loiter speed to stay on station for 99% of the time against winds encountered at 60,000-90,000 feet. The system could act as a satellite substitute for communications relay or reconnaissance, as long as the payload fit within the weight limit. Vulture would be more vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles than a satellite, and could be targeted by fighter jets as well given the right launch profile; on the other hand, that closeness would improve sensor resolution and communications capability.
The engineering challenges ahead are formidable, as one would expect for a DARPA project. The power system in particular must be extremely reliable, and the aircraft’s materials will require advances of their own. Odysseus will be exposed to far more warming and cooling than satellites, and more ultraviolet radiation which will affect the aircraft’s materials. The design is also likely to require very large wings, both to help keep it aloft and to accommodate the number of solar cells required. Conditions at altitude can challenge the durability of those wings, especially with hydrogen storage tanks attached. Aerovironment’s Helios (1998-2003) demonstrated this the hard way in its 2003 crash.
So, who is competing, and what are the proposed designs?
The path toward a hypersonic space plane has been a slow one, filled with twists and turns one would expect given the technological leap involved. Speeds of Mach 8+ place tremendous heat and resistance stresses on a craft. Building a vehicle that is both light enough to achieve the speeds desired at reasonable cost, and robust enough to survive those speeds, is no easy task.
The famous SR-71 Blackbird, which cruised at “only” Mach 3, made heavy use of titanium and had to use slip fits instead of rivets in many places, so that the plane wouldn’t tear itself apart when 800-900 degree surface temperatures made it expand. On the ground, and when being refueled shortly after takeoff, the plane would reportedly leak like a sieve until speed and heat had given the airframe its requisite fit. While the state of the art has advanced since then, so have the desired speeds – and the accompanying challenges.
Despite the considerable engineering challenges ahead, the potential of a truly hypersonic aircraft for reconnaissance, global strike/ transport, and low-cost access to near-space and space make DARPA’s FALCON HTV program a compelling goal to work toward on both engineering and military grounds. The question, as always, will be balancing the need for funding to prove out new designs and concepts, and risk management that ensures limited exposure if it becomes clear that the challenge is still too great for the nonce.
DID covers its ongoing developments below – including a development on the contractor side that may render contract competition plans moot.
Textron Defense Systems in Wilmington, MA recently received an initial $3.17 million increment of a $21.3 million “other transaction”. They’ll provide protoypes for phase 2 of the High Energy Liquid Laser (HELL) Area Defense System. Work will be performed in Wilmington, MA (66%), Cambridge, MA (13%), Vienna, VA (9%), Bridgeton, MA (9%), Albuquerque, NM, (1%), and Charlestown, MA (less than 1%), and is expected to be complete in August 2009. This is a sole source award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., (HR0011-08-9-0006).
Lasers have a number of obvious benefits if used as an air defense system, especially against targets like the terrorist rocket attacks that featured so prominently in Israel’s 2006 war, and which continue from the Palestinian territories to this day. The technical obtsacles remain daunting, however, and include rate of fire, sufficient power to burn through a target almost immediately, number of shots per power source, battlefield fragility, and in some cases the toxicity of the chemicals involved. A system called THEL/M-THEL has been tested, and is even marketed by Northrop Grumman as Skyguard, but lasers have yet to be bought in numbers or deployed under battle conditions. Research continues.
DID readers send us some interesting tips. The USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency handles futuristic research projects that would be too difficult for the normal defense program R&D process (one of those projects became the Internet). Now its Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) is turning its attention to a project called “Deep Green,” which aims to provide US commanders with significantly better decision support tools in battle. According to DARPA, Deep Green will:
”...aid in battle command and commander’s visualization by creating technologies that make it easier for the commander to articulate options to consider and anticipate the possible futures that result from those options. This proactive analysis will help predict which possible futures are becoming more likely – before they occur. Given that information, the commander can make better decisions and focus planning efforts (the generation of future branches and sequels) on where they can be the most useful.”
The article below explains the vision of Deep Green, its envisioned components, and some of the challenges the program faces. It also begins to cover contracts, now that the first R&D orders are being issued…
Helicopters are familiar sights in the sky, and recent years have seen a variety of unmanned helicopter options introduced into the market. Boeing’s entry lays a breathtaking challenge before the field: what could the military do with a helicopter-like, autonomously-flown UAV with a range of 2,500 nautical miles and endurance of 16-24 hours, carrying a payload of 300-1,000 pounds, and doing it all more quietly than conventional helicopters? For that matter, imagine what disaster relief officials could do with something that had all the positive search characteristics of a helicopter, but much longer endurance.
Enter the A160 Hummingbird Warrior, which was picked up in one of Boeing’s corporate acquisition deals and uses a very unconventional rotor technology. The firm’s Phantom Works division continues to develop it as a revolutionary technology demonstrator and future UAV platform. With the Army’s Class IV UAV role and the Navy’s VTUAV locked up by the Northrop Grumman MQ-8B Fire Scout, Boeing’s sales options may seem thin. Their platform’s capabilities may interest the USA’s Special Operations Command and Department of Homeland Security, however, and exceptional performance gains will always create market opportunities in the civil and military space. At least, Boeing hopes so.
