Army Develops Helmet-Mounted Radar To Watch Soldiers’ Backs



The combat helmet is one of the oldest pieces of military equipment still used on the battlefield. Now, after years of upgrades, the U.S. Army is planning what may be the most startling one yet: a helmet-mounted radar to give soldiers an all-round warning of urban threats.

Specifically, the Helmet Mounted Radar System (HMRS) program calls for:

a miniature, low power, near 360-degree field of view Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar sensor that will alert the soldier to the whereabouts of a target out to at least 25 meters. The sensor is to be mounted, embedded, and integrated within the Advanced Combat Helmet and associated sensor suites.

Radar can see through fog, smoke and dust, and works just as well in pitch darkness. Which could make it pretty useful for catching creeping adversaries. The HMRS might also have some other useful features; the ability to see through foliage, and the ability to see through walls, are described as “desired” capabilities for the HMRS rather than requirements.

The HMRS description also encouragingly specifies that “the effective radiated power of the system has to be low enough not to affect the health of the soldier” -– and presumably not the other members of the squad either, who are likely to be lit up by each other’s radar from all directions. Anyone worried by cellphone radiation emissions need not apply, tinfoil helmet liners optional.

The whole system should weigh less than two and a half pounds, with less than a pound of that being mounted on the helmet. This is not as ambitious at it might sound; a few years ago, ImSAR and Insitu developed a Micro Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar weighing two pounds called NanoSAR. It included a Moving Target Indicator. NanoSAR has a range of over a kilometer, but its fifteen-watt power consumption would eat up batteries if left on continuously.

And that’s just one of the many questions about how the radar will work in practice. As well as 360-degree horizontal coverage, what’s the vertical? If you tilt your head up or down do you lose coverage? There is also the question of how the system should pass on information to the user, which should be answered in the Phase I part of the project. Something like a heads-up display might be too much to cope with; but perhaps and audible tone or a simple LED display might be all that’s needed.

(For some reason those radar Motion Trackers used in the movie Aliens come to mind – but those were comparatively big and clumsy and only gave 180-degree coverage.)

The HMRS will be constantly set off by friendly troops, who are likely to be nearer than the enemy. And it might also be triggered by any number of other moving objects, such as tree limbs blowing in the wind. Development is likely to take several years, and it may end up as another one of those useless additional weights that nobody want to carry around… but it might just turn out to be a life-saver.

Photo: The helmet which saved the life of Staff Sgt. Kyle Keenan. Photo credit: Major Web Wright, U.S.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10 ... ers-backs/

Glasses To Project Images Directly Into Retina Terminator Style
Published on 10-27-2009


Source: Singularity Hub
http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/26/gl ... #more-8651

Brother Industries, Ltd. has just announced that next year it plans to produce Retinal Imaging Display (RID) glasses that augment regular vision. Just as in the popular Terminator movies, these glasses could project supplemental information into your field of vision to augment your normal vision. Although Brother and most of the blogosphere is hyping that the product will be ready by 2010, I am skeptical. Even if they do appear in 2010, will the quality and form factor of the glasses be reasonable? I doubt it. Augmented reality sent directly into our retinas is certainly on the horizon, and its going to be awesome…but the technology still needs several more years of innovation before it is ready to break out. In the meantime, we can wet our imaginations with what is to come.

So how do the RID glasses work anyway? For those that want to get more depth on how the whole RID thing works, a decent place to start seems to be available from the US Navy. Sadly the information from Brother is pretty thin, only adding to my skepticism of their product plan. The glasses are equipped with an attachment piece that literally projects light onto your retina. The light source for the eyepiece comes from a hard drive sized laser generator that you would have to carry on your hip or somewhere on your body. Brother claims that the images are transparent enough that they don’t interfere with the real visual field of what you are seeing.

It sounds great in theory, but does it really work as advertised and without complications? What about the images causing headaches due to temporal distortion, image stabilization, and other factors? How is the augmented information correlated in realtime with the real images streaming into your field of vision? Will the images being projected into your retina be of high enough resolution to see writing and other informative data crisply? All of these issues and more will need to be addressed before Brother is able to offer a viable product.

