Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it’s beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon’s answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to “detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments.” It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”
The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type — just 60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.
Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.
The way they’d keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track objects and people within the sensor net.
“The best way to learn about an adversary – what he’s done, what he’s doing, and what he’s likely to do – is through continual observation using as many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent surveillance,” Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa’s Information Exploitation Office, told a conference last year. “We’ve learned that occasional or periodic snapshots don’t tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to really understand what’s going on we have to observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out.”
According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new, minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of fiscal year 2007.
UPDATE 8:50 AM: Speaking of military omniscience, Darpa’s “Combat Zones That See” effort, meant to network together an entire city’s worth of surveillance cameras, gets $5 million in next year’s budget.
I feel sick. Is it better to be dead or one of the world’s most impoverished people living in a remote disease-infested jungle (if any are left)? The nazis are winning, despite 1945.
That was the fastest one I’ve ever seen.
Fastest Godwinning, that is. Forgot the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law
What in the hell do nazis have to do with any of this? Just out of curiosity.
Mmm sounds like anohter link in our “matrix/spider” system.
http://www.defense-update.com/products/s/spider.htm
Put with a little creative thinking and hiding these things in bricks/rocks and such around bases or known enemy transit zones and yeah it becomes a real bad day to be a bad guy.
This will probably be one of the vaporware that will fade away just like such blimps, due to its limited storage of power leading to limited time of operation, and the nightmare of dealing with information overload, consuming too much time determining which encounter was just a civilian, wildlife, or a terrorist. What a worthless thing for Defense Tech to write an article about this.
I think “kalisana” is confusing “nazis” with Big Brother.
It’s interesting to imagine these working in urban environments. I’m curious how they will know the difference between a bad guy and a guy walking down the street.
Or in the case of Bagdad, how to tell the difference between an iraqi police officer that wants to uphold the law of the land and one that wants to execute opposing contrymen.
Scott
Come-on man “how will they tell the difference”?
Think more like placed ehh say around military bases or strategic locals and when say a truck pulls up and two Jihadi’s jump out set up a mortar tube in the back of the truck aimed at the local maybe that will determine their allegiance.
Or lets say a sniper pops a couple of rounds in zone 6 then a video pics him up stashing a Dragoon AK in a alley. Maybe telling.
Zone 8 pics up 5 guys wearing their colors packing AK’s & RPG’s coming in yeah may want to send a welcome committee. Or even better a young Jihadi passing out propaganda or threatening the guy we just talked to earlier.
Say we know the AQ are in a certain village but no one will talk we roll in do our thing roll out. Kick back at base and see whose house is tomorrows raid target.
It’s called surveillance and yeah like most things it requires some freekin common sense. By the way large numbers of those “boots on the ground” do just this type of thing. Even patrols are a type of snap shot surveillance. An unknown camera or sensor would put the fear of god in the enemy sow confusion and discontent. How would they know it was a camera or old Akmed we scooped last weak that ratted on their weapons storage at Babi’s, hell maybe it was Babi or one of the neighbors.
And as to the Nazi Bawahhaah well Big Brother somewhat reasonable thing. When they start putting these things here in the states I am with you. But putting these things in the middle of a hostile foreign battlefield I say do it do it yesterday. Foreigners don’t respect our laws and we owe them no constitution protections that we by our allegiance/PATROITISM to the constitution and US are owed in return.
This might not seem as farfetch as you might imagine. There are several companies thats doing this today deploying real wireless networked sensor systems in industrial applications. I would suggest you take a look at http://www.xbow.com and http://www.dustnetworks.com. Of course with curent commerically available radio technology, we probably won’t be able to achieve the goal of 180 days run time at full power. But we are close. We can duty cycle our systems to achieve years run time but with better lower power radios it’s not to far fetch to imagine these system coming on line in a few years especially with darpa involved.
looking at the picture: looks like one of those fold your money craft projects. kind of like when you take a dollar bill and make a ring out of it. seriously, looks really fake and kind of like money instead of camo. maybe they’ll hide it in war profiteer bank vaults. at least that would prevent the electronics from being scavenged for ‘ide’s because the camouflage wouldn’t fool anyone. the spider, mentioned in a previous comment, while larger looks like a better candidate for buried sensor gear. though with that, where is the antenna exactly? anyway, if you want to hide this thing in among loose bricks then make it look like a brick.
-huh
Hey, boys, this technology is for real and it really works. About half the size of a pack of cigarettes now, most of the size is accounted for by batteries–the sensors are very, very small. As power packs come down in size, expect to see these things get very, very small. Check out Dust Networks (http://www.dustnetworks.com).
Not really farfetched, since law enforcement agencies have been placing cameras and microphones for decades. I would worry about any number of things, but off the top of my head is the likelihood that the enemy will do what the Mob does: use sweeping gadgets to locate and destroy the little critters. The other would be what pedestrian mentioned: the simple impossibility of processing that much information.