This is DID’s FOCUS article covering the A160 program. Flights have now resumed after a December 2007 crash, and Boeing is filing a world record claim for one recent test…
Most military programs don’t coordinate news releases with major motion pictures. With Iron Man in theaters and getting reviews that may get DID’s staff to go see it, Raytheon is taking the time to promote its US Army-funded exoskeleton suit. Originally funded under a 7-year, $75 million DARPA program, the suite has now gone on to the next stage under a 2-year, $10 million follow-on Army grant:
The problem they’re trying to address is no stunt. The weight of a soldier’s equipment easily approaches 80-100 pounds, far higher than the 30 pounds recommended for maximum mobility. As we load our soldiers down with more technical gadgets, that weight tends to go up, not down. The USA and Japan are only a couple of the countries working on aspects of a mechanical exoskeleton that would give its wearers vastly improved strength and endurance. While Japanese demographic and cultural trends in particular are giving concepts like individual soldier augmentation a push, we can still expect a very long wait before we see exoskeletons that can deliver the required performance to justify their cost, can handle military conditions, and can be maintained in the field at reasonable cost. It’s far more likely that first fielding, if there is one, will involve more limited use by disabled soldiers, or be used like Cyberdyne Japan’s HAL-5 in private, para-public, and first responder roles. Raytheon release | Raytheon feature | Popular Science [PDF].
In conventional silicon transistors, a certain finite voltage swing on the order of 150-200 mV (for high performance devices) is needed to switch a device between the on and off states. Reducing that number would enable drastic improvements in power consumption, because modern chips have many millions of transistors – but the fundamental physics of thermionic emission over an energy barrier is in the way.
International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation of NY recently received a contract option for $6.4 million under a DARPA program known as “Steep-subthreshold-slope Transistors for Electronics with Extremely-low Power (STEEP). The goal is to develop novel transistor technologies based on non-thermionic switching, allowing manufacturers to build high-performance logic circuits with very low power consumption. At this time $4.5 million has been obligated by Det 1 AFRL/PKDA at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH (FA8650-08-C-7806).
STEEP metrics
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IBM’s new devices under this DARPA-funded research program will utilize a fundamentally different mechanism of operation based upon quantum mechanical tunneling, which allows them be switched on and off over a much smaller voltage range1. Such devices have previously been demonstrated, but only at extremely low performance levels. The goal of this program is to build a device that meets the performance criteria for much higher-performance computing.
Which is nice – but why does this really matter in the field? Consider 3 factors making themselves felt on the front lines, plus one above them, and another behind:
This article is a follow-on to the play-by-play discussion in “DARPA Urban Challenge 2007: George Town Races” that looked at events on the course. This article looks at everything that happened, and is likely to begin happening, outside of it.
Looking at the crowds at the 2007 Urban Challenge, you’d be forgiven for wondering if DARPA has touched off another of the famous side-effects from its research projects. The event was open and free to the public. While the teams and DARPA staff were present for the duration, the spectators came and went through the day, making it hard to judge the crowd. But I’d say at least a third and maybe half of the attendees were fans. Some seemed to have found a new kind of southern California entertainment: NASCAR for Nerds!
In reality, the goals of DARPA and the tastes of race fans are in conflict. Safety and reliability aren’t usually compatible with speed and risk. (There could be a future for autonomous bot races on the tube, however. Rumor had it that the presence of Discovery Channel talent indicated a forthcoming special or mini-series on the Urban Challenge.)
The Grand Challenges are like NASCAR in some important respects, however – and a few of them herald changes to the way we think about vehicle platforms, robotics, and more…
I’ll start this with a big tip of the hat to DARPA and its director, Dr. Tony Tether, who has one of the world’s best jobs. Not only do they push the bleeding edge and come up with clever ways to engage the research community in their endeavors, but they run well-managed events with a flair for showmanship that belies their status as a government and military agency. As an example of the latter, they had arranged for the Urban Challenge webcast and on-site video to be co-hosted by Jamie Hyneman and Grant Imahara of Myth Busters, the techie crowd’s favorite TV show.
They also have the guts to invite in the world press and the general public while trying something new to the world: Turning multiple autonomous vehicles loose on city streets at the same time, interspersed with human drivers. As Tether said at the start of the program, “If anyone tells you he knows what’s going to happen, he’s lying.”
Since that test could likely take every bit of a short November day, the teams, staff and press assembled for their briefings at a chilly and dark 0600 hours. The day featured robot traffic jams, the world’s first ‘bot vs. ‘bot collision, and the Terramax robot truck’s attempt to take out the old air base PX.