Don’t get me wrong – I certainly commend Brother for working to develop such a neat product and I am excited to see where they can go with this. I just think we need to set reasonable expectations for the timeline of their product development. The Hub has reviewed several augmented reality applications that already exist on iphones and elsewhere and even a contact lens concept, and now Brother introduces us to the possibility of wearable awesomeness. The real and virtual worlds continue to collide, but it will still be several years before this collision starts to make some really big waves. In the meantime maybe its time to watch that Terminator movie again – I’m pretty sure augmented reality is not the only part of our future that the movie foretells…

Little Buddy GPS Device To Keep Tabs On Your Kid
Published on 10-27-2009 Email To Friend Print Version
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Source: Chicago Sun Times
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/1847 ... 27.article

Best Buy is selling a transmitting device that lets parents keep track of their children. Parents can place the device in a child's backpack or lunch box, for example.

The "Little Buddy Child Tracker" retails for $100 (far less than other devices that sell for $200 to $500). It combines global satellite positioning and cellular technology to signal the child's whereabouts to a computer or smartphone.

Parents can program the device to set up specific times and locations where the child is supposed to be -- in school or at home, for example -- and the device sends a text message if the child leaves the site in that time.

The device immediately drew angry writeups from some techies, who called it a reason for children to run away from home.

Japanese Building Robot from 'Aliens' Movie

Friday , October 30, 2009

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,570 ... 000:b0:z5#


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Japanese engineers have taken us one step closer to the robot revolution by developing a machine inspired by the movie Aliens.

The Dual-Arm Power Amplification Robot by Activelink gives users superhuman strength and resembles the hydraulic exoskeleton worn by Sigourney Weaver in the climactic scene of the sci-fi classic.

The robot is being developed for disaster relief situations and can lift more than 200 pounds. However it weighs more than 500 lbs, making it heavy enough to crush the average human without support.

Chief engineer Go Shirogauchi told news.com.au his team was currently working on a way to make the arms lighter for standalone use.

"The main material used is aluminium alloy," Mr Shirogauchi said.

"Though aluminium itself is a light material compared to iron, in order to make the body lighter we are making some parts of the arms and legs hollow."

Mr Shirogauchi said the first design priority was to make sure the operator was safe.

"The most important challenge is not to injure the operator with the amplified power," he said.

"For that challenge, a delicate control and a mechanics design which does not put too much force onto a human in the worst situation is required."

The robot, dubbed the "Power Loader" after its Hollywood counterpart, uses 18 electromagnetic motors with direct force feedback that allow the human operator to control its behavior.

"Most robot researchers think that robots should move as automatically as possible with very little human instruction," Mr Shirogauchi said.

"What we are developing is a robot which moves only when an instruction is given from a human and moves exactly according to that instruction."

The robot's primary purpose is construction and comes with interchangeable parts to adapt to any situation.

"Our intention is not to develop a small power shovel, but to create a common platform which can be applied to many areas other than the construction sites," Mr Shirogauchi said.

"It's like the body of a truck. A truck can be converted to a dumper truck, a cement mixer car, a crane car, a fire engine, a bus or something else by replacing the carrier."

Mr Shirogauchi said Activelink had no plans for the robot to be modified for combat, but people had expressed interest in its use in disaster relief and warehouses.

The arms are expected to cost $329,000 when the robot becomes fully operational. Activelink hope to finish work on it by 2015.

Activelink is owned by Panasonic and financed by the consumer technology company's Spin-Up Fund. The fund is designed to support employee projects.

Future War and the War Against the Machines

There is a growing movement of academics, scientists, scholars and intellectuals calling on a out right limit on how far we allow computer technology to go.

A Terminator Future could well indeed happen if we do not check our computer and Artificial Intelligence development

I'd just like to add my humble voice to that call..

This must be stopped!

Shady