What is yet not understood is that we are on the verge of extracting
modern humanity from the battlefield. The drone itself was a good
start but is certainly the first generation. Its presence on the
Afghan battlefield has the enemy reeling as again and again it has
proven possible to decapitate any threat. In practice, the drone has
been the single most effective tool in this fight and has eliminated
the need to put massive numbers of boots on the ground to put
pressure on the enemy. The war has gone from unwinable to
effectively won. Of course, no one wishes to admit that unled combat
is at best a nuisance and no creditable threat in the long term.
Car bombs do not win wars and eventually your supporters began to
wonder.
Now we can envisage a battle field infested with micro drones all
operated at a distance and able to call down indirect fire in an
instance. They will even penetrate bunkers and their like making
security impossible for an enemy force.
The take home is that a force equipped with micro drones and
supported with indirect fire will be well able to drive an enemy
force from the battle field. Can you imagine a war game in which
gamers take charge of a real micro drone and then go hunting for
targets in a real battle field? Actual firing solutions would be the
controlled by boots on the ground but this augments the search with
potentially thousands of eyeballs. As stated, the modern human will
no longer enter the real battlefield except to salvage lives of enemy
combatants.
Micro-drones: The
new face of cutting-edge warfare
23 July 2012 by Will
Ferguson and David Hambling
Drones are getting
smaller and smarter, able to navigate and identify targets without
GPS or human operators
FAR from the
aeroplane-sized craft that are the face of cutting-edge warfare, a
much smaller revolution in drones is under way.
Micro-aerial vehicles
(MAVs) with uncanny navigation and real-time mapping capabilities
could soon be zipping through indoor and outdoor spaces, running
reconnaissance missions that others cannot. They would allow soldiers
to look over hills, inside buildings and inspect suspicious objects
without risk.
Unlike their larger
cousins, whose complex navigation systems let them fly autonomously
for hours or even days (see "Aloft for longer than ever"),
MAVs are not known for their smarts. They typically rely on a GPS
signal to tell them where they are, and on human operators for nearly
everything else, such as where to go, what to look for and where to
land.
Now researchers led by
Roland Brockers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California, have developed a MAV that uses a camera pointed at the
ground to navigate and pick landing spots. It can even identify
people and other objects. The system enables the drone to travel
through terrain where human control and GPS are unavailable, such as
a city street or inside a building.
A human operator needs
to tell the drone only two things before it sets off: where it is and
where its objective is. The craft figures out the rest for itself,
using the camera and onboard software to build a 3D map of its
surroundings. It can also avoid obstacles and detect surfaces above a
predetermined height as possible landing zones. Once it selects a
place to put down, it maps the site's dimensions, moves overhead and
lands.
In a laboratory
experiment, a 50 centimetre by 50 centimetre quadrotor craft equipped
with the navigation system was able to take off, travel through an
obstacle-filled indoor space and land successfully on an elevated
platform. Brockers's team is now testing the system in larger, more
complex environments. The system was presented at the SPIE
Defense, Security and Sensing conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in
April.
Vijay Kumar of the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that autonomous
navigation and landing capabilities are unprecedented in a drone of
this size. "Typically the information required to locate a
landing site and stabilise a vehicle over it is coming in at a 100
times a second," he says. "No one else has been able to
design a system so small with this kind of processing power."
With such capabilities
making their way into ever smaller craft, it may not be long until
the PD-100 Black Hornet (pictured), which is set to become
the world's smallest operational drone, gets an upgrade as well.
As it stands the
PD-100, which has been in testing by Norwegian manufacturer Prox
Dynamics since 2008, can navigate autonomously to a target area using
onboard GPS or fly a pre-planned route. It can also be controlled by
a human from up to a kilometre away, has an endurance of up to 25
minutes, can hover for a stable view, and fly both indoors and out.
At just 20 centimetres
long and weighing about 15 grams, the PD-100 makes the drone created
by Brockers's team look like a behemoth. And while it may look like a
toy, Prox Dynamics claims it can maintain steady flight in winds of
up to 5 metres per second. This has attracted the attention of the UK
Ministry of Defence, which last year issued a request for the vehicle
under the name "Nano-UAS".
A reconnaissance drone
has flown for two days straight, fuelled by a laser beam that
transmits energy from the ground to the aircraft.
Lockheed Martin and
Seattle-based LaserMotive teamed up to perform the test last week in
a wind tunnel in Palmdale, California, as proof that drones could be
made to fly indefinitely via wireless energy transferred from the
ground.
When the team stopped
the flight - because the craft had surpassed the goals of the test -
the battery on the drone had more energy than it started with.
LaserMotive is now working on adapting the system to beam power from
Earth's surface to orbiting satellites and even the moon.
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