The Nightwind 2 – A Supercharged Model Airplane (ahem… UAV)
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a larger and larger part of the US Armed Forces, and for good reason. They carry out dangerous missions without putting servicemen and women in the line of fire. Instead, the are operated remotely from a safe location, much like a flight simulating video game.
As they become more and more prevalent, they continue to turn up in all sorts of shapes and sizes, catering to the many different needs of a military fighting a dangerous war. The large scale Predator UAVs are pretty well known for the operations they carry out, but the smaller portable UAVs don't have as wide a reputation. This is probably due to the fact that they look very much like the model airplanes you see children crashing into power lines at your local park while their parents look on in horror.
The Nightwind 2, however, could change that.
With a wingspan measuring 2 meters and an 88-cc engine (a go cart has about a 250-cc engine, for comparison), it is pretty small, but is capable of a lot. Using a specially-designed engine by a company called Ricardo (who created the gearbox for the drool-provoking Bugatti Veyron), it has a ceiling of 20,000 feet, is virtually silent to the human ear at just 1,000 feet, and can operate for hours on the same fuel that is used in tank, planes, and humvees. What's more, it costs $65,000, which is relatively affordable for the private sector.
With applications in surveillance, security, chemical attack, or disaster relief, it is safe to say that it must look very attractive to a lot of companies over a wide range of industries.
Source: Jalopnik
New Night Vision Tech Looks to Shed Pounds Off of Existing Gear
Night vision. Something that almost every boy dreams about having at one point or another. Some even grow up and buy night vision goggles to fulfill their boyhood fantasies. But invariably, they find out the truth about night vision equipment. It's REALLY REALLY heavy. It's a catch-22 if ever there was one; you can see in the dark, but you'll have to mount a heavy piece of delicate electronics on your head if you want to do so.
Recently, however, researchers at the University of Florida have come up with a new way to make night vision equipment that will help shed pounds off of existing gear.
Using funding fro DARPA, the researchers came up with an entirely new way of seeing in the dark, using Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLEDs. OLEDs are stimulated by the presence of infrared light, which is what night vision technology picks up and magnifies to allow its users to see in the dark. Using seven layers of OLEDs, the new technology picks up the infrared light in a dark environment, and then gets amplified into an image similar to the green-tinged ones you've probably seen on war footage on the Discovery Channel or CNN.
The best part of it, however, is how much lighter it will be than existing night vision technology. At only a few microns thick, it will weigh somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a pound. A far cry from anything currently on the market.
Although the researchers have only been able to employ this new tech in a 1 square centimeter sized prototype, they hope to be able to employ it in all sorts of ways (like windshields, cameras, and possibly even eyeglasses) within 18 months.
Source: Popsci via Gizmodo
New Supersensitive Mic Can ID Gunfire Type and Location, Among Other Noises
A Dutch company called Microflown Technologies has developed a super-sensitive microphone that can identify where a gun is firing from, and even the make of the gun, just from the sound of gunfire. They call the technology acoustic vector sensing, and it can be used for not only gunfire, but all sorts of sounds. Screams, mortars, warplanes, motor vehicles, and anything else you can imagine that has a distinctive noise can be identified, and its position determined using the device and its measurements of the air disturbance created by the noise. On top of it all, as you can see from the photo above, it's smaller than a matchstick!
So how does it work? Well, the device itself holds two strips of platinum that are 10 micrometers wide and approximately 600 atoms thick (that's 200-nanometers for those of you who are rusty with your atom-to-nanometer conversions). The strips are heated up to 200 degrees Celsius, and then wait for a sound wave to pass through them. When one does, it cools down the strips in a certain way, and Microflown's proprietary software does what we assume are super-uber-complicated calculations to determine what the sound is and where it's coming from. It's even sensitive enough to pick out sounds from large crowds.
If deployed (multiple countries are testing it at the moment) it could be a valuable asset for troops defending posts in hostile territory.
The Search for RoboDoc
Appparently, the Pentagon has put out a request for a design for the next generation of field-medics; the robotic kind. What they envision is a team of fully autonomous robots that can deploy themselves from an unmanned ambulance, "plan and execute transportation routes, facilitate communication between patients and off-site human medics, coordinate 'robot teams,' lift, drag or otherwise remove a troop from harm’s way, and even figure out just how serious a fallen war-fighter’s injuries are."
Sounds pretty ambitious, but the benefits that would come from such an advancement would definitely be worth it. Casualties are a foregone conclusion in war, but having to expose additional soldiers to danger in order to possibly save downed comrades is something that could be avoided if this project should come to fruition.
