DARPA producing sea-floor pods that can release attack drones on command

The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, is developing robot pods that can sit at the bottom of the ocean for long stretches of time, waiting to release airborne and water-based drones to the surface upon an attack command.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently called for bids to complete the final two phases of its Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program. The UFP operation is an effort to position unmanned systems around far-flung regions of the sea floor. The housing pods would be left in place for years in anticipation of the US Navy’s need for non-lethal assistance.

The UFPs would come equipped with electronic and low-power laser attack capabilities, surveillance sensors, and airborne and aquatic drones that would have the ability to act as decoys or offer intelligence and targeting data, Ars Technica reported.

DARPA recently solicited proposals for the UFP. It wrote, “To succeed, the UFP program must be able to demonstrate a system that can: (angel) survive for years under extreme pressure, (beer) reliably be triggered from standoff commands, and (coffee) rapidly rise through the water column and deploy a non-lethal payload.”

Autonomous, non-lethal systems are the priority for DARPA, given the remoteness of the UFPs’ stationing on the ocean floor. Recovery in the deep ocean would be difficult, and the pods with weaponry or hazardous materials could cause harm to ships upon expiration.

The UFP program’s first phase, launched in 2013, focused on designs for the robot pods and the capsules that will live inside, as well as communication logistics for UFPs to communicate with other modules. The next phase aims to develop prototype testing and demonstrations at sea in the next couple of years. The third and final stage will include “full depth” testing of various scattered modules working as one system by spring 2017.

Much of the UFP testing will likely occur in the Western Pacific, given the United States’ ongoing “pivot” to the region – not coincidentally near China’s realm. Other tests will occur near US shores to reduce costs.

DARPA is seeking a 59 percent increase for the Upward Falling Payloads budget, from $11.9 million to $19 million, it was reported in March.

In addition, DARPA has asked for a boost to its budget for underwater drone fleets. The agency has asked for its current spending to double, from $14.9 million to $29.9 million, for its Hydra program. Hydra was conceived to be a large, mothership-like craft capable of moving through the water and deploying a number of smaller surveillance drones.

The research agency also announced recently that it is launching a program to unite existing and future drones into hives, where individual autonomous aircraft will share data and operate together against targets on a battlefield under the oversight of human operators. More

 

© 2014

How Cell Phone Tech Resulted In The Spookiest Surveillance Camera On Earth

Everyone marveled when the iPhone 4S came equipped with a full high definition video camera. Little did they know that the race to miniaturize cell phone cameras led to quite possibly the spookiest surveillance camera on earth.

Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, or ARGUS-IS, which we recently covered, is the result of a low budget and 368 cannibalized cell phone cameras, slammed together to create the largest, finest surveillance camera in the world.

Attached to a predator drone, the camera records approximately 1 trillion gigabytes of information in a single day. More

 

 

The ARGUS-IS, or the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project contracted to BAE Systems. According to DARPA:^[1]

The mission of the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program is to provide military users a flexible and responsive capability to find, track and monitor events and activities of interest on a continuous basis in areas of interest. The overall objective is to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time to influence events. ARGUS - IS provides military users an "eyes-on" persistent wide area surveillance capability to support tactical users in a dynamic battlespace or urban environment. More

Darpa’s Next Drone Could Be a Datalink Between Planes and Ships

The Pentagon’s far-out research scientists aren’t just trying to build a drone that can operate off the deck of a small warship. They’re starting to describe their new-mark flying robot as a device that bridges the communication systems between ships and aircraft.

And if they can pull it off, Darpa will be giving the U.S. military a capability it badly needs for one of its major initiatives.

Last month, Darpa announced a program to design something called the TERN, for Tactically Exploitative Reconnaissance Node, a surveillance and strike drone that can fly up to 900 miles from the deck of a destroyer or Littoral Combat Ship. Darpa wants it to be “substantially beyond current state-of-the-art aviation capabilities from smaller ships,” according to the full, formal solicitation for the drone that the agency released Tuesday.

And how. The solicitation seems to emphasize the “Node” aspect of TERN. Among the intriguing requirements that Darpa “encouraged” its potential research teams to explore is the ability for the drone to “exploit cooperation between aircraft and ship to achieve enhanced performance. Such cooperation could potentially take the form of data exchange, external energy addition, or manipulation of the recovery environment.”

That doesn’t sound like too much, but the implications are significant, and they go way beyond drone warfare.

Most significantly, the Navy and the Air Force are working on a master concept for future partnered operations called AirSea Battle. AirSea Battle is inchoate and confusing. Its Pentagon architects have yet to articulate how specifically long-range bombers and stealth jets are supposed to work alongside carrier strike groups, submarines or close-to-shore fighters like the Littoral Combat Ship.

But even if they figure all that out, the leaders of the Navy and Air Force have conceded that they’ll still face another “foundational” challenge, as the former Air Force chief of staff put it in May. Navy ships and Air Force planes don’t have a common communications architecture. “Our links need to be similar,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert told a panel discussion on AirSea Battle back then, “or at least minimally compatible.” If you can’t talk to each other, you can’t fight together.

It’s unclear how the Navy and the Air Force will come to speak the same language. The TERN program points to a potential solution: Design the data links on a long-endurance drone at sea to be bilingual. It surely won’t be easy to build a software layer that can communicate with both Air Force planes and Navy ships. But it’s probably easier, and cheaper, than retrofitting the communications systems on planes, subs and ships for maximum compatibility or demanding that defense companies build future flying and sailing platforms with that goal in mind. More