Here’s another great story from our friends at Popular Mechanics that looks at cut­ting edge research into drones that fly autonomously inside struc­tures. That’s some­thing that until now could only be done (barely) by wheeled mini-​​bots. But as you can see from this report, engi­neers still have a long way to go.

It’s not the most attrac­tive spy bot, but the unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle hov­er­ing some 20 ft. away is doing its job. For now, that means stay­ing right where it is, weav­ing ever so slightly under the weight of the web­cam strapped to its back. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing to look at with this UAV, a com­mer­cial four-​​rotor model that any RC hob­by­ist could put together. But no one is pilot­ing this mod­i­fied drone — it’s fly­ing autonomously, sta­bi­lized a few feet above the floor of MIT’s RAVEN lab. Like most of the air­craft tested here, this model is a pup­pet, receiv­ing input not from onboard proces­sors, but from a nearby computer. 

As it con­tin­ues to buzz in place, an array of 18 motion-​​capture cam­eras tracks the UAV, pro­vid­ing 3D posi­tion­ing data to deter­mine just how sta­ble it is. Specifically, those bale­ful red cam­eras — the same kind Hollywood visual effects teams use to trans­pose an actor’s move­ments to a computer-​​generated coun­ter­part — are track­ing the tiny Styrofoam balls attached to the drone. On the com­puter mon­i­tor, these balls show up in real time, map­ping the UAV as a clus­ter of dots, sway­ing in midair. I’m some­where between impressed and bored when the drone begins to drift. A sec­ond later and it slams into a plex­i­glass divider, as hard as a hockey player. 

It will take some time to fig­ure out why this lit­tle craft sud­denly lost con­trol. But that’s the point of RAVEN, or Real-​​Time Indoor Autonomous Vehicle Test Environment, where geeks cap­ture every flight — and col­li­sion — in painstak­ing detail. There are no acci­dents here, just prob­lems that haven’t been suf­fi­ciently ana­lyzed. “RAVEN gives us the free­dom to test what­ever we can build,” says Jonathan How, direc­tor of MIT’s Aerospace Controls Lab. “And we can build won­der­ful things, even in 24 hours.“ 

One of the researchers has done just that, and is now prepar­ing to fly a drone that was redesigned, then cob­bled together out of light­weight foam core. Of course, this isn’t exactly the next gen­er­a­tion of missile-​​packing Predators; the toy­like cre­ation in front of me, with its cir­cu­lar wing and minia­ture nose-​​mounted pro­peller, is more of a test­bed than a pro­to­type. All of the UAVs cov­er­ing nearly every sur­face of this lab, from high-​​end RC planes the size of a small child to a store-​​bought fly­ing insect pro­duced by WowWee, are just tools to develop flight con­trol algo­rithms for indoor robots. 

As chal­leng­ing as it is to make some­thing fly itself, design­ing a drone that can func­tion indoors is even harder. For an indoor UAV to meet all of the military’s expec­ta­tions, it would need to be able to fly into a build­ing and find a suit­able spot to perch and observe, all with­out rely­ing on GPS con­tact. “The ulti­mate vehi­cle is a bat that you can down­load data from,” How says. Bats have the abil­ity to perch, plus echo loca­tion to detect obsta­cles, and the agility to keep from slam­ming into them. 

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A great inside look at a Pentagon after-​​action report on that embar­rass­ing nuke flub where the Air Force flew a cou­ple dooms­day weapons across the US with­out even know­ing it. 

Let’s hope this report doesn’t just col­lect dust on some general’s shelf and that the rec­om­men­da­tions are actu­ally implemented. 

From our friends at Popular Mechanics:

One might think that the United States’ nuclear weapons — the cor­ner­stone deter­rent in the country’s arse­nal — would be treated with the utmost precision. 

This com­fort­able illu­sion was shaken on Aug. 31, 2007, when crews loaded six live nuclear war­heads onto a B-​​52 bomber and flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, cruis­ing over the nation’s heart­land. Each war­head was 10 times more pow­er­ful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki dur­ing World War II. 

