Bugging the enemy with micro UAVs

Dayton Daily News:

Imagine an unmanned aerial vehicle the size of a bird or even an insect, equipped with flapping wings so it could fly between buildings and even into rooms to gather intelligence about the United States' enemies.

Air Force Research Laboratory scientists have created a micro air vehicle team with goals of demonstrating the concept of a bird-sized UAV by 2015 and a bug-sized one by 2020. The vehicles may not be ready for deployment by then, but they would be intended to support the Air Force's goals of being able to locate, target, assess and engage any potential enemy anytime and anywhere — even inside a room, said Doug Blake, deputy director of the laboratory's air vehicles directorate.

"You can envision scenarios where a thing I want to find would be in a place where a big air vehicle would not be able to find it," Blake said in an interview Monday, Oct. 27. "Something that crawls around like a bug and flies around like a bird might be able to get into that room to see."

...

A story on a six inch log bat size UAV is here. I think it would be possible for the small UAVs to be launched from a mother ship UAV. Think about the bat size UAV being dropped in the area of a cave in Afghanistan, then it would drop the bee sized UAV in position to fly into the cave with nigh vision equipment to see who was inside.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:01 PM

    Are you familiar with the "hunter-seeker" in Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more

Apple's huge investment in US including Texas facility

Blaze: Apple announced a $500 billion commitment to infrastructure in the United States over four years, its largest commitment to domestic spending to date. Apple said it will expand teams and facilities in Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington as part of its new spending. With a new facility in Houston, Texas, Apple will reportedly double its investment in advanced manufacturing along with increasing investments in AI and silicon engineering. The company said in a press release that the Houston facility will produce servers to support Apple Intelligence, the "personal intelligence system that helps users write, express themselves, and get things done." ... The Texas facility will be for advanced technologies.   Texas has become a place that is very supportive of the tech industries.  Austin and Houston have seen much of the tech growth in the state.  Texas universities have been active in the AI field.
Read more