In May 2005, the title “Remote Control Toys Used By Iraq Patrols,” talked about childrens’ toys being used on the front lines to look fo roadside bombs. It would appear that someone took notice, because there has since been a flurry of activity on the robotic explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) front. Meanwhile, deliveries of smaller and cheaper MARCBOTs and BomBots are underway.
DefenseLink notes in its announcements that “The increase in production quantity is due to the urgent and compelling need for units that are forward deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.” So, what exactly is the MTRS program? DID explains, and covers the latest news and contract information for MTRS robots. Per DID convention, new items are indicated in green type.
The latest news includes another American contract to iRobot…
Like a swarm of angry bees, unmanned aerial, ground, and sea vehicles automonously converge on enemy troops, aircraft and ships, decide what to do, then engage the enemy with surveillance or weapons to help U.S. forces defeat them. All this without direct human intervention. Sounds like science fiction? The American military is one of several working on the technology, called “swarming,” in order to make this scenario a reality.
According to the SWARMS project at the University of Pennsylvania, future military missions will rely on large, networked groups of small unmanned vehicles and sensors. Groups of this type will typically operate with little or no direct human supervision most of the time. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee individual management or control in the kind of dynamic, resource-constrained, adversarial environments that characterize human warfare. Managing such large groups will thus be extremely challenging, and will require the application of new, yet-to-be-developed methods of communication, control, computation and sensing, specifically tailored to the command and control of large-scale, autonomous vehicle groups.
DID has more on a recent NAVAIR contract, and the swarm concept…
Research and Development is essential to any national technology base, and to the health of its defense industrial base. The USA is a global research leader, and some of its efforts have created international infrastructure – like the internet. In other cases, it has been a matter of adapting existing civilian research like low-power, flexible displays for military use. For smaller nations like Canada, Australia, et. al. R&D budgets are smaller, and so funded research must be more focused.
Australia’s Capability and Technology Demonstrator (CTD) Extension Program aims to take existing DSTO research projects to higher maturity levels for operational./ commercial evaluation, in a manner similar to the USA’s SBIR Phase III awards. Australia’s Minister for Defence Science and Personnel Warren Snowden recently announced 4 winners in this area:
Something big is going on in the history of war, and maybe even humanity itself. The US military went into Iraq with just a handful of drones in the air and zero unmanned systems on the ground, none of them armed. Today, there are over 5,300 drones in the US inventory and another roughly 12,000 on the ground. And these are just the first generation, the Model T Fords compared to what is already in the prototype stage. This is what is happening now. Peering forward, one Air Force lieutenant general forecast that “given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands.”
For my book Wired for War, I spent the last several years trying to capture this historic moment, as robots begin to move into the fighting of our human wars. The book features stories and anecdotes of everyone from robotic scientists and the science fiction writers who inspire them to 19 year old drone pilots and the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting. The hope wasn’t just to take the reader on a journey to meet this new generation of warriors—both human and machine, but also to explore the fascinating, and sometimes frightening, political, economic, legal and ethical questions that our society had better start facing in how our wars will be fought and who will fight them. In other words, “What happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality?”
Despite all the enthusiasm in military circles for the next generation of unmanned vehicles, ships, and planes, there is one question, however, that people are generally reluctant to talk about. It is the equivalent of Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, the issue That-Must-Not-Be-Discussed. What happens to the human role in war as we arm ever more intelligent, more capable, and increasingly more autonomous robots?
What happens when advances in modern electronics mean that sensors like imaging-class radars, advanced day/night cameras, and even more exotic items like hyperspectral sensors, laser radars, etc. are no longer very expensive items that are mounted on dedicated platforms? When a wide array of video cameras, surveillance turrets, ubiquitous radar capabilities, and other systems built into vehicles, aircraft, ships, and unmanned vehicles provide an explosion of sensor data – just as a range of databases related to human patterns or physical infrastructure are also appearing on the scene, in numbers.
In part, it’s the same sort of thing that happened when the Internet went from an academic platform to a global phenomenon. The good news was, so much more information became available. The bad news was, finding the things we were looking for started to involve a lot more work.
