Noah Shachtman's Blog

It ain’t much to look at. But then, ODIS wasn’t designed to win robot beauty contests. ODIS, which stands for Omni Directional Inspection System, is one of a score of small military ground robots developed by universities in recent years and now seeing its first real-world tests in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ODIS looks like a fat bathroom tile and moves like a hockey puck on tiny invisible wheels. It was designed in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Utah to assist military and law enforcement personnel in inspecting vehicles for bombs and contraband. The bot’s low profile and small size let it skate easily underneath any vehicle, where it uses a simple digital video camera to peer up at the vehicle’s undercarriage.

The first ODISs were “totally autonomous,” according to Terry Tierney, an engineer at the Army’s robotics labs at the Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren, Michigan. But users complained that they didn’t trust the bot, so TARDEC took the basic, autonomous ODIS and made it dumber.

Besides assuaging the fears of bot-phobic operators, this had the effect of making ODIS cheaper, meaning TARDEC and its university partner could make more of them for testing. The less-autonomous models were handed over to the Coast Guard and the California Highway Patrol, and later, to U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where suicide car-bombers (warning: graphic!) are a constant threat.

Getting feedback from the deployed test models is difficult, says TARDEC’s Bill Smuda, since the operators are more focused on using the system than writing up reports about it. So periodically, Smuda goes on the road with his menagerie of small bots – to places like Baghdad – and sees for himself how they perform.

Based on this, TARDEC has made several fixes to ODIS in anticipation of greater military demand for the system. Engineers have added a metal “zipper mast” that unrolls from inside the robot to elevate a camera for peering into truck beds. They’ve also made the wheels detachable. In a 10-minute operation, you can add bigger wheels for off-roading. They’ve designed additional fixtures including cameras and claws to give operators choices. Finally, TARDEC has switched the ODIS control console from a unique proprietary system to one that’s based on the Xbox gaming controller. Why? “Because,” Smuda says, “you can buy them in the PX,” or post-exchange – the military’s department stores. So if your ODIS controller breaks, even in back-woods Afghanistan, a replacement isn’t far off.

ODIS is just one of several types of Unmanned Ground Vehicles that is slowly and subtly transforming the way soldiers fight. The fundamental idea is “standoff.” That is, keeping soldiers at a distance while expendable robots go into harm’s way.

–David Axe, cross-posted at War Is Boring and Ares

My recent piece on Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in Wired News> traces a familiar pattern in the evolution of air warfare. When balloons were invented they were first used for observation, then for bombing. The first fragile biplanes flying over the trenches in WWI were unarmed, but within a few years they carrying machine guns and bombs. Unmanned Air Vehicles like Predator were flying reconnaissance for years before they were armed for strike missions.
(UAV pedants note: the V-1 doesn’t count as it was only ever one-way)

So it’s not surprising that British SAS troopers should decide that rather than just spying on Taliban with their WASP micro air vehicles, they should be able to take them out. Sticking a small C4 charge on these toy-sized craft is a relatively crude approach, but one that should effectively convert them from silent spies to stealth assassins. And at $3,000 a time they are by no means the most expensive weapon around.

But, as the article explains, the US Air Force has much more ambitious plans for arming MAVs to take out installations, vehicles and people. They might initially be used individually like the SAS’s WASPs, but the obvious approach is to release swarms of them as I have previously described – networked robots forming an efficient single unit.

One area I did not have space for was the use of incendiaries, which can be far more effective than explosive pound-for-pound. This is real ‘fire-ant warfare’.

A single insect-sized MAV carrying a few milliliters of napalm would be a dangerous nuisance, especially indoors or inside a vehicle. Several dozen of them would be lethal, especially when they can locate stored fuel or ammunition. Just program them to look for those distinctive ‘danger inflammable’ signs

Similarly, thermite could give tiny robots a disproportionate destructive capability. A mixture of powdered metal and metal oxide, it burns at very high temperature (up to over 2,500 degrees centigrade), enough to turn most metals to liquid. It can burn through metal; in WWII, thermite charges were used as a quick way of disabling artillery. It would not take too much thermite to make an artillery barrel hazardous to use; and surface-to-air missile batteries are an obvious target.

