It’s been decades in the works, but an honest to goodness robotic space plane is about to make it to orbit. The X-37B is a demonstration vehicle designed for testing in space, and will be launched next month on top of an Atlas V rocket. It’s 27 feet long, 15 feet wide, weighs 5 tons, and that’s about all we know at this point. A bit confusingly, the X-37 was developed from the X-40, a smaller air-dropped gliding demonstrator that had its first flight back in 1998.

It’s worth noting that this is a US Air Force project, not a NASA project. In fact, the branch of the air force that is working on the X-37B is the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, whose mission is “to expedite development and fielding of select Department of Defense combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities.” Understandably, this has prompted a few concerns. More, after the jump. (Read more…)

You’re looking at the Navy’s newest recruits: from left to right, CS3 Scooba Stevens, Chief Miles O’Brien, and ITSN Unger. I kid you not, that’s what they’ve been named. The iRobot Scooba and Roombas are just part of an entire assemblage of robots who clean the floors on the USS Freedom, one of the newest and most ridiculously expensive warships in the Navy.

Apparently, the robots are generally free to roam around the ship on their own… Crew member still have to do some sweeping, but the robots help keep things tidy on a day to day basis. Give it a couple years, or maybe a decade, and the robots will be running the ship while humans do the sweeping. I’ll be more efficient that way.

VIA [ Military Times ]

The future of robotics is here. It’s **drum roll** cockroaches? Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (say that 10 times fast!) is developing technology that allows cockroaches to be controlled via a tiny chip on a cockroach’s back that sends electrical signals to make the roach move. “It’s like a cattle prod for cockroaches,” says William Charlton, an associate professor at Texas A&M.

But why cockroaches? Well, the same chip that communicates remotely with a computer to prod the roach has several types of radiation sensor, meaning that it can detect whether conditions in a given area are safe for humans.

“Cockroaches really are the perfect medium for this,” says William Charlton, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the university and a principal investigator on the project. “They can go for extraordinarily long periods of time without food. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. They’re very radiation resistant, and they can carry extremely large amounts of weight compared to their body mass.”

If Charlton gets his way, we’ll have mini-armies of 20 or so roaches surveying areas as large as one square kilometer, all controlled by remote operators, all reporting data about chemical conditions in the area.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

It may look almost cartoonish in proportion, but the picture above is the real deal. How long till we see “Control Your Own Cockroach” kits for the kids?

[ NDIA ] VIA [ Wired ]

I can’t fault people for writing articles that make use of the term “killer robots.” It’s sexy, and it attracts attention. I mean, I kinda just did it myself, didn’t I? An article by Johann Hari for the opinions section of The Independent takes this several steps too far, however, by making false assertions about the motives and capabilities of unmanned combat robots:

Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses”.

Why is “chooses” in quotes? It’s in quotes because that’s not the way it works, the author knows that’s not the way it works, and he’s covering his ass. Here’s the next paragraph:

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and “die”. So the military is building “autonomy” into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

See those quotes again? If you’ve been reading BotJunkie long enough, you should be able to figure out why they’re there. Obviously, the robots don’t “die.” And “autonomy” is in quotes because the previous paragraph talked firing a machine gun at autonomously chosen targets, which is not at all the way it works. In fact, the way it works is the exact opposite of what the author is insinuating with his quotation marks: when a combat robot loses signal, the only active actions it will take is to try to reacquire the signal again, or (in some cases) try to get home, even if it’s an impossibility. It won’t just start shooting at people.

This, really, is what bothers me most about these articles: They’re basically full of lies of a sort, designed to scare people who don’t know the facts. No, the author isn’t actually publishing false statements (I guess), but that stuff in quotes isn’t exactly true, and it’s only in there so that people who don’t take the time to find out what is true (most people) will use it to jump to the obvious, and wrong, and inevitably terrifying conclusion.

More, including a pretty funny video of a robot totally NOT killing the Japanese prime minister, after the jump. (Read more…)

Well, this sucks… In order to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan, the army has been forced to essentially gut the core of its Future Combat System (which has already been gutted a few times) by eliminating the MULE and FireScout unmanned vehicles. One variant of the MULE will remain (a lightly armed version), but the FireScout is toast, to be replaced by an improved version of the Shadow UAV which (for the record) is an unmanned airplane, not a helicopter.

