Return-Path: <sentto-279987-5288-1030747323-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:44:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 14369 invoked by uid 510); 30 Aug 2002 22:40:09 -0000 Received: from n14.grp.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.69) by all.net with SMTP; 30 Aug 2002 22:40:09 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-5288-1030747323-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.67.192] by n14.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 30 Aug 2002 22:42:03 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_1_0_1); 30 Aug 2002 22:42:03 -0000 Received: (qmail 56384 invoked from network); 30 Aug 2002 22:42:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.217) by m10.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 30 Aug 2002 22:42:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (12.232.72.152) by mta2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 30 Aug 2002 22:42:00 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id g7UMgl330999 for iwar@onelist.com; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:42:47 -0700 Message-Id: <200208302242.g7UMgl330999@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:42:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Drone.Armies.Are.Coming] Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Wired News The Drone Armies Are Coming By Lakshmi Sandhana 2:00 a.m. Aug. 30, 2002 PDT Dispatched on a rescue-and-capture mission, unmanned vehicles arrive at the scene in minutes, corner a potential suspect and await visual confirmation before proceeding. Star Wars 2020? It might be happening sooner than you think. Allen Moshfegh at the Office of Naval Research is the head of the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS), a program that aims to create an operational drone army by the year 2020. Initiated in 1996 -- and based on a humble spy plane originally used for tracking whales at sea -- researchers are attempting to make this science-fiction scenario a reality. The project has an annual budget of roughly $6 million. Given more aggressive development and increased funding, Moshfegh believes that the technology could be functional well before that date. Going well beyond autopilot and preprogramming, he envisions swarms of unmanned, unattended and untethered drones on the ground, in the air and underwater. These machines would be capable of independently handling events in a hostile combat zone, such as surveillance, strike and even capture and detention. Aiming to create an adaptive, dynamic, self-healing network of drones, Moshfegh intends to rework the whole idea of military structure. "The army of the future will be one where human and machine collaborate to achieve a common goal," said Moshfegh. "The mission commander will provide high-level goals and tasks to teams of heterogeneous agents/UAVs/UGVs/UUVs . In turn, the teams of autonomous agents will synthesize the high-level tasks into emerging low-level tactical tasks, and then to low-level machine trajectories for navigation. Execution will become faster as the commands go down the layers." The focus of the network, though, is on decentralized command. "Although we do not rule out reporting to a central command post and, in fact, require the commander to intervene in high-level decisions, if a reliable, secure connection exists, we avoid reliance on central control as this is a major reliability issue," said Mario Gerla, spokesman for the Minuteman project (Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents), which is supported by the AINS program. While networking a few agents and performing an operation successfully is already possible, Moshfegh's intent differs in that it involves whole battalions of these vehicles communicating and operating together, capable of instantaneously reacting to unpredictable wartime events. The hurdles that have to be overcome are many. First of all, there's mission planning and decision making, with essentially an army of brainless hardware. Then comes distributed signal processing, dynamic tracking of mobile threats and real-time trajectory generation, stored sensory information, variance in available bandwidth, hardware engineering difficulties, fault tolerance (the adaptive ability to protect and heal itself from the environment as well as from attack), situational awareness in real time, collaborations amongst the nodes and time-sensitive multimedia information distribution in a dynamic mobile environment. A key component is creating an impregnable wireless "Internet in the sky" capable of routing huge amounts of data between agents moving at nearly 300 mph. Minuteman project developers have discarded conventional technologies such as radar signals or the GPS as potentially risky. Emphasizing that these technologies were capable of being easily switched off or jammed, Moshfegh said that the wireless Net would be implemented instead with pseudo-GPS information obtained by the drones with the help of physical landmarks or a vast array of sensors on the ground, which would generate the location information through triangulation. Currently the team is working with 20-pound drones that were initially developed by Advanced Ceramics Research in Tucson, Arizona, to locate and track whales. Part of the AINS program, the Smart Warfighter Array of Reconfigurable Modules (SWARM) provides the autonomous intelligent control for collaborative flights and navigation of the mobile drones. Carrying a wide variety of sensors, including biological hazard sensors, audio sensors, real-time video, infrared and night-vision cameras, the drones are capable of flying 24 hours without refueling at speeds of up to 60 mph. So far, Moshfegh has been able to connect about 9 to 10 nodes to the network. "Research is on scalability, e.g., 10,000 or greater. Scaling up the nodes increases difficulties at a number of levels such as resolution of information transmitted, fuel consumption ... etc. In the end only a handful of people should be needed to manage the network. It would be totally unacceptable to have 400 or so people managing a network of say 10,000 nodes." And will all this lead to a safer world? Gerla thinks so. "Armies of drones will exist and will help not only to combat conventional battles, but also to assist in disaster prevention/recovery and homeland defense operations," he said. "In that respect, this approach will definitely make the world safer as it performs functions that humans cannot support. "As for the conventional battlefield, the problem of out-of-control armies of drones will not occur; it will be prevented by the fact that there is a limit with the level of decisions made by the drones and the scope of their range. In other words, the drones can intelligently organize to execute a mission in the most efficient way. But, it is the commander that 'pulls the trigger.'" ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> 4 DVDs Free +s&p Join Now http://us.click.yahoo.com/pt6YBB/NXiEAA/MVfIAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2002-10-01 06:44:32 PDT