We first wrote about the Microdrone last September… It’s a German-made UAV that can navigate autonomously and provide realtime surveillance video. We mentioned that several civilian organizations (like police departments) had expressed interest in the Microdrone, and it looks like one of them has ponied up for one of the $60,000 aerial bots: the British Transport Police. They’ve been using a Microdrone to help prevent thefts of metal from railways, which is actually kind of a big problem. The cool part, though, is that they’ve mounted some kind of squirt gun on the bot, which fires SmartWater that can be used to track suspected perps. Most squirt guns are fairly short range weapons, and this particular model looks like little more than a tube, so I imagine (and I am totally imaging this right now) that the robot’s controller has perform some sort of high speed close range strafing run on the criminals, who (if they have any sense at all) are probably trying to gtf out of there as fast as they can.

Please, please, somebody take some video of this happening.

Please.

[ BTP Press Release ] VIA [ Telegraph UK ]

iRobot has announced that they’ve received funding from DARPA to design and construct a prototype LANdroid. We wrote about DARPA’s LANdroid solicitation over at OhGizmo last June; the idea is to create an army of small, mobile, autonomous, network routers to keep advancing troop connected in battlefield conditions. LANdroids are designed to be used primarily in urban environments which have all sorts of inconveniently placed buildings that block more conventional wireless access points. These little guys are actually disposable: the idea is that they get dropped by advancing troops, whereupon they wander around until they find the most effective place to act as a network node. The bots work together to cover “shadowed” and indoor areas, and if one of them gets blown up, the rest will move themselves to keep the network operational.

From iRobot’s press release:

iRobot will design and develop the LANdroids robot. This robot will be small enough that a single dismounted warfighter can carry multiple robots, inexpensive to the point of being disposable, robust enough to allow the warfighter to drop and throw them into position, and smart enough to autonomously detect and avoid obstacles while navigating in the urban environment.

The terms of the award include $1 million per year for up to three years for software development; after that, the next stage of the award will be designing the robot itself, followed by an evaluation period. There will be other players besides iRobot in the running, but I imagine that having so much PackBot experience probably gives iRobot a head start.

VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

You can blame Yahoo news for that headline, but the content of this article quotes Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield (the one in England) as arguing that the increasing availability, decreasing cost, and constantly improving features of consumer robotics makes it inevitable that extremist groups will start using them against military forces:

“The trouble is that we can’t really put the genie back in the bottle. Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy. How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act? With the current prices of robot construction falling dramatically and the availability of ready-made components for the amateur market, it wouldn’t require a lot of skill to make autonomous robot weapons.”

Sharkey suggests that a small GPS-guided drone with an autopilot could be made for about $500. In 2006, Hezbollah flew Iranian-made UAVs over Israel, and used one with an explosives payload to ram an Israeli warship. Obviously, using UAVs and other robots as weapons isn’t impossible, but I might question how practical (and realistic) it will be in the near future considering the present effectiveness of relatively primitive terrorist and insurgent tactics. Sharkey will be giving a talk entitled “The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems” to the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London this Wednesday.

[ RUSI ] VIA [ Yahoo News ]

Believe it or not, some of the toys that get DARPA money do make it into general use in the armed services. The Crusher UGV has just graduated from its birthplace at Carnegie Mellon, and is entering the army, albeit a stateside research arm thereof. From the video, it looks like it’s been updated with a new sensor suite, probably to improve its autonomous obstacle avoidance capabilities… It looks a lot like some of the sensors on DARPA Grand/Urban Challenge vehicles, for good reason: they work, especially when designed by CMU. This version of Crusher is designed to navigate itself between GPS waypoints without human intervention, although fully autonomous deployment is still a ways away. Hopefully, passenger cars will be categorized as obstacles to avoid, rather than crush, by then. Video after the jump. (Read more…)

The whole point of robots is that they’re not human. When it comes to military ops, the upside of not being human is that robots can get blown up and it’s not such a big deal. The downside (and it’s a big downside) is that robots aren’t yet ready to make their own decisions in battle, meaning humans have to be in the loop somewhere. Chatten Associates has created a camera system designed to provide robot operators with a real telepresence; that is, feeling as though they’re in the robot’s shoes treads. The HARV (Head-Aimed Remote Viewer) system combines a gimbal mounted remote video system on the robot with gyro equipped VR goggles for the user; wherever you move your head, that’s where the camera looks. The HARV can improve mission performance by 300% - 400%, and includes a 36:1 optical zoom, night vision camera, laser target designators, stereo audio, and a price of only $40,000. The following video shows the HARV being demoed on a few different platforms, including a MAARS battlebot armed with a paintball gun (cool!):

Currently set for delivery to the military in March is an updated HARV system, with a higher resolution thermal imager and a laser rangefinder, able to geolocate targets up to 2km away. Next step? How about something for, say, UAVs? Brilliant idea! We’ll just have to arrange some way of stealing it from the Canadians… Video after the jump. (Read more…)

This torpedoey looking AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) is, at first glance, fairly unremarkable… It carries onboard sensors to measure temperature, salinity, conductivity, depth, and biological productivity, with a GPS surface navigation system and an Iridium satellite data connection. It’s 1.5 meters long, and weighs about 60 kg. So what’s the cool part? Well, although it only has a top speed of about half a meter per second, it can keep that up for five years, giving it a range of about 40,000 (!) kilometers, which is just shy of a complete circumnavigation of the Earth at the equator (assuming such a thing were possible for a submarine). This AUV achieves such efficiency thanks to its propulsion system, which uses the temperature differential between the warm surface of the ocean and the cooler water below to create motion. Basically, the glider oscillates between floating up toward the warmer temperature and then sinking back down toward the cooler temperature, and its wings convert that vertical motion into horizontal motion.

