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Category: military

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a great navigation aid – unless you lose the signal while negotiating a complicated spaghetti junction. That’s bad enough for conventional cars, but for autonomous vehicles it could be catastrophic, so the University of California, Riverside’s Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory under Zak Kassas is developing an alternative navigation system that uses secondary radio signals, such as from cell phone systems and Wi-Fi to either complement existing GPS-based systems or as a standalone alternative that is claimed to be highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof.

Today, there are two global satellite navigation systems in operation, the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS, with the European Galileo system set to become fully operational in the next few years, and plans for the Chinese Beidou system to extend globally by 2020. These have revolutionized navigation, surveying, and a dozen other fields, but GPS and related systems still leave much to be desired. By their nature, GPS signals are weak and positions need to be confirmed by several satellites, so built up areas or mountainous areas can make the system useless. In addition, GPS signals can be deliberately or accidentally jammed or spoofed due to insufficient encryption and other protections.

In military circles, various supplementary systems are employed with everything from submarines to foot soldiers also using Inertial Navigation System (INS) that emply accelerometers and compasses to calculate positions from the last good GPS fix, but these only work for a limited time before they start to drift.

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Fuel/ energy efficient method for travel is my guess.

The US Air Force’s unmanned X-37B space plane has now spent more than 500 days orbiting the Earth, without statement or explanation. The 29-foot unmanned plane is part of the Air Force’s orbital program.

Launched May 20, 2015, it is the program’s fourth flight (hence its other name, OTV-4 for Orbital Test Vehicle-4). The first OTV took flight in 2010 and spent 224 days in orbit; two others brought the total number of OTV days in orbit before 2015 to 1,367, according to the Air Force.

The full purpose or intent of the program? The US Air Force remains mum. The Air Force will only say in its program factsheet that the initiative is to “demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the US Air Force. The primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America’s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.

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China’s latest work on QC.

If early mechanical computers were never introduced to expand people’s computing ability, the invention of the atomic bomb would have gone out the window, and human history would have been rewritten.

This highlights the significance of computer simulation in scientists’ exploration of the physical world, which also explains their strong motivation in continuously pursuing higher computing power.

In a recent case, Chinese scientists managed to tremendously enhance such power — they succeeded in performing quantum simulation with atoms in extraordinarily cold conditions.

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Unfortunately I think the Pentagon is right. We are quickly heading into a dystopian future.

“Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a video created by the Army and used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University.

The video is nothing if not an instant dystopian classic: melancholy music, an ominous voiceover, and cascading images of sprawling slums and urban conflict. “Megacities are complex systems where people and structures are compressed together in ways that defy both our understanding of city planning and military doctrine,” says a disembodied voice. “These are the future breeding grounds, incubators, and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid threats.”

The video was used as part of an “Advanced Special Operations Combating Terrorism” course offered at JSOU earlier this year, for a lesson on “The Emerging Terrorism Threat.” JSOU is operated by U.S. Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for America’s most elite troops. JSOU describes itself as geared toward preparing special operations forces “to shape the future strategic environment by providing specialized joint professional military education, developing SOF specific undergraduate and graduate level academic programs and by fostering special operations research.”

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If the Defense Department is looking to implement blockchain, other organizations may quickly follow suit. Blockchain technology helps guarantee that information has a timestamp and recorded whenever any change happens, ensuring data can be trusted in real time. In DARPA’s case, blockchain technology could help track attempted data breaches.

“Whenever weapons are employed … it tends to be a place where data integrity in general is incredibly important,” Booher said. “So nuclear command and control, satellite command and control, command and control in general, [information integrity] is very important.”

In September, DARPA awarded a $1.8 million contract to computer security firm Galois, asking it to verify a specific type of blockchain technology from a company called Guardtime. If the verification goes well, the military could become one of a growing number of industries and institutions using blockchain to help ensure the security of their operations.

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Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of National Defense Lee Hsi-ming recently said Taipei is seriously considering organizing its own DARPA to accelerate the research, development and application of military technology.

Lee’s statement, which was made at the 14th annual US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Virginia, followed media reports saying Taiwan lags behind other East Asian countries in establishing a DARPA-like agency. Japan and China have already organized advanced defense research establishments.

Lee’s announcement about establishing a “Taiwanese DARPA,” however, triggered debate among legislators in the country’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan. Critics of the proposed think tank said the proposal for its creation might become a contentious policy item since it will require sharing or distributing funds across agencies.

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A look at the military 10 years into the future—human soldier deaths become unacceptable:

THERE will be no longer be human casualties of war from wealthy countries within 10 years as advanced militaries will begin sending MACHINES to warzones to do their bidding, an expert has claimed.

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Got a bee shortage? No problem, DARPA has you covered.

Following the news that the honeybee is now officially an endangered species as “colony collapse disorder” accelerates, it seems that a Harvard research team has the solution – robotic honeybees. Instead of attempting to save the bees by reducing the use of pesticides or revising safety standards for cell phone radiation, the focus has shifted to replacing the bees altogether. Harvard University researchers, led by engineering professor Robert Wood have been tweaking “RoboBees” since their initial introduction in 2009. The bee-sized robots made of titanium and plastic represent a breakthrough in the field of micro-aerial vehicles. The size of the components needed to create flying robots were previously too heavy to make a such a small structure lightweight enough to achieve flight. Current models weigh only 80 mg and have been fitted with sensors that detect light and wind velocity.

Researchers claim that the bees could artificially pollinate entire fields of crops and will soon be able to be programmed to live in an artificial hive, coordinate algorithms and communicate among themselves about methods of pollination and the locations of particular crops. In addition, RoboBees have been suggested for other uses including searching disaster sites for survivors, monitoring traffic, and “military and police applications.” These applications could include using RoboBees to “scout for insurgents” on battlefields abroad or allowing police and SWAT teams to use the micro-robots to gather footage inside buildings.

The RoboBees project originally began at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998 when neurobiologist Michael Dickinson, electrical engineer Ron Fearing, and then-grad student Rob Wood received a $2.5 million grant from DARPA to create an insect drone. Dickinson now continues his work at the University of Washington while Wood heads the principal RoboBee micro-robotics lab at Harvard. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US military, is best known for its role in helping create the internet, but a vast majority of their taxpayer-funded projects paint a decidedly dystopian picture of humanity’s future. Most of DARPA’s projects involve transhumanism, the merging of humans and machines to create a technologically governed populace.

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