In addition to being precise enough to pick up and carry wounded soldiers to safety and diagnose the extent of a soldier's injuries, the Pentagon also wants the robots to be rugged and resilient. If they get exactly what they're looking for, the robots will "be able to extract casualties from rugged terrain, marshes or ice, and even through 'enemy fire or IEDs, contamination from weapons of mass destruction, or any of numerous natural hazards.'"
A successful prototype won't be restricted to military use either. Such a team of robo-medics could be used in natural disasters, hostage situations, or even in response to chemical, biological, or nuclear attacks.
Source: Wired
Military Drones Go Micro
Gizmodo posted a link to a video today that shows simulated footage of the Air Force's MAVs, or Micro Air Vehicles, doing some really cool things. There is no live footage, and all the graphics are computer generated, but the proposed capabilities of these MAVs show real promise.
They are essentially bird-sized drones that can carry out a variety of activities in a multitude of situations. They can be used both for surveillance and for combat, depending on how they are outfitted and the situation. An interesting aspect of the MAVs is that they have been designed to use flapping wings to be able to deal with fluctuations in wind speed and gusts, which can occur often in urban environments.
First off, they have a great advantage in their size. Being as big as a small bird allows them to blend in to their surroundings, and makes transporting them easier. The video shows them being deployed en masse from a passing plane, peppering an urban area, but they can most likely also be launched with a good toss, like a model airplane.
The video shows one model perched on a power line, in an extended surveillance mission in which it uses an optical sensor to spy on a target in a car. If and when they are manufactured, the MAVs may apparently be able to harness power from sunlight, wind, and even vibrating machinery and power lines to be able to operate for days or weeks.
Another model is shown attacking a dug-in sniper, using what seems to be some sort of explosive charge. The narrator also adds that the MAV can carry incendiary devices (for setting stuff on fire) or "incapacitating chemicals." It's also show targeting a building for a presumed attack, combing a house with other MAVs working in unison, and even looking for WMDs in some sort of freight compartment or storage area.
Check out the video below to get a better idea of how they work!
Source: Gizmodo
Insurgents Tune In to UAV-TV
Apparently, Iraqi insurgents have been able to use some very cheap software to tune in to live video feeds of the United States UAVs. Using a program called SkyGrabber, insurgents have been able to pick out the unencrypted data from the sky. This let them watch the exact same video feed that the pilots of the UAVs were watching, thousands of miles away.
With this information, insurgents could possibly be warned of an incoming attack, or learn about sites that the military was scouting in preparation for a strike. As you would guess, the military has already announced that they are in the process of encrypting all of the data links they use. This gaping security hole was brought to attention when footage from a UAV was found on the computer of a captured Iraqi insurgent.
The software used only costs $26, but I would venture a guess and say that the insurgents didn't bust out their American Express for it.
Sources: BBC, Engadget
Flying Commandos Infiltrating a Hot Zone Near You Soon
It's been an everlasting obsession of mankind: flight. It's hard to know when man first envisioned what it would be like to fly, but there have been countless attempts and designs at apparatuses that would enable man to fly. Some of the firstdesigns were made by Leonardo DaVinci, with his design of the ornithopter. Eventually, the Wright Brothers developed the first airplane, and aviation took off from that point (no pun intended).
But flying in an airplane is not the same as REALLY flying, with the wind in your face and your entire body exposed to the elements, cutting through the sky. Attempts at this sort of flight have been less successful through time than that of the development of different kinds of airplanes, but a Swiss pilot named Yves Rossy (also known as the Jet Man) has gained a lot of recognition for his development of an eight-foot set of wings and jet engines that allow him to do just this. However, he has not offered his invention to interested military parties, so they have had to look elsewhere.
Two German companies working together as an entity known as the Special Parachute and Logistics Consortium (SPELCO for short) have taken the Jet Man's idea and applied it to a more stealthy, combat-oriented design which has heads turning. They call it the Gryphon Next Generation Parachute System, and thebrochure SPELCO has posted makes it look pretty cool. More like a backpack that Rossy's 8-foot design, they are designed for gliding stealthily after dropping from a plane, carrying whatever equipment the troops might need. It boasts a 5:1 glide rati0, meaning it allows the wearer to glide 5 feet for every foot it falls (so in order to reach a point 30 miles away, the wearer would have to be dropped from around 30,000 feet). However, with a set of engines attached to the existing design, SPELCO proposes a range of 60 miles and deployment from much lower altitudes. The only downside to all of these designs is that a parachute is required to safely land. SPELCO's working on that, though. Seriously.