One armed MAV, or ‘termite with thermite’, would not be too much of a menace, but dozens or hundreds could be effective, against even large installations. The small size of the warhead is offset by the extreme precision with which it can be placed by the sort of flying/crawling robot insect which the Air Force has in mind.

This should help put the earlier report on swarming robot cockroaches intended to attack underground installations into perspective. Such weapons are too indiscriminate to be used in an urban environment, but in an enemy bunker, everything is fair game. Stamp on one and the thermite will burn through your shoes and keep going…

Individual cockroaches can burn through grilles or other obstacles, making a way for the rest of the swarm. With their collective intelligence they can identify the complexes vulnerable points, and by combining together, they can destroy most things. When the lights in your bunker start to go out and the air fills with the smoke of burning insulation, how long would you hang around?

– David Hambling

Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles, or UCAVs, have a rather sad history in the U.S. military. When the General Atomics RQ-1 Predator proved, in the 1990s, that you could arm a medium-sized surveillance drone with air-to-ground weapons and turn it into an elusive, lethal and relatively cheap hunter-killer, folks in the Pentagon got real excited. They wanted to take that basic concept, throw some money at it and see what happened if you designed a drone from the ground-up to be a killer. Boeing was working on one of these so-called UCAVs, the X-45, for the Air Force. Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, had the X-47, which was beefed up for Navy use. Both programs were joint efforts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Looking to boost economies of scale, in 2003 the Pentagon brought both X-planes into the same program, called Joint-Unmanned Combat Air System. As J-UCAS picked up steam, Darpa relinquished control in 2005 and the military took over. A fly-off was imminent. The future looked bright.

Then, without warning in January 2006, the Air Force dropped out, effectively killing J-UCAS. The service said it had decided to focus money and effort on the new Long-Range Strike program to develop a new (perhaps unmanned) bomber. But folks inside the Boeing X-45 office said that was a load of bull and advanced their theories: that the Air Force was scared that the cheap, smart and lethal UCAVs might threaten the manned Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning fighter and start putting fighter pilots out of business; or that the Air Force was uncomfortable sharing technology with the Navy and letting the sea service call any shots in the UCAVs’ designs. (Navy airplanes have to be considerably bulkier and heavier than Air Force planes in order to survive repeated aircraft carrier launches and recoveries.)

Whatever the reason, the Navy was left to salvage something from J-UCAS. They renamed the program, first to N-UCAS for “Naval” then to UCAS-D for “Demonstration.” And they announced their intention to keep both industry teams in the running. It’s taken an entire year for the Navy to piece UCAS-D together; the request for proposals is due any day now. But whether it will eventually produce a real live combat aircraft is anybody’s guess. Technological hurdles are few – but cultural, fiscal and organizational obstacles abound.

Sources inside the Boeing X-45 program say that the office has been effectively split in two, with some staff still surviving on remaining J-UCAS funds and others spending company money while awaiting the Navy contract. Problem is, these two camps are prohibited from working together, for political reasons. And those residing the viable Navy half of the office are apparently being rather mismanaged – encouraged to do advanced work on X-45 despite the contract and prospects for government money being some months away. That’s risky, especially in light of the tenuous health of Boeing’s other drone programs, which have been stripped of people and money in order to keep UCAS-D going. No word on whether Northrop Grumman is suffering similar in-fighting. Probably not, considering that X-47 has long been Navy-optimized and also bearing in mind the firm’s tremendous success with the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone.

After a bullish decade, aerial drones are getting a reality check. The Pentagon has cast its lot with manned fighters over UCAVs and the Army is cutting in half its portfolio of future airborne drones in order to save cash; meanwhile, the Air Force seems to prefer a manned bomber for the Long-Range Strike mission. But if the Navy stands by UCAS-D, drones’ future just might turn around.

–David Axe, cross-posted at Ares

ALSO:
* Killer Drone Plan Revealed
* Killer Drone Construction Begins
* Killer Drone’s Big Brother
* Killer Drone, Dead; New Bomber Lives
* Who Killed the Killer Drone – and Why?
* Who Killed the Killer Drone? (Redux)