It may make fiscal sense to do this, but it’s disappointing that the Future Combat System has been replaced with “Army Brigade Combat Team modernization.” In other words, we’re kinda giving up on future, let’s just try and get to modern. And having seen the FireScout in person, I’m not sure that a small UAV can really take the place of a sizeable unmanned helicopter when it comes to diverse capability. Yes, the sensor requirements might be the same, but that’s that “it’ll work for now” as opposed to a “what future options might this other platform enable” mentality. As I said, it’s hard to argue against the whole cost and efficiency thing, it’s just sad that one of the most promising aerial platforms I’ve seen is getting canceled for budget reasons.

[ TheHill ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

Danger Room already made the joke about this thing looking like a Star Wars landspeeder, but whatever you think it looks like, it is pretty sweet. Hovering on two giant ducted fans, the drone (from Israeli company Urban Aeronautics) is designed to be an unmanned cargo hauler and ambulance. It recently completed hover tests, and the next step is to get it moving around on its own… I hope it has a better time of it than this thing did.

[ Urban Aeronautics ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

According to military budget documents, “Project Anubis” has been successfully completed. All that we really know is that Project Anubis was begun in 2008 by the Air Force Research Lab with the goal of “develop[ing] a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.” In this case, successful completion probably means one of two things: either the development was completed to the satisfaction of the original goal and then the project was simply considered finished, or the project actually produced something that may be fielded.

If no operational robot came from this project, it’s only a matter of time (a short time) until one is produced. There’s no reason why it’s a technological impossibility, and tactically, it would be extremely valuable, as it would (as Danger Room points out) solve both the positive target identification and collateral damage issues that come with Predators firing guided missiles.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

Take a deep breath and repeat after me: this isn’t as bad as it sounds. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have been able to intercept and record live video feeds from Predator surveillance drones using a $26 piece of software called SkyGrabber. Several confiscated laptops have been found with “hours and hours” of intercepted drone video, which presumably let insurgents track and avoid the drones. The military has been aware of this potential vulnerability (namely, that the video downlink between the drone and its ground control station is for some silly reason entirely unencrypted) since the 90s in Bosnia, but (and this is the actually scary part) “the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.”

Now, an important point to make is that this just the video feed. Drone command and control communications are encrypted, and there has been no interference with the drones themselves. Also, this vulnerability is currently in the process of being fixed. But as I said, the scary part is that the Pentagon underestimated the insurgents by assuming that they aren’t sophisticated enough to break into an unencrypted satellite downlink.

[ WSJ ] VIA [ DIY Drones ]

It may be a stretch saying that this post has much to do with robots, but there are two reasons why I’m posting about this stuff anyway. First, it’s always interesting to see demonstrations of how computers experience time on an entirely different scale than we do, and second, explosions.

The above video (from who else but DARPA) shows a test of the Iron Curtain anti-RPG active protection system for light tactical vehicles. The system mounts to the top of a vehicle, and is comprised of radar, optical sensors, and some kind of active countermeasure that DARPA won’t talk about. The radar tracks incoming projectiles, while the optical sensors identify the specific type of warhead and instructs which countermeasure to fire so as to detonate the projectile just before impact. And it makes a huge difference… There’s still a big explosion, but the projectile is no more. Just last week, Iron Curtain got approval from DARPA to begin system testing on MRAPs.

Something even cooler, after the jump. (Read more…)

Boeing’s drone-zappin’ laser cannon we posted about back in January has gone live in tests, and has had no problem shooting down not one, not two, but five hapless unmanned drones using a “relatively low laser power” weapon outputting about 2.5 kilowatts. It’s not clear how, exactly, the drones were brought down… The deliberately vague press release says that the drones were “acquired, tracked and negated at significant ranges,” which makes me think that they weren’t instantly vaporized a la the Death Star. Aww. Keep tryin’ guys.

VIA [ Danger Room ]