The U.S. amassed an army of bomb-handling robots to spot explosives on the roads of Iraq. In the farms and culverts of Afghanistan, those machines have had trouble finding and reaching the weapons. The robots weren’t built for off-roading. And soldiers are dying as a result — eight in the last two weeks alone. No wonder the Army is now scrambling for a new crop of machines: things that can take Afghanistan’s rugged terrain, and find bombs that rely on soldiers’ errant footsteps to explode, not devices like cellphones that give off detectable signals.
The Army’s recent request to companies is basically a wishlist. It needs a bomb-finding, “tele-operated” robot that’s navigable through “rough terrain, 45 degree hills, rocks, holes, culverts and other obstacles” — read: Afghanistan — and can withstand the dust, trash and gunk that war zones force into the guts of machines. It’s got to be able to talk to troops’ radio frequencies for alerts and mesh with existing bomb-signal jammers. It needs to be to be light enough to carry and stuff in a truck; good for at least six hours without needing its battery recharged; and able to keep up with soldiers on a dismounted patrol on uneven terrain. It needs to work within 30 seconds of powering on and be impervious to conditions as cold as 22 below zero or warm as 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
And you can bet that if the Army had this stuff already, it wouldn’t need to put out the request. What’s up with the military’s expensive, bomb-spotting robots?
The Defense Department has spent about $19 billion since 2004 trying to beat back the scourge of the improvised explosive device, the signature weapon of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But while the bombs in Iraq are way different than the bombs in Afghanistan, the detection techniques in Afghanistan are often carried over from Iraq.
Afghanistan’s bombs typically rely on fertilizers for their boom, with few metal and electronic parts, unlike the rejiggered, remotely-detonated ordnance of Iraq’s bombs. And with pressure plates, a favorite technique of Afghan insurgents, a bomb explodes when someone’s body weight presses two metal-lined plates together to complete a circuit, sending a charge to the bomb’s explosive source. Sometimes that metal is as thin as two sheets of cigarette foil lining the underside of wooden planks. Yet troops in Afghanistan are issued metal detectors to use for weapons hunts.
Making matters worse, the robotic bomb detectors the military has work better on paved roads — like in the urban areas of Iraq — and not the unpaved wilderness of Afghanistan, where bombs lie in drainage ditches, craggy farmland and culverts. Some robots just can’t handle the terrain. The treaded Talon ordnance-disposal ‘bot weighs 125 pounds — not the sort of thing you’d want to tip over on jagged sun-baked clay or grassy dirt during a bomb hunt. The 32-pound, iRobot-modeled Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle can climb a few feet by “standing” on its front treads, but the Army is still testing it.
And the Army needs durable bomb-finders now. Its request talks about acquiring the machines on “a significantly reduced timeline compared to traditional Department of Defense acquisition procedures.” As one study concluded, bureaucracy can be a homemade bomb’s best friend.
It’s not that the military doesn’t already use lots of Afghanistan-specific methods of attacking homemade bombs and the networks that build them. It equips planes with sensors that hunt the chemical signatures of the Taliban’s fertilizer-based bombs and conducts forensics tests to determine who built what lethal device. But there were 2,677 roadside-bomb incidents in 2007, and with two months to go until 2010 is over, there’ve been 10,500 this year.
Turning the tide’s going to require, among other things, a few good robots. The chief operating officer of iRobot — a veteran military bot-maker that’s received $286 million so far for “xBot” bomb-hunters — has some ideas for where military robotics goes next. “Little by little,” retired Vice Admiral Joseph Dyer toldScientific American this week, “robots will be able to autonomously complete more and more complex assignments to the point where you can program them with actual missions.” For now, let’s see if they can perform the easier tasks of route clearance — in places where the routes are as improvised as the bombs they’re trying to stop.
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