There’s the shopworn military cliche about every soldier being a sensor. And then there’s Darpa’s out-there project to shrink thermal imaging down to the point where it would fit on a cellphone screen or a rifle sight. The Pentagon’s research branch wants personal infrared imaging that’s good enough to tell a soldier whether armed adversary is coming right at him.
The cellphone industry may just want to give a sloppy kiss to the Pentagon’s futurists for this one. A solicitation Darpa sent out yesterday calls for the development of “wafer”-sized thermal imagery sensors and optics. That’s meant to remedy a “key shortfall” for today’s troops: the lack of mobile, individualized heat vision — no blasters, please — for spotting living forms in low-visibility environments.
One objective is to create a “high throughput thermal camera” mounted on a gunsight or a vehicle dashboard. Another is to put the camera on “a small handheld platform (ex. cell phone).” Break out your phone’s camera and tune it to infrared, and you’ll have an edge up on stealthy terrorists or the neighborhood trick-or-treaters.
Only the goals of the project are more ambitious than what your typical data plan provides. The resolution of the imaging has to ultimately aid in the “identification” of targets. That is, it’s not enough to detect an “upright, stationary adult human being.” The sensors should allow users to “determine that personnel target(s) are present and that the target(s) are potentially an immediate threat (i.e., with RPG/Rifle) to the host vehicle/soldier/etc.”
In other words, upgrading grainy night vision won’t cut it. As to how someone tells whether the gentlemen with a gun is a danger or another member of the team, that’s less obvious. But it’s worth noting that a Hungarian company that specializes in GPS recently rolled out a smartphone app that tells troops where known friendly and enemy forces are, similar to the military’s Blue Force Tracker detection devices. Darpa’s Low-Cost Thermal Imager Manufacturing (LCTI-M) project is supposed to be compatible with existing military sensor systems, so maybe it wouldn’t be too difficult to design a plugin.
And just in case you thought Darpa hadn’t considered the commercial applications of cell phone thermal imaging: “If successful, the IR [infrared] cell phone camera-like approach will lead to widespread proliferation in military and consumer products,” the solicitation reads. “Similar to visible cameras, the IR cell phone camera products will lead to a continued quest for improved cost-efficiency in various manufacturing methodologies, making it more attractive in the commercial sectors.”
Handheld and tablet devices are all the rage in military circles these days. Special Operations Command is building an app suite compatible with Android phones. In March, the Army launched an app-building contest, leading to everything from physical-fitness trainers to portals for learning how violent a particular area is. At the Army’s big D.C. annual conference, contractors lined up to show how good their cartography apps are. All this looks toward the day when tablets and smartphones are standard issue for troops.
That’s one of the reasons that the thermal imaging project has the words “Low-Cost” in the title. Everything — the cameras themselves, the optics, the software, manufacturing, everything — has to cost under $500 per unit. If it costs more, the thinking goes, it won’t be practical to issue to troops; for the same reason, the “thermal core” of the camera has to weigh less than 25 grams.
Good luck keeping costs down. Engineers will have three years to develop working, cheap, personal thermal camera prototypes.
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