Nano Aerial Vehicle will help soldiers fighting in crowded urban areas

Soldiers fighting future battles in crowded urban areas will be able to launch hummingbird-sized unmanned nano aerial vehicles — or NAVs — capable of carrying sophisticated sensors and flying through open windows in buildings to report back on enemy positions.

A new project partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) called the Nano Aerial Vehicle (NAV) program aims to develop an extremely small, ultra-lightweight aerial vehicle for urban military missions that can fly both indoors and outdoors and that is capable of climbing and descending vertically as well as flying sideways left and right.

DARPA says the NAV program pushes the limits of aerodynamic and power conversion efficiency, endurance and maneuverability for very small air vehicle systems.

The design the agency green lighted for further development actually will look and fly much like a hummingbird. The winning concept, developed by AeroVironment, is called Nano Scout (Nano Sensor Covert Observer in Urban Terrain). It is a remote-controlled, battery powered NAV with two flapping wings that weighs about two grams (about as heavy as two nickels) and is just slightly longer than three inches.

Lots of competition
The Scout is designed to fly forward at speeds of up to 20 mph, slow down to one mph for precision navigation inside buildings, withstand five mph wind gusts, operate inside buildings and have a range of over one-half mile.

The Nano Scout was selected over competing concepts submitted by Lockheed Martin, MicroPropulsion Inc., and Draper Laboratory at the end of the program’s first phase last year.

An early prototype tested by the company has already reached a technical milestone by achieving a hovering flight equal to that of a two-wing flapping wing aircraft while carrying its own energy source and using only the flapping wings for propulsion. A working prototype, scheduled for demonstration to DARPA when the second phase of the NAV program ends this summer, will have a flight endurance of 11 to 20 minutes.

But DARPA and AeroVironment aren’t the only players with a wing in the NAV game. Though its monocoptor design that is shaped like a maple leaf was passed over for the second phase of the DARPA program, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works’ Advanced Development Programs is continuing its exploration of NAVs on its own dime with the Samurai program.

The company has built two larger mono-wing vehicles as part of the program, a 30-inch flyer and a 12-inch version that is small enough to fit into a backpack and fly through an open window to enter a building. The Samurai design, says Kingsley Fregene, principal investigator for the program, is inherently stable and has few moving parts, which makes it a robust, aerodynamically clean airframe. Unlike more conventional designs, the entire aircraft rotates.

Nano-sized pack mules
Most of the excitement has been about the platform and getting devices in the air and keeping them there. But the payoff for NAVs is in the payload. “A lot of people can build aircraft that fly,” Neil Adams told TechNewsDaily. “Making them work is the

critical element.”

Right now, preparing for new viral threats means looking to the past, creating hypotheses based on how pathogens have changed before. Now Darpa wants to reverse that strategy: test every possible outcome, to create a prophetic almanac that warns of viral mutations and outbreaks in advance — giving scientists the chance to change the course of the future before illness strikes.

The Pentagon’s far-out research arm has been zeroing in on the danger of mutating pathogens, and the corresponding problem of drug resistance, for years now. The agency is already funding tobacco-based vaccine production, a seven-day plan to thwart biothreats, and prescient viral infection detectors. And they’ve even set their sights on psychic medics, with a 2007 program that sought to turn docs into all-knowing illness predictors.

Now, Darpa wants the powers of premonition to wipe out viral threats altogether. They’re hosting a workshop for a new program, called “Prophecy,” that’ll develop methods to predict the rate, location and likely mutations of viral agents.

First, the agency wants novel lab-based methods to reproduce “virus-host interactions,” in different environments. After that, researchers will sequence different viral genomes, and test how they adapt and change under diverse conditions.

Ideally, that’ll yield a host of algorithms, capable of accurately predicting “the rate, direction and phenotype of viral mutations.” From there, scientists will be able to develop appropriate attack strategies in the right geographic locations. Most notably, Darpa wants to see mere mortals outdo the forces of nature, by creating “high energy evolutionary boundaries” that keep genetic mutations at bay.

Even if Darpa’s program doesn’t result in omniscient predictive powers, the possibility of more accurately anticipating viral mutations would have widespread implications. Health agencies could  prep for looming outbreaks, new vaccines could be fast-tracked — and if scientists do manage to thwart evolution, the threat of resistance to antibiotic and antiviral meds could be all but eliminated.

The contract has been awarded to Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–”first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

Here is a video of  BigDog kicking it on a beach in Thailand.

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it’ll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that’s right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard “If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops” as described by BD’s president Marc Raibert.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it’s prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple “squad support” label would suggest. It’s placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat–essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won’t be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Here is video of  BigDog auto-tracking a human.

Stay tuned for: Drone Wars

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included (Wired)

DARPA Wants to Override Evolution to Make Immortal Synthetic Organisms (Popular Science)

They are calling the new project Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), and intend to assemble “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed vessel would be capable of amazing range and endurance.  It could go for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, criss crossing oceans largely without any human input .

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates (The Register)