Explosions do not disturb residents of Draguignan, the “artillery capital of France.” But a visitor to this southeastern city is surprised that the sound of an 18-ton Caesar self-propelled howitzer travels 20 km (12 mi.) from Camp de Canjuers, the biggest proving ground in Western Europe.
Scraping coatings off aircraft by hand will soon be a thing of the past at Hill AFB, Utah, which is deploying robots for this task in 2014. Concurrent Technologies Corp. of Johnstown, Pa., and Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics and Engineering Center in Pittsburgh developed six coating-removal robots under contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and Ogden Air Logistics Center. The robots use 6-kw fiber lasers for coating removal.
Shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is of less concern than countering their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. This is the idea behind a program at Georgia Tech Research Institute, which develops integrated hardware devices that simulate sensors on enemy UAVs. The Threat Unmanned Devices Program, funded by the U.S. Army Threat Systems Management Office, assesses UAV countermeasures. The hardware simulates electro-optical infrared sensors, and systems for signals-intelligence intercepts and weapons jamming.
Unmanned platforms have many advantages and one major impediment: interoperability. It's difficult for personnel in one service to control robot systems fielded by another, owing to the use of proprietary operational software. This may change. The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) has developed the Common Control System (CCS), which uses software that reportedly allows any unmanned system to communicate and work with any other system in the military.
Spy movies and drone imagery may give people the idea that the problem of night vision has been definitively solved, but in fact the past few years have seen a vigorous three-way technology conflict at the lower end of the market, where users need portable and wearable sensors and want to fit very small unmanned vehicles—and large fleets of trucks—with night-vision devices.
The Pentagon justifiably regards quiet submarines as a threat. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) seeks to neutralize them with DASH, the Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting program, which is developing deep-ocean acoustic nodes that function as maritime satellites, or “subullites,” as Darpa calls them. The low noise of extreme depths enhances deployment of scalable fixed and mobile collaborative sensor platforms that detect (fixed) and track (mobile) submarines over large areas. Darpa recently tested two collaborative prototypes.
No matter how advanced a bolt-action rifle is, it represents 19th-century technology, says Bret Boyd, vice president of sales and marketing at TrackingPoint Inc., a company that is using 21st-century technology to make this type of weapon far more accurate.
The German army officially received its expanded future soldier system on March 7. The IdZ-ES, short for Infanterist der Zukunft-Erweitertes Systeme, goes to the 10th Panzer Div.'s Mountain Infantry Btn. 232, which deploys to Afghanistan in June. Rheinmetall Defense received an order for 30 systems in 2012 and another in January for 60 more. The 60-system order is being delivered in two batches: the first by midyear and the second at year-end. Each system has enough equipment to outfit a 10-man squad.
The U.S. Army is moving forward with development of a 120-mm tank round that will, in one unit of ammunition, combine the capabilities of four different rounds now in use and loaded aboard tanks, and provide two new capabilities. According to the Army News Service, the Advanced Multi-Purpose (AMP) round has an ammunition data link and programmable multimode fuze. The data link is used to select the capability necessary to defeat a target, while the fuze can be set to one of three modes—impact-detonate, detonate-delay, or airburst.
Moving equipment efficiently and economically during NATO's drawdown in Afghanistan poses serious challenges to the major players deployed there. “Everyone fixated on rushing kit into theater. Getting it back is left to chance,” says one British logistics planner.
Mortars, short-range rockets, improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) are insurgents' weapons that military forces deal with by employing superior protection, operational procedures and tactics, and real-time intelligence. When insurgents obtain guided weapons, however, there is a major escalation in the threat level.
Laser beams that measure an object's distance are part of navigation systems in autonomous vehicles. This time-of-flight (TOF) technology has limitations, however, in distance and in imaging objects that do not reflect beams well. Researchers at Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh, Scotland, developed a TOF system that yields high-resolution 3-D data about objects 1 km (0.6 mi.). The work raises the possibility that the system could not only guide autonomous vehicles but be a portable targeting device.
Most garments protect against contamination from chemical and biological agents by erecting fabric barriers between the body and toxins. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is experimenting with specially spun fibers that incorporate such additives as quaternary ammonium salt biocides, polyoxometalates, fullerenes and phthalocyanines, which spontaneously decontaminate fabrics by neutralizing the chemical and biological agents they contact.
It's difficult to smuggle explosives into areas that are monitored by sensors or bomb-sniffing dogs. Research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a U.S. Energy Department facility in Richland, Wash., could make it virtually impossible, especially with military-grade explosives that have extremely low vapor pressure. PNNL scientists developed a real-time vapor-detection technique for explosives that is reportedly accurate in the parts-per-quadrillion (ppq) range—similar to or more sensitive than a dog's sense of smell.
In the future, if a rogue nation is caught secretly testing a nuclear weapon, and is confronted with credible evidence about blast size, location, date and time of detonation, satellites and radio telescopes may get the credit. Researchers at Ohio State University and astronomers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have discovered that GPS and GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) satellites, along with the Very Large Array (VLA) of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico, can detect atmospheric disturbances caused by nuclear blasts.
Obstacles challenge robots, but researchers at Harvard may overcome them by engineering robots to jump. Tests on silicone robots advance this capability. Robert Shepherd, a former postdoctoral researcher and now an assistant professor at Cornell, describes work that he and colleagues are conducting in the Feb. 6 Angewandte Chemie. The team uses controlled explosions generated by methane and oxygen to make a robot jump (see photo). The Y-shaped robot, with each limb about 6 in. long and less than 1 in. thick, leaps 12 in., at 13 fps.
Crowdsourcing, which is increasingly popular for national security applications, may soon move into arms-control verification. The U.S. State Department's “Innovation in Arms Control Challenge” selected several ideas for new technologies and approaches to help with verification. One winning concept, proposed by an aerospace and defense consultant in Florida, enlists virtual armies of citizens to track “treaty limited items” (TLI) to ensure countries comply with arms-control obligations.
The International Defense Exhibition—IDEX—in Abu Dhabi last month saw the first public appearance of the massive Multiple Cradle Launcher (MCL), a product of the Abu Dhabi-based Jobaria Defense Systems, which company officials told Aviation Week is in service with the United Arab Emirates army. The MCL uses an Oshkosh Defense 6 X 6 Heavy Equipment Transporter with an armored cab, pulling a 10-wheel trailer. On the trailer are mounted four multiple-rocket launchers, each with three modular pods of 20 122-mm rockets, for a total of 240 rockets.