During the analy­sis of the inci­dent by the Defense Science Board (DSB), released this month, the ugly truth came out: America’s nukes are so neglected that they are stored along­side con­ven­tional mis­siles, with noth­ing but an 8.5 x 11-​​in. sheet of paper to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the two. The last day in August, Air Force per­son­nel loaded the nuclear war­heads on a rou­tine repo­si­tion­ing of weapons stocks, believ­ing them to be cruise missiles. 

The sys­tem of checks and bal­ances has degraded to a point that six of the planet’s most pow­er­ful weapons were miss­ing for 36 hours — and no one noticed until they had landed in Louisiana. “The process and sys­temic prob­lems that allowed such an inci­dent have devel­oped over more than a decade and have the poten­tial for much more seri­ous con­se­quences,” the report warns. 

So what can be learned by this near miss, and how can some­thing worse be avoided? 

1. No one Air Force com­mand is solely respon­si­ble for tak­ing care of nuclear weapons. 

There are plenty of weapons sys­tems and mis­sions out there, and each one is more excit­ing and has a higher pri­or­ity within the com­mand structure. 

The DSB report notes that, after the demise of Strategic Air Command, three oper­a­tional Air Force com­mands took over the nation’s nuclear weapons: ICBMs went to Air Force Space Command; bombers went to Air Combat Command, and Air Mobility Command retained own­er­ship of the refu­el­ing por­tion of the bomber mis­sions. That means that there is no one cen­tral place where the nuclear mis­sion — upkeep, train­ing and such — is the pri­mary mis­sion. So the nukes got lost in the post-​​Cold War shuffle. 

Recommendations in the report include the estab­lish­ment of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Enterprise to focus solely on nuclear mis­sions. This per­son would report directly to the Secretary of Defense. The DSB report notes that the U.S. Navy, which han­dles nuclear mis­siles in its sub­ma­rine fleet, has a sys­tem that keeps those weapons under one ban­ner, “Strategic Systems Programs.” It’s com­manded by a rear admi­ral, whereas in the Air Force the high­est rank with a pri­mary, daily focus on nukes is that of colonel. “While the attack sub­marines no longer rou­tinely carry nuclear mis­siles, the sub­ma­rine forces retain their nuclear legacy and nuclear focus,” the report says. 

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NASA’s cur­rent plan for manned space explo­ration focuses on estab­lish­ing a base on the moon, as a vital step­ping­stone for a visit to Mars. The ini­tia­tive has been trum­peted by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, which wants the first mis­sion to launch by 2020. But trou­ble is brew­ing as a grow­ing group of for­mer mis­sion man­agers, plan­e­tary sci­en­tists and astro­nauts argues against any manned moon mis­sion at all. One alter­na­tive, they say: Send astro­nauts to an aster­oid as a bet­ter prepa­ra­tion for a Martian landing. 

The dis­senters gath­ered at a meet­ing of the Planetary Society at Stanford University. “We want to get a pos­i­tive rec­om­men­da­tion to the new admin­is­tra­tion,” says Planetary Society exec­u­tive direc­tor Louis D. Friedman. He sup­ports an even­tual mis­sion to Mars, but argues that the cur­rent moon scheme was selected with inad­e­quate debate after a speech by President Bush in January 2004. “If you said humans’ and Mars’ [to NASA offi­cials] in the same sen­tence, you would receive a fig­u­ra­tive slap on the face, and then four months later [the moon-​​to-​​Mars plan] was the main point on a view­graph at the high­est levels.”

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This month Lockheed Martin released a 280-​​word state­ment from its radar research head­quar­ters in New Jersey announc­ing a break­through test of an advanced radar plat­form. And while the tech world shrugged, peo­ple watch­ing the evo­lu­tion of radar saw another step for a sys­tem that could have a dra­matic effect on future world affairs, from American missile-​​tracking plat­forms in the Czech Republic to the ship-​​based defense of the Taiwan Straits. 

