The military - increasing its reliance on robots in war - soon will use explosive-sniffing versions made by a Massachusetts company to better detect roadside bombs accounting for more than 70 percent of the U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Fido is the first robot with an explosives sensor integrated into its body. iRobot Corp., of Burlington, Mass., is filling the military's first order of 100 in this southwest Ohio city and will begin shipping the robots over the next few months.

There are nearly 5,000 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from about 150 in 2004. Soldiers use them to search caves and buildings for insurgents, detect mines and ferret out roadside and car bombs.

As the war in Iraq enters its fifth year, the federal government is spending more money on military robots and the two major U.S. robot-makers have increased production.

Foster-Miller Inc., of Waltham, Mass., just delivered 1,000 new robots to the military. iRobot cranked out 385 robots in 2006, up from 252 in 2005.
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The government will spend about $1.7 billion on ground-based military robots between fiscal 2006 and 2012, according to Bill Thomasmeyer, head of the National Center for Defense Robotics, a congressionally funded consortium of 160 companies, universities and government labs. That's up from $100 million in fiscal 2004.

Fido, produced at a GEM City Manufacturing and Engineering plant, represents an improvement in bomb-detecting military robots, said Col. Terry Griffin, project manager of the Army/Marine Corps Robotic Systems Joint Project Office at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.

The bomb-sniffing sensor is part of the robot, with its readings displayed on the controller along with camera images.

Otherwise, a soldier would have to approach the suspect object with a sensor or try to attach it to a robot. The new robot also has a 7-foot manipulator arm so it can use the sensor to scan the inside and undercarriages of vehicles for bombs.

Officials would not release details of how the sensors work because of security concerns.

"The sniffer robot is a very good idea because we need some way of understanding ambiguous situations like abandoned cars or suspicious trash piles without putting soldiers' lives on the line," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Lexington Institute.

Philip Coyle, senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said the robots could be helpful if they are used in cases where soldiers already suspect a bomb. But he said explosive-sniffing sensors are susceptible to false positives triggered by explosive residues elsewhere in the area, smoke and other contaminants.

"The soldiers can begin to lose faith in them, and they become more trouble than they're worth," he said. "It can slow down things."

Thompson said all military robots have limitations. Their every move must be dictated by an operator, they can be stopped by barriers or steep grades, they are not highly agile, and they can break down or be damaged, he said.

Robots range in size from tiny - 1.5 pounds - to brute - 110-pound versions that move rubble and lift debris. Fido is an upgrade of PackBot, a 52-pound robot with rubber treads, lights, video cameras that zoom and swivel, obstacle-hurdling flippers and jointed manipulator arms with hand-like grippers designed to disable or destroy bombs. Each costs $165,000.

Army Staff Sgt. Shawn Baker, 26, of Olean, N.Y., has helped detect and disable roadside bombs during two tours in Iraq - both with and without robots. Before the robots were available, he and fellow soldiers would stand back as far as they could with a rope and drag hooks over the suspect devices in hopes of disarming or detonating them.

"A couple of times you were closer than you needed to be, but it was something you had to do to get it done," Baker said.

Two soldiers were killed that way, he said. No one in his unit has been hurt or killed while disarming bombs since the robots arrived.

"The science and technology of this has been way out in front of the production side," Thomasmeyer said. "We're going to start to see a payoff for all the science and technology advancements."

iRobot posted $189 million in sales in 2006, up 33 percent from 2005. Its military business grew 60 percent to about $76 million. Bob Quinn, general manager of Foster-Miller, said his company has contracts of $320 million for military robots and that its business has doubled every year for the past four years.

Griffin, of the Robotic Systems office, said military robots are here to stay.

"This is the beginning," he said.

------ End of article

By JAMES HANNAH

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dl...373/1002/NEWS02

I have devised a kind of robot in my mind which will be assigned to seat at the back of remote controlled trucks to be used as bait! They will have eyes whose image seen will be seen in our control panel. They will not do the fighting. But just in case they are ambushed, the rebels thinking that they are live human beings and tries to confiscate their rifles and machine guns, they will self-explode upon touching or upon being sensed by metallic sensors. They can also be used as surveillance and reconnaisance tools.The control panel of the truck will be manned by UP Vanguard, the most courageous fraternity in UP. :armyLol:

It will take 1 year for my son, Vladimir to perfect them. Vladimir by the way is mechanical engineer who took up his master's in Caltech, California.

Elbit Systems unveils VIPeR "hunter-killer" robot



Israeli defense firm Elbit System looks to be gunning squarely at iRobot's battle-hardened territory, today unveiling its less-than-originally-named VIPeR bot which, as you can see, boasts some serious firepower. In addition to that imposing Uzi machine-pistol (aimed via video camera, not autonomously), Reuters reports that the bot can also plant grenades, and be equipped with the necessary tools to sniff out bombs and dispose of them appropriately. While the bot will apparently be deployed with Israeli forces initially, the company also appears to be hoping to attract the interest of the United States military, as well as foreign police forces. No word if the the testing process included showdowns with other robots, although it's hard to imagine them being able to resist.

read more

Gun Toting Robots See Action in Iraq

National Defense magazine, Sept 2007 issue
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/...RifleToting.htm



The U.S. Army quietly entered a new era earlier this summer when it sent the first armed ground robots into action in Iraq.