This is the XRay, a large thermal glider AUV being developed by the US Navy. It’s designed to patrol large areas of ocean and coastlines for extended periods of time (6 months or so), hunting for submarines. Since it doesn’t have an engine, it’s virtually undetectable, and thanks to its hydrodynamic hull, it should be able to reach speeds of up to 3 knots (almost 4 mph).

Really boring video showing the thermal propulsion system in action, after the jump. (Read more…)

This little camera may not look like much, and in fact, it’s not much, measuring less than 3″ square. But what it can do is huge. It’s a LADAR (or LIDAR) camera, which uses a laser to create 3D images. This tiny little guy has a 128×128 pixel sensor, and it’s able to detect objects up to 22,000 feet away with a depth resolution of up to one inch, depending on what laser is installed as an illuminator. LADAR (Laser Detection and Ranging) uses timed pulses of laser light to determine how far away and how reflective something is, and this particular camera is able to operate at up to 30 frames per second, which results in pretty decent 3D video:

Since the laser pulses are only 20 nanoseconds long, they’re invisible to the human eye, most cameras, and night vision systems. The ability to create on-the-fly 3D maps ought to give PackBots some autonomous navigation capabilities, or if nothing else, they’ll improve situation awareness, especially in complicated urban environments. You can watch a 60 minute long presentation on the technology here.

[ Advanced Scientific Concepts ] VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

According to Defense News, the Israeli military is in the early stages of planning a robotic defense system with the ability to “take over completely” from humans. We’re not just talking automated weaponry here… this system would be a command umbrella, able to take control of automated and semi-autonomous systems like interceptor missile launchers in the event of “attacks that exceed physiological limits of human command.” As far as I know, this is the first system that’s being designed to operate (at least partially) without any humans in the loop at all. Some meat from the article:

“It will be designed for man-in-the-loop as well as autonomous operations,” said Milo, the officer spearheading the vision within Israel’s user community. “But right now, our emphasis is on algorithms, not autonomy. Man-machine interface is the name of the game, because the more clever we make the interface, the more successful we’ll be in providing operators and commanders the situational awareness they’ll need to make very tough decisions…”

“Our approach cannot be based exclusively on man-in-the-loop, nor can it rely only on the opposite. Rather, we need to build an operational concept and a system that is flexible and situationally dependent,” Milo said.

In the future, and “under very complex scenarios,” Milo said, the envisioned super system would be able to generate a level of supreme situational awareness and snap intuitive capabilities that could surpass the very best wartime commanders.

“We’re talking about something that sees everything and calculates everything and makes decisions that can only be made through a real revolution in BMC4ISR [Battle Management/Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance],” he said. “We’re not there yet, and it could take a decade. But this is our vision and we’re running in that direction.”

There’s no denying the advantages of having a system like this in place. And even if humans are available to be in command, I have no doubt that Skynet the system will be capable of making more timely and efficient decisions than humans, because that’s what robots are good at. What robots are NOT good at, however, are making decisions like these… And we’re not talking about computer games, here. That could have been WW3, and it’s not the first time we’ve come close thanks to a computer error. I’m sure Israel is cognizant of the risks involved in giving control of weapons to a computer, I just fervently hope they’ve watched all the relevant movies and know what they’re getting themselves into.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

Well, I’m disappointed. It looks like a drone dogfight, which would be the only thing more robotic than the acting in Top Gun, is not going to be feasible for at least the next 25 years, according to the Pentagon… Dyke Weatherington, deputy director for the Pentagon’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Task Force, states that “there’s really no way that a system that’s remotely controlled can effectively operate in an offensive or defensive air combat requirement. The requirement of that is a fully autonomous system, we don’t have that level of autonomy yet and frankly in the roadmap that will take many years to get to.” He’s got a point there, sort of, but I also think that the speed of development of aerial combat drones is being vastly underestimated, especially when it comes to the AI. I’m not saying I think it’ll happen in the next year, but 25 years is a very, very long time when it comes to computers. I mean, 25 years ago was what, 1982? Think about the amount of change that has happened between then and now, and project it forward. We’re rapidly approaching the point where hardware is not going to be the limiting factor, and where computers will be able to operate (and interoperate) fast enough to make faster and arguably better decisions in an active combat environment than humans are capable of. The hardest part, in my opinion, is not going to be developing the autonomy: it’s going to be getting past all of those prickly ethical issues that come up when you have robots deciding whether or not to shoot at people.

BTW, the drone matchup above is the Boeing X-45 versus the MiG UCAV.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

This is a concept video of the Blackswift unmanned hypersonic bomber. It’s powered by engines which transition between turbojets under Mach 2, ramjets to get near Mach 6, and finally scramjets to put the cruise speed (not sprint speed, cruise speed) up to around Mach 10. That would give the bomber 2 hour worldwide precision strike capability.

Lockheed is currently designing a technology demonstrator of the Blackswift, designated the HTV-3X. If DARPA secures $800 million in funding for it in 2009, this thing could actually be built. Part 2 of the above vid, after the jump. (Read more…)