Several years from now, Navy scientists hope, bomb squads will strap a sensor to a robot that will hunt for bombs by blasting the ground in front of it with sound waves. The mischievous creature virtually “digging” through the earth? The Navy calls that a Gremlin.
Or, more precisely, GREMLIN — an acronym for Ground-Based Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Laser Interrogation. (Well, close enough.) Earlier this month, the defense giant BAE Systems got $2 million from the mad scientists at the Office of Naval Research to study the feasibility of a “small laser interferometric sensor system” for bomb hunters.
Brian Almquist, the Navy’s program officer for GREMLIN, explains that the sensors will use an “acoustic source, something that makes noise” to vibrate a patch of turf that military explosive experts suspect might hide a buried bomb. The basic principle — studying the patterns of waves when they’re disrupted by a stimuli in order to develop an image — is a staple of astronomy or oceanography. It makes sense: Insurgent bombs aren’t easy to find from a distance, especially when they’re buried beneath a road or under a pile of trash.
“We put sound into the ground, things vibrate and we image that expression of that vibration on the ground,” Almquist tells Danger Room.
It’s basically a system to “see” beneath the ground, with the image mapped by the vibrations displaying if there’s anything unusual implanted below — like the homemade bombs that insurgents in Afghanistan hide underfoot. The idea is to display the subterranean image on a screen attached to the controls of a ground robot — the Army’s WALL-E-like Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, for instance — that will carry the GREMLIN. Mogwais sold separately.
Despite its namesake, the Navy’s GREMLIN isn’t an instrument of chaos. It’ll only be designed to find bombs. It doesn’t blow them up.
And even finding the bombs is a long way off. Almquist explains that GREMLIN is in its infancy, getting started just this year, with at least three years of initial feasibility tests in front of it before there’s even a prototype system. BAE’s Hawaii-based scientists are in charge of the project, company spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.
It’s the latest Pentagon idea to combat the scourge of cheap, easily constructed bombs. The military has tried everything from jamming the signals sent from the bomb’s remote detonators to sniffing out the particular fertilizers used in bombs from up in the air. More baroque ideas involve sending robot cars to drive over potential minefields so the humans behind them don’t get blown up. But nothing’s been able to stop the proliferation of the bombs worldwide, despite about $20 billion in Pentagon research and development since 2004.
Sure, the GREMLIN will be used on dry land, but the Navy — which funds a variety of explosives detection systems research — isn’t bothered. “We just want get the warfighter out of the minefield and put more capability onto robots,” Almquist says, “so we can detect things in the ground rather than have a person go out there to risk their life.” Still, you might not want to get the sensor wet.
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