So far, the robot army's entrance into the war has been a trickle rather than an invasion.

Only three of the special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system (SWORDS) have been deployed so far.

The Army has authorized the purchase of 80 more robots -- which are being touted as a potentially life-saving technology -- but acquisition officials have not come forth with the funding.

"As [soldiers] use them and like them, I’ve heard positive feedback, they want 20 more immediately. It’s a shame we can’t get them to them," Michael Zecca, SWORDS program manager, told National Defense.

The three robots, which tote M249 rifles and are remotely controlled by a soldier through a terminal, have been in Iraq since April and are with the 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade.

After three years of development at the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., the robots were formally approved for combat use in June. Their exact whereabouts and missions are classified, but Zecca could confirm that they have been used in reconnaissance tasks and street patrols.

He did not know of any incidents of the weapon being fired so far.

SWORDS is designed to take on “high risk combat missions,” according to an Army statement. A specialist controlling the robot could send it into a potentially dangerous situation, such as a narrow street infested with snipers, seek targets and take them out before a foot patrol follows.

“Anytime you utilize technology to take a U.S. service member out of harm’s way, it is worth every penny,” said John Saitta, a consultant with Smart Business Advisory and Consulting and a major in the Marine Corps reserves, who has been trained as a weapons and tactic instructor.

“These armed robots can be used as a force multiplier to augment an already significant force in the battle space,” he added.

The 80 robots approved under an urgent materiel release, a mechanism designed to speed potentially life-saving technologies to the battlefield, are being held up “due to limited funding in fiscal years 2006-2007,” said Lt. Col. William Wiggins, a spokesman for the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

“While SWORDS is currently not a program of record, the Army has initiated a memorandum of agreement between ARDEC and Robotic System-Joint Project Office to expedite establishing a funded program to meet Army needs," Wiggins said in a written statement.

hmmm...this is one weapon system thant could be fully developed indigenously.

I wonder if there's alsready a local prototype out there...

ROBOBUGS?
Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs



(Washington Post) Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies — an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

“If you find something, let me know,” said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

“America can be pretty sneaky,” said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.

All told, the nation’s fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year — a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles “could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous.”

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

“You can’t make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just shrink the design down,” said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways — a huge engineering challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly — a biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists’ eyes, was for decades deemed “theoretically impossible.” Just last month, researchers at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying how dragonflies adjust the relative motions of their front and rear wings to save energy while hovering.

That kind of finding is important to roboticists because flapping fliers tend to be energy hogs, and batteries are heavy.

The CIA was among the earliest to tackle the problem. The “insectothopter,” developed by the agency’s Office of Research and Development 30 years ago, looked just like a dragonfly and contained a tiny gasoline engine to make the four wings flap. It flew but was ultimately declared a failure because it could not handle crosswinds.

Agency spokesman George Little said he could not talk about what the CIA may have done since then. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service also declined to discuss the topic.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial. “We don’t have anything like that,” a spokesman said.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae — the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult — and hatching them into healthy “cyborg moths.”

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

“You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic ‘Lord of the Rings’ used a moth to call in air support,” DARPA program manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, “this science fiction vision is within the realm of reality.”

A DARPA spokeswoman denied a reporter’s request to interview Lal or others on the project.

The cyborg insect project has its share of doubters.

“I’ll be seriously dead before that program deploys,” said vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., which makes household and military robots.

By contrast, fully mechanical micro-fliers are advancing quickly.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a “microbat ornithopter” that flies freely and fits in the palm of one’s hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.

“It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce,” said team leader Robert Wood.

The fly’s vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form “like a micro-origami,” he said. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.

Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its creator wrote in the program, “feel something of ‘living souls.’ ”

Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on chemical fuels instead of batteries. The “entomopter,” in early stages of development at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a toy plane more than a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which powers four flapping wings and ancillary equipment.

“You can get more energy out of a drop of gasoline than out of a battery the size of a drop of gasoline,” said team leader Robert Michelson.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will always be risky investments.

“They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web,” said Fearing of Berkeley. “No matter how smart you are — you can put a Pentium in there — if a bird comes at you at 30 miles per hour there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Protesters might even nab one with a net — one of many reasons why Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march — and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant described on the Web “a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue . . . watching us”?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large, spectacularly adorned dragonflies that “can knock your socks off,” he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies — an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

“Dragonflies never fly in a pack,” he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, “it would be a significant violation of people’s civil rights.”

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however, that concern — and their technology’s potential role — seems superfluous.