The new radar sys­tem, called dig­i­tal beam­form­ing, could become a game-​​changing tech­nol­ogy that may help defeat an over­whelm­ing attack on U.S. war­ships by mis­siles. It could also answer one of the chief com­plaints about bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tems — that decoys or other coun­ter­mea­sures could eas­ily hide a war­head and spoof inter­cep­tors. If placed on satel­lites, new spy and envi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing mis­sions become pos­si­ble from orbit.

All this comes as an improve­ment to an exist­ing sys­tem called phased-​​array radar. While tra­di­tional radars spin their faces to seek tar­gets, phased-​​array radars guide a reflec­tive beam elec­tron­i­cally from a sta­tion­ary panel. They can track things by mov­ing the main beam very quickly, within microsec­onds, at numer­ous tar­gets. But the phased array sys­tems can­not seam­lessly track mul­ti­ple tar­gets at the same time with­out los­ing res­o­lu­tion. Lockheed’s improve­ment on these radars allows true simul­ta­ne­ous track­ing, with each tar­get fol­lowed by a ded­i­cated radar beam.

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Micrometeorites and unde­tectable bits of space junk as small as 0.4 mm pose a seri­ous threat to every cur­rent and future manned space mis­sion. These dust-​​size par­ti­cles travel as fast as 12 miles per sec­ond, pack­ing enough momen­tum to melt alu­minum space­craft skin — or turn it into a puff of vapor. 

To find small holes, astro­nauts must use hand­held ultra­sonic devices such as direc­tional micro­phones — a time-​​consuming process. NASA sci­en­tists seek­ing other solu­tions are focus­ing on new wire­less tech­nolo­gies that can find tiny leaks by track­ing vibra­tions across a space­crafts metal skin. 

“There is tur­bu­lence as the air spreads in the vac­uum, and that reacts against the plate at the edge of the hole,” says Dale Chimenti, a pro­fes­sor at Iowa State University who’s devel­op­ing the inch-​​long sen­sors for NASA.

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While aboard a DC-​​9 air­craft, a remote oper­a­tor uses a robot to suture a sec­tion of sim­u­lated tissue.

If a robot sur­geon is treat­ing you, your life is in dan­ger. That’s not due to any machine-​​borne mal­ice, but because cur­rent research into autonomous surgery is focused on bat­tle­field casu­al­ties barely cling­ing to life and astro­nauts injured on dis­tant plan­ets. To demon­strate how that research is pro­gress­ing, Silicon Valley-​​based SRI International and the University of Cincinnati held a series of tests this past September that sound like a cross between a PR stunt and a B-​​movie: human doc­tors squar­ing off against a robotic sur­geon aboard a nose-​​diving DC-​​9 aircraft.

During peri­ods of zero grav­ity and sus­tained accel­er­a­tion of 1.8 g’s, a robot made inci­sions and applied sutures on sim­u­lated tis­sue, while a human sur­geon did the same. The pur­pose: to mea­sure just how pre­cise a remote-​​operated robot can be, espe­cially in a tur­bu­lent or gravity-​​free envi­ron­ment. SRI hasn’t released its results, but accord­ing to PM Advisory Board mem­ber Dr. Ken Kamler, who par­tic­i­pated in one of the flight tests, the robot seemed to hold its own?until its com­pen­sa­tion soft­ware was turned off. “The dif­fer­ence was huge,” Kamler says. “It was vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble [for it] to tie a knot.” But with com­pen­sa­tion engaged, the bot per­formed as well as it did on Earth.

And so the tests’ true pur­pose was to show­case SRI’s soft­ware. “We’re not mim­ic­k­ing a sur­geon,” says Tom Low, SRI’s direc­tor of med­ical devices and robot­ics, “but look­ing at what a robot can do bet­ter.” By focus­ing on adap­tive algo­rithms, SRI wants to move away from remote telesurgery and closer to auton­omy. The com­pany plans to build a sys­tem for NASA that could treat an astro­naut on Mars, where com­mu­ni­ca­tion delays of more than 20 min­utes would make telesurgery impossible…

Read more about robotic doc­tors and other high-​​tech sto­ries from Popular Mechanics at Military​.com.

– Christian