Think of a satellite. A satellite can be optimized to “read license plates,” as they put it, or it can be optimized to follow the flow of traffic. But it can’t really do both. You have to choose and that logic can be extended to most surveillance situations. You can watch one thing very closely or keep a general eye on a lot of things. There simply won’t be enough resources to “wire” an entire city. I agree that if you’re pursuing a small group of guys through the city or keeping watch on a particular cell, it would make a lot of sense, and that’s certainly a useful tactical advantage, but I don’t see it changing the overall situation in Baghdad or anywhere else.
They deliver them in the same ordinance they deliver anti-personel bomblets.
Back in 1970, I worked on a similar project from Sandia that consisted of a sensor, FM receiver, FM transmitter and battery module, all slipped into an armored shell. They were shot or dropped into Vietnam and each could be commanded on and off from a base station. The sensor could be a noise or vibration sensor module.
>Back in 1970, I worked on a similar project from Sandia that consisted of a sensor,
>FM receiver, FM transmitter and battery module, all slipped into an armored shell.
>They were shot or dropped into Vietnam and each could be commanded on and off from a base
>station. The sensor could be a noise or vibration sensor module.
>Posted by: PJ at March 30, 2006 10:48 AM
PJ, are you one of the people who worked on REMBASS!? Wow! I have always admired the developers of REMBASS, and the contribution of the basic concept for unattended ground sensors (UGS). I also dreamed having security audiovisual broadcasting system in the Vietnam War era, broacasting television images from towns and villegages with UHF/VHF (high grade long range zooming video cameras used by broadcasting corporations set up at towns broadcating images to the intelligence to detect enemy movement in the area). However, due to vulnerabilites for the images to be broadcast indiscriminately including television held by civilians, that might have forced cable networks. I never thought to see someone worked for the development milestone of UGS, the REMBASS over here.
PJ, I have always wanted to say thankyou as well as other staffs from bottom of my heart for you and the staffs contribution of UGS, saving lives. Without your contribution and efforts, as well as those who have worked on the project, we would have less options in low intensity conflicts, and close range combats. I thought about the concept years ago without knowing REMBASS, and was surprised one day to notice some one had come up with the same idea more than decades ago. You are our hero. Sensors are not exciting as weapons to some people, but I have always been one of the geeks who loved to know more about sensors. They don’t attack, but provide valuable information. Without sensors, there is no future of Information Technology. Sometimes they may save lives, and avoid harm to innocent. I hope the milestone of REMBASS will continue to lead to be bulit up on it for better systems, saving more lives. Even we may pass away some day, our systems will continue to live.
Good Morning Folks,
It looks like these remote sensors have scored their first “Kill” on an IED laying crew in Iraq.
The sensors found ‘em and an armed Preditor in the neighborhood got ‘em. The next level now will be to mate these bad boys/girls with the Northorp Grumman “Autonomous Killer Bees”.
To the crew at Nellis, good work, outstanding and well done. Now off to the Casinos.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
These things are certainly real. We were pitching the thing way back as the ELASTIC project, complete with the sneaky-wave comm links and motion locator feature.
To the guys saying it’s too small to have a lot of battery storage, that’s probably correct. However, sneaky-wave (the old name, now it’s UWB) is spectacularly efficient in terms of power-to-range. There’s a huge number of advantages to sneaky-wave in a gadget like this, not only is the power drain just a few milliWatts, the sensors can determine each others’ relative locations to a few millimeters, they can locate (and size) objects in the field between them, and the comm signal is effectively encrypted, although it might be more accurate to call it “non-observable”, since you can’t detect its presence with any sort of emission-spotting device.
There’s a lot you can do with this sort of thing, we had also pitched a sort of transparent super-ball looking version that you could just chunk out of your ruck as you went, with vibration sensors, audio and video inputs etc that would solar charge and transmit back only if something met a profile or if they were interrogated from a UAV. With enough of them in a network, you can do some data fusion and get a really good picture of what’s going on in the area.
Neat technology and glad to see it being used and effective. Noted the comments about REMBASS and offer some unattended sensor history for anyone interested.
It began with formation of a combined DoD Group and JTF in late 1966 to design, acquire and deploy unattended acoustic and seismic sensors along the DMZ and Ho Chi Minh Trail. The concept being to construct a ground infiltration detection system analog to the underwater submarine acoustic detection system.
The first sensors were deployed in less than a year. They were dropped from Phantom Jets; the acoustic sensors had chutes to slow them and hang them in trees; the seismic sensors dug into the ground to detect vehicle or foot traffic. Detections were transmitted to aircraft which relayed to a central point. Later, sensors were monitored from high ground for use in country in local areas. The groupings of sensors with a local monitoring site was called BASS (Battle Area Surveilance System) and was the progenitor of the Army REMBASS.
The Dod group was disbanded in 1972 and its products and technology transistioned to the Services. Besides a variety (sizes & shapes) of hand-emplaced and air-dropped acoustic and seismic sensors, there were magnetic and infrared sensors, night vision and starlight devices, and even a couple of foliage penetrating radars. One of the last items was a number of very small seismic sensors and a monitor for patrols to use for local intrusion warning.
A lot of technology was developed and deployed in a short time. The Group/JTF had Army,Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps members as well as civilians from DoD, Sandia and Mitre.
hey how cheap are these and where can i get them need to know asap