Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe it’s beyond tough in todays guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon’s answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments. Its part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish military omniscience and ubiquitous monitoring.
The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type — just 60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.
Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.
The way they’d keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track objects and people within the sensor net.
“The best way to learn about an adversary what hes done, what hes doing, and what hes likely to do — is through continual observation using as many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent surveillance,” Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa’s Information Exploitation Office, told a conference last year. “Weve learned that occasional or periodic snapshots dont tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to really understand whats going on we have to observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out.“
According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new, minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of fiscal year 2007.
UPDATE 8:50 AM: Speaking of military omniscience, Darpa’s “Combat Zones That See” effort, meant to network together an entire city’s worth of surveillance cameras, gets $5 million in next year’s budget.
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Mini-Sensors for “Military Omniscience”Leave a Reply |
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I feel sick. Is it better to be dead or one of the world’s most impoverished people living in a remote disease-infested jungle (if any are left)? The nazis are winning, despite 1945.
That was the fastest one I’ve ever seen.
Fastest Godwinning, that is. Forgot the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law
What in the hell do nazis have to do with any of this? Just out of curiosity.
Mmm sounds like anohter link in our “matrix/spider” system.
http://www.defense-update.com/products/s/spider.htm
Put with a little creative thinking and hiding these things in bricks/rocks and such around bases or known enemy transit zones and yeah it becomes a real bad day to be a bad guy.
This will probably be one of the vaporware that will fade away just like such blimps, due to its limited storage of power leading to limited time of operation, and the nightmare of dealing with information overload, consuming too much time determining which encounter was just a civilian, wildlife, or a terrorist. What a worthless thing for Defense Tech to write an article about this.
I think “kalisana” is confusing “nazis” with Big Brother.
It’s interesting to imagine these working in urban environments. I’m curious how they will know the difference between a bad guy and a guy walking down the street.
Or in the case of Bagdad, how to tell the difference between an iraqi police officer that wants to uphold the law of the land and one that wants to execute opposing contrymen.
Scott
Come-on man how will they tell the difference?
Think more like placed ehh say around military bases or strategic locals and when say a truck pulls up and two Jihadis jump out set up a mortar tube in the back of the truck aimed at the local maybe that will determine their allegiance.
Or lets say a sniper pops a couple of rounds in zone 6 then a video pics him up stashing a Dragoon AK in a alley. Maybe telling.
Zone 8 pics up 5 guys wearing their colors packing AKs & RPGs coming in yeah may want to send a welcome committee. Or even better a young Jihadi passing out propaganda or threatening the guy we just talked to earlier.
Say we know the AQ are in a certain village but no one will talk we roll in do our thing roll out. Kick back at base and see whose house is tomorrows raid target.
Its called surveillance and yeah like most things it requires some freekin common sense. By the way large numbers of those boots on the ground do just this type of thing. Even patrols are a type of snap shot surveillance. An unknown camera or sensor would put the fear of god in the enemy sow confusion and discontent. How would they know it was a camera or old Akmed we scooped last weak that ratted on their weapons storage at Babis, hell maybe it was Babi or one of the neighbors.
And as to the Nazi Bawahhaah well Big Brother somewhat reasonable thing. When they start putting these things here in the states I am with you. But putting these things in the middle of a hostile foreign battlefield I say do it do it yesterday. Foreigners dont respect our laws and we owe them no constitution protections that we by our allegiance/PATROITISM to the constitution and US are owed in return.
This might not seem as farfetch as you might imagine. There are several companies thats doing this today deploying real wireless networked sensor systems in industrial applications. I would suggest you take a look at http://www.xbow.com and http://www.dustnetworks.com. Of course with curent commerically available radio technology, we probably won’t be able to achieve the goal of 180 days run time at full power. But we are close. We can duty cycle our systems to achieve years run time but with better lower power radios it’s not to far fetch to imagine these system coming on line in a few years especially with darpa involved.
looking at the picture: looks like one of those fold your money craft projects. kind of like when you take a dollar bill and make a ring out of it. seriously, looks really fake and kind of like money instead of camo. maybe they’ll hide it in war profiteer bank vaults. at least that would prevent the electronics from being scavenged for ‘ide’s because the camouflage wouldn’t fool anyone. the spider, mentioned in a previous comment, while larger looks like a better candidate for buried sensor gear. though with that, where is the antenna exactly? anyway, if you want to hide this thing in among loose bricks then make it look like a brick.
–huh
Hey, boys, this technology is for real and it really works. About half the size of a pack of cigarettes now, most of the size is accounted for by batteries–the sensors are very, very small. As power packs come down in size, expect to see these things get very, very small. Check out Dust Networks (http://www.dustnetworks.com).
Not really farfetched, since law enforcement agencies have been placing cameras and microphones for decades. I would worry about any number of things, but off the top of my head is the likelihood that the enemy will do what the Mob does: use sweeping gadgets to locate and destroy the little critters. The other would be what pedestrian mentioned: the simple impossibility of processing that much information.
Think of a satellite. A satellite can be optimized to “read license plates,” as they put it, or it can be optimized to follow the flow of traffic. But it can’t really do both. You have to choose and that logic can be extended to most surveillance situations. You can watch one thing very closely or keep a general eye on a lot of things. There simply won’t be enough resources to “wire” an entire city. I agree that if you’re pursuing a small group of guys through the city or keeping watch on a particular cell, it would make a lot of sense, and that’s certainly a useful tactical advantage, but I don’t see it changing the overall situation in Baghdad or anywhere else.
