American sailors are quickly moving from the high seas into river combat. The Pentagon is looking for a crawling, self-defending, largely autonomous robot that can join ‘em.
Don’t get me wrong: the U.S. Navy still loooves its giant warships, cruising on the "blue" waters of the open ocean. But lately, with all that fighting on the bank of the Tigris and the Euphrates, sailors have been trading that blue water for rivers’ brown. Two Navy riverene squadrons of 224 men each are already in action, with a third set to join them. At least one is scheduled to patrol Iraq’s waterways this year. So now that those sailors and headed into rivers’ muddy, shallow waters, the Defense Department would like some robots that handle the job, too. Darpa, the Pentagon’s wild research arm, has put out the call for an "Unmanned Underwater Riverine Craft," or UURC, that can scurry along the rivers’ floor.
The military has already invested into one such machine: the eight-legged Robo-Lobster. The faux crustacean, its maker once told me, uses "a proven design; it’s been doing it for over 4 million years."
But Darpa is looking for something way, way beyond what any lobster — mechanical or otherwise — could do. First off, the agency wants ot to be "deployable by air-drop, surface launch and subsurface launch," and to be able to "navigate submerged in rivers, inlets, and harbors as well as in coastal and shallow water areas." It should also "be capable of autonomous operation and evasion procedures underwater (maneuver, burrowing, use of obscurants, hibernation mode) including bottom conditions such as in mud and sand particulate, weed beds and rock strata."
To move around in the muck, "touch, heat sensitive and acoustic devices will be needed for controlled bottom movement. A capability for bottom locomotion (crawling) is potentially beneficial in many applications," as well. The robo-critter should be able to go into a "sleep" mode, too – or "have the ability to regenerate or harvest power for sustained endurance operation."
When it’s awake, the UURC should be able to use everything from acoustic sensors to chemical sniffers to an infrared periscope to "provide underwater surveillance (against waterborne traffic, underwater obstacles, bottom and buried objects, specific vessels of interest)… under low visibility conditions." Once all that data is in hand, Darpa wants the bot to communicate surveillance and positional data" back to sailors, sitting on the river’s surface.
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/05/make_no_mistake/#ixzz11myJNohB
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