“I don’t want people to get paranoid, but what can I say?” Fearing said. “Cellphone cameras are already everywhere. It’s not that much different.”

http://christianactionnetwork.wordpress.co...rk-on-robobugs/

Droid pilots beat humans at air-to-air refuelling
Robots acquire another key human pilot skill

By Lewis Page

The Pentagon killer-boffin agency DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) has made another move forward in its plan to replace all US military humans with robots. The latest trick the droids have learned is that of flying a plane during air-to-air refuelling.

Air-to-air refuelling, in which a military aircraft tops up its supplies by plugging in to a pipe trailing from a tanker plane, is a key military capability and one of the trickier piloting feats. Now that robots can do it, unmanned aircraft can potentially stay airborne for very long periods, limited only by maintenance requirements.

DARPA announced (pdf) last week that it had successfully completed a programme called AARD, for Autonomous Airborne Refueling Demonstration, and the story appeared yesterday in the Defence Industry Daily.

Over the past year, the AARD system* has apparently conducted 11 air-to-air refuelling flights without human input. The trials took place using an F-18 fighter jet operated as a testbed by NASA. The F-18 had a human pilot aboard during the trials as a backup, but the droid pilot required no help from its meatsack passenger. It was able to jack the F-18's fuelling probe into a basket trailing behind a refuelling tanker in the toughest of conditions.

Not only did the robo-flyboy manage to hook up with the trailing fuel point flapping up and down in turbulence by up to five feet - apparently the limit for most human stick-jockeys - it could also plug in while the tanker was turning.

"Although pilots routinely follow a tanker through turns while connected, they typically do not attempt to make contact in a turn," says DARPA.

The software improved significantly during the trials, according to NASA test pilot Dick Ewers. Last year it flew "like a second lieutenant", he said. But the robot rookie was upgraded, and now it's "better than a skilled pilot". If it was human, it would now retire and go to work for the airlines, and the military would have to start again with a another second lieutenant; but the robot will stay this good forever, or improve.

DARPA said that in the end the "algorithms were actually able to precisely match the drogue motion – something pilots are specifically taught to avoid... the system followed the drogue through a full three-foot cycle in the two seconds before making contact, never deviating more than four inches from the exact centerline of the drogue, all the while traveling at 250mph, 18,000 feet above the Tehachapi Mountains".

Human pilots, rather than tracking the drogue, are taught to try and slot in with a forward move at the right moment. Pilots have traditionally described the manoeuvre as "like taking a running f-ck at a rolling doughnut".

But now, yet another of their hard-won manual skills has been mastered by the droids. Things don't look good for the military flyboys at all, in the long run. That said, the money which might buy robot aircraft is largely in budgets controlled by former pilots. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/15/ai...ng_robot_darpa/

Rise of the Machines


Boeing Hummingbird - ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Realtime Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance- Imaging System)


Firescout robo-gunship


Big Dogs - Mule Bots

K-9 Robot

Robo-Snipers

The machines in this concept project kinda remind me of the robot spy bug from the Sci-Fi movie called "The Fifth Element".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1965

More steps that bring us closer to the "transformers" of science-fiction fame?

Insects Inspire New Generation of Australian Weapons

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-03-11-voa9.cfm

By Phil Mercer
Sydney
11 March 2009


Australian researchers have studied the navigation skills of insects to develop a pioneering weapons-guidance system. The insect-inspired tracking technology has been launched at an air show in the southern state, Victoria.

Australian weapons developers have been inspired by the unfailing capacity of insects to spot and zero in on food and the ability of bees to avoid colliding with each other in a swarm.

Australia's Defense Science and Technology Organization has been looking at how the existing research into insects' navigation and sight could make airborne weapons more reliable and improve their ability to hit moving targets.

Through its collaboration with several electronics companies, a new system known as 'Bioseeker' has been developed.

Project Manager Philip Henschke says the study of insects has been vital.

"A variety of insects have a unique capability to find the moving target and that's the particular holy grail of what we're interested in from a weapons application in defense," Henschke explained. "What we've actually done is looked at the mathematics of how an insect sees and we've taken that mathematics and from that we've looked at an algorithm that will enable us to do what we call a bio-image generation, a map of the movement within a scene."

This information was then analyzed in special software to create a system designed to find, track and destroy moving targets.

The Bioseeker technology is scheduled to undergo final testing, later this year. Its architects believe that, if it is eventually used in battle, it will make soldiers safer by taking them further away from the enemy.

Researchers aim to produce a low-cost seeker-and-guidance system that could eventually be reduced to the size of a coffee cup. Possible applications include placing the technology inside rockets used on the Australian Army's Tiger Attack helicopters.

The Australian military is relatively small, with about 50,000 personnel. However, the defense force has a reputation for technological innovation.

The government in Canberra has said that, by 2020, it hopes to bring into service a fleet of Super Hornet jet fighters and an early-warning aircraft, as well as a range of new helicopters and airborne refueling airplanes.

The Australian military is involved in peacekeeping missions in East Timor, Sudan and the Solomon Islands and with the US-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Do you think it will work out the way they want it to?