They deliver them in the same ordinance they deliver anti-personel bomblets.
Back in 1970, I worked on a similar project from Sandia that consisted of a sensor, FM receiver, FM transmitter and battery module, all slipped into an armored shell. They were shot or dropped into Vietnam and each could be commanded on and off from a base station. The sensor could be a noise or vibration sensor module.
PJ, I have always wanted to say thankyou as well as other staffs from bottom of my heart for you and the staffs contribution of UGS, saving lives. Without your contribution and efforts, as well as those who have worked on the project, we would have less options in low intensity conflicts, and close range combats. I thought about the concept years ago without knowing REMBASS, and was surprised one day to notice some one had come up with the same idea more than decades ago. You are our hero. Sensors are not exciting as weapons to some people, but I have always been one of the geeks who loved to know more about sensors. They don’t attack, but provide valuable information. Without sensors, there is no future of Information Technology. Sometimes they may save lives, and avoid harm to innocent. I hope the milestone of REMBASS will continue to lead to be bulit up on it for better systems, saving more lives. Even we may pass away some day, our systems will continue to live.
These things are certainly real. We were pitching the thing way back as the ELASTIC project, complete with the sneaky-wave comm links and motion locator feature.
To the guys saying it’s too small to have a lot of battery storage, that’s probably correct. However, sneaky-wave (the old name, now it’s UWB) is spectacularly efficient in terms of power-to-range. There’s a huge number of advantages to sneaky-wave in a gadget like this, not only is the power drain just a few milliWatts, the sensors can determine each others’ relative locations to a few millimeters, they can locate (and size) objects in the field between them, and the comm signal is effectively encrypted, although it might be more accurate to call it “non-observable”, since you can’t detect its presence with any sort of emission-spotting device.
There’s a lot you can do with this sort of thing, we had also pitched a sort of transparent super-ball looking version that you could just chunk out of your ruck as you went, with vibration sensors, audio and video inputs etc that would solar charge and transmit back only if something met a profile or if they were interrogated from a UAV. With enough of them in a network, you can do some data fusion and get a really good picture of what’s going on in the area.
hey how cheap are these and where can i get them need to know asap
I was MOS 8621 or 17M in late 70’s.
Sensors have Audio and Magnetic add ons to Minisids of that time. So detecting friend or foe wouldn’t be that hard, plus the cost, you would not place them down a street that contains massive traffic.
It’s great for rear protection and 360 security of location to a sniper hide or lookout post.
As for Nazi or Big Brother, they are not set up for that, it’s security and surveilance for an area, it doesn’t read minds or report you to the man.
Where to get old sensors?
The Emid, ElectroMagnetic Sensor that works great in water areas and garages/wherehouses that are damp were removed from military in late 70’s because Magnetic waves on bodies was dangerous, so many civy Security firms bought them up.
I have only seen Psids for sale, which are phase one sensors, very limited.
Go to a security firm to see if they handle groundlevel sensors or Infrared sensors for sale.
Anybody out there using BAIS? I used PEWS in the late 80s, early 90s and had a hard time with it, from what I hear, BAIS is way better and the army is feilding it to units now. I would really like to hear about anybody using BAIS in Iraq or Afganistan now.
Anybody out there using BAIS? I used PEWS in the late 80s, early 90s and had a hard time with it, from what I hear, BAIS is way better and the army is feilding it to units now. I would really like to hear about anybody using BAIS in Iraq or Afganistan now.
The BAIS looks like a new phase of the most basic sensors, psids, more of a small perimiter sensor system.
give some idea for projectsin this field
Hey this is not a Pic!!!! but it helped!!
I have had experience with UGS since 1977. Still work mainly with UGS but some other gadgets have
crept their way into the GrndSurv suite of Surveillance I spend time around . The BAIS Sets AN/PRS-9’s are fielded and activly minding their own ground, wherever they lay. The size and simplicity of the BAIS Set is a large sell point. Light weight and simple to use , low power consumption, A very large detection radius, in ideal geographic/logic settings. Designed and built by L3 Com East who also designed REMBASS,IREMBASS and REM II. Basicly its REM II sized down to be used as a
Force Protection element and force Multiplier .
Great for lay in Surveillance and short range
recon patrol settings where force protection has to be set up down and dirty quick. Great for short term use eg, shooter position security etc. Lots of degigns and manufacturers of UGS out there but the REMBASS Family of Sensors which first were developed in 1982 has held their own . The UGS World has changed from simple ground sensors buried to warn us where the bad guys are to very complex Surveillance Gateways used in wireless and ADHOC Configurations sending their intelligence data a world away keeping those in the rear informed with whats up front and around those blind corners we don’t see. Thanks, km
To respond to the person who asked if BAIS was in comparison like PEWS or PSID or EMIDS and MIDS.
Not even close,maybe the fact they both used Seismic Detection capablity other than that, No Way. BAIS, is using highly refinned algorythms to not just detect but classify what the target is.Vehicle,wheeled,track,person. The classifications are very accurate when the devices are emplaced correctly and given time to Set In we call it in the UGS World. Each sensor has its own Gain Control system that allows the sensor to get use to its surroundings. Once this period, usually only about 30 minutes. the sensor can tell the difference between a car, truck person . They also use Magnetic and Infrared attachments to show not just the intrusion but the direction of travel. I have and probably always will be facinated by UGS. I emplace and operate all different types of Grnd Surv equipment
but Ground Sensors are fun to work with. The ground sensors like BAIS are great triggers for frame or video cameras to capture images of intruders . It is great to know what the threat is,before responding it really saves lives.