The military has this same problem with sensors, only worse. Most of the time, they’re not necessarily looking for discrete answers, but for an overall picture of what’s going on. That becomes hard as sensors move from a small number deployed on dedicated platforms, to hundreds or thousands of them employed in platforms of every shape and size. For some applications, like domestic security or protecting certain key areas, it gets even harder. The need to include physical surveillance, communications surveillance, information about human activities, and improved geo-awareness all combine to produce a maddeningly complex task.
Moore’s Law of doubling computing power, and Metcalfe’s Law of exponential network power, created this data explosion. Several cycles later, the military is hoping it can begin to offer assistance, by turning massive arrays of data into coherent systems that help humans respond at the speed of events. The first step was data fusion. The next step was sensor fusion. The third step is information fusion… and the US Navy has just set up a center to work on it.
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].
The USA’s $160+ billion Future Combat Systems program aims to replace at least 1/3 of the USA’s land forces. The program’s original mandate had its components replacing the USA’s heavy armor, but that plan collided with the reality of front-line experience in Iraq. FCS is now slated to be a set of medium forces that are slightly more deployable than a Heavy Brigade Combat Team, but still cannot fit into the C-130s that are expected to make up the USA’s tactical airlifter fleet. The concept of an integrated set of vehicles, robots, sensors, and UAVs, all backed by a high-performance network, remains.
The US Government Accountability Office has been asked to report on the program every year, and its 2008 report suggests that FCS is reaching a critical stage on 2 fronts: system design and development, and software design and development. Their overall 2008 report says that…
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.
Goodrich Corp. subsidiary Sensors Unlimited Inc. in Princeton, NJ received a $1.25 million increment of a $5.7 million cost plus fixed fee contract to develop extremely small, lightweight, shortwave infrared imaging sensors on a chip. They’ll be used in helmet-mounted and micro air/ground vehicles.
The primary goal of this program is to establish the micro-systems technology for extremely light weight, low power cameras with the performance necessary for medium to short range applications. Micro-air and micro-ground platforms and helmet mounted applications require some special features: sensor operation at room temperature or with extremely low power cooling and temperature stabilization, micro-packages with operational lifetimes consistent with military operations, and optics and electronics consistent with the platform. DARPA specifically excluded research targeted at evolutionary improvements; innovations in optical and detecting materials, sensor design and fabrication, signal processing, and micro-packaging will be necessary to achieve their extremely light weight goals.
The first phase of the program will demonstrate the feasibility of integrating an imaging array into a micro-package of the size and weight necessary, with measured data supported by models and calculations predicting performance. Options may be exercised to continue the program after this initial demonstration; if they’re exercised, the second phase will feature a feasibility demonstration of an integrated system. Work will be performed in Princeton, NJ (93%), White Plains, MD (3%), and Woodland Hills, CA (4%) and is expected to be complete February 2009. Funds will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. DARPA posted Broad Agency Announcement BAA06-46 “Micro-Sensors for Imaging (MISI)” on the Federal Business Opportunities website on Oct 3/06, and 10 proposals were received (HR0011-08-C-0011).
AIBO: Move over,
little dog…
(click to view full)
Small business qualifier Boston Dynamics, Inc. in Waltham, MA has received a $10 million completion-type, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to build a dog-like robot with the capability to run fast, traverse trough terrain, jump over obstacles 1 meter (40”) tall or 2 meters wide, and operate for 2 hours without refueling. The goal of this effort is to create legged robots that mimic animal structure, mechanics and control, in order to achieve animal-like strength, speed and mobility. The priority application is a robot that could eventually accompany Marines and other troops in the field as a load-carrier across nearly any terrain. This 15-month contract also includes 3 one-year options which would bring the cumulative value of this contract to $40 million if exercised.
Your "Insider" membership qualifies you to view in-depth analyses, detailed chronologies, additional photos and graphics, subcontractor information, links to source documents, related research and more.
Plans available starting from $46 per month.
CLICK HERE to subscribe.
Defense Industry Daily does not own the rights to the images displayed on our site. We use images under "fair use" copyright doctrine, from public sources and private organizations, or use images under Creative Commons/ GNU licenses that make them available to the general public, or with explicit and noted permission. All rights remain with the original image owners.
If you believe that a DID image may violate these conditions, please discuss it with us via an email to editorial@defenseindustrydaily.com
The sizes displayed on DID are the only sizes we have to offer.
