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that was darpa that stopped the funding on openbsd. a nice summary is available here

The scary thing is that this is absolutely true. Here is a the DARPA goal summary.

New Science for National Security: Defense Sciences Office Overview

Page 6 -
Brain Machine Interfaces - Beyond acting on thoughts to having thoughts act.
Enhanced Human Performance - Beyond frailties of life to super physiological performance.


Go zerg

The government is already on this.

New Science for National Security: Defense Sciences Office Overview

One of the the goals is to go "beyond the frailties of life to super physiological performance".

DARPA is strictly defense

True, they are doing research for the military, but this will trickle down to civilian applications, as the jet engine did, as micro-electronics did. Darpanet was the precursor to the Internet, originally designed as a redundant communications system that would survive a nuclear strike. Thats right, it was Darpa, not Al Gore, that invented the internet. I am a big fan of Darpa (except for the Total Information Awareness program). They do really cool stuff. If you haven't been to their web page yet, I am not sure you can call yourself a geek. They have some really cool stuff ranging from mind/machine interfaces, super soldier exoskeleton, stim-paks and "health" (almost like video game power ups for soldiers), super laser beams, and mini fuel cells. The goal of Darpa is to find 'the next big thing'.

The true killing fields type technology is done by other labs. Super computers go to the NSA; Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and others get Nukes (no Sandia jokes allowed, THEY WILL FIND YOU and send you to Gitmo); JPL does rockets; I don't want to think about the CIA Science Directorate without wearing my tinfoil hat. US Space Command is researching orbital weaponry able to strike worldwide in seconds(don't bother going to their web page, it has been scrubbed). The people at Darpa are the dreamers, free to think up the wildest, coolest stuff that is one step short of science fiction. Scientists usually get one or 2 year fellowships to do their work and then go back to academia or wherever they came from. their budgets are tiny and based on testing theories and finding proof of concepts (like can a robot drive itself 200 miles in rugged terrain quickly). Their work is largely free of the dark side of the force! Darpa rocks! If there is any branch of the government that is 'geekcool', it is Darpa.

Yes.

Each vehicle is followed by a manned one. Specifically, one of the team members and a contest official.

The team member has a "big read button" - which is a mandatory safety device - that is the vehicle is in danger of or actually goes off course can be used to shut it down.

Then you can get disqualified for it, upon the disgression of the cheif judge.

Check out the latest copy of the rules
=Smidge=

Model it after Battlebots or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Let entrants audition their robots in the same groundside Hubble-repair simulations used by Astronauts. Give the best entrant a ride to Hubble to make real fixes.

More discussion at Send Asimo to Save Hubble and Hubble Rescue Battlebots .

What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for.

We're working on technologies for that right now, through things like NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology mission and DARPA's Orbital Express program. Right now we don't have good sensors for bringing two crafts together under robotic or tele-robotic control. With luck, we'll have them working and working well in the very near future.

And yeah, I am a rocket scientist.

Find a dedicated concept or conceptual area to exploit. How to do this? Simply ask folks what areas they are having problems with software needs.

I'll tell you that a number of folks are doing quite well at the interface between biotech and software. The amount of data that is being generated by biotech is truly mind boggling and we need software tools for analysis and visualization of that data. Software that is capable of analyzing multi-dimensional datasets is particularly in demand right now with gene chip analysis and the work we do in our lab on molecular phenotyping. For instance, we are adopting software used in the remote sensing community to analyze "multispectral" data sets in the retina and other tissues and the communities that this software came from (GIS, Remote sensing, Intelligence) are very interested in software that can help distill multispectral data real time to enable streamlined processing and analysis. Your link to DARPA is particularly informative for these potential projects, but don't forget about other resources as well like the National Institutes of Health.

human assisted neuro devices

The government is working on something similar.

Let the military stay out of non-military institutions. They engineer stuff with one ultimate applicable purpuse only: killing human beings.

Not always true. The military has also granted funding to projects on how to create better parachutes; new surgical techniques; communications and team building; and many others.

Check out the DARPA Programs page to browse through and see what your tax dollars have paid for over the years. You might be surprised.

Here's the correct link: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Let's be realistic here. When has it not?

Computers were originally people who determined calculated firing tables. The first computers were used to calculate this information and break encryption codes.

The Internet is based on equipment and protocols that DARPA paid for. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Check out the current and recent solicitations.

I'll grant you that business plays a large role too. It funds its fair share, but it seems as though it is more practical and immediate. The military seems to fund things that might not be very practical now, but can possible provide the edge in battle.

In the '60s, GE had a project called "Hardiman". It was scrapped when they couldn't get the limbs to coordinate properly. It was also impractically heavy, at 1,500 pounds.

Currently, DARPA has a $50 million project dedicated to developing exoskeletons for US soldiers.

How Stuff Works has an article detailing some of the problems with developing exoskeletons with a few interesting links.

~~LF

You are so far off, this is great. Many great inventions like minianture fuel cells, micro electronics, velcro and other stuff came out of the military-insdustrial complex. I suppose you would be against Darpanet too...the project that led to the Internet. Go to the DARPA web page some time. They are doing amazing things (except for the Department of Information Awareness). Here are a few of my favorites.

bio signals

combat exoskeleton

neuro helmet(Anyone ever play battletech?)

laser guns

You are so far off, this is great. Many great inventions like minianture fuel cells, micro electronics, velcro and other stuff came out of the military-insdustrial complex. I suppose you would be against Darpanet too...the project that led to the Internet. Go to the DARPA web page some time. They are doing amazing things (except for the Department of Information Awareness). Here are a few of my favorites.

bio signals

combat exoskeleton

neuro helmet(Anyone ever play battletech?)

laser guns

You are so far off, this is great. Many great inventions like minianture fuel cells, micro electronics, velcro and other stuff came out of the military-insdustrial complex. I suppose you would be against Darpanet too...the project that led to the Internet. Go to the DARPA web page some time. They are doing amazing things (except for the Department of Information Awareness). Here are a few of my favorites.

bio signals

combat exoskeleton

neuro helmet(Anyone ever play battletech?)

laser guns

You are so far off, this is great. Many great inventions like minianture fuel cells, micro electronics, velcro and other stuff came out of the military-insdustrial complex. I suppose you would be against Darpanet too...the project that led to the Internet. Go to the DARPA web page some time. They are doing amazing things (except for the Department of Information Awareness). Here are a few of my favorites.

bio signals

combat exoskeleton

neuro helmet(Anyone ever play battletech?)

laser guns

The Virtual Soldier

Program Manager: Dr. Richard Satava

The Virtual Soldier Program seeks to establish a new capability that will revolutionize medical care to support the soldier. The program will create the mathematical modeling approaches to develop an information (computational) representation of an individual soldier (a holographic medical electronic representation or holomer) that can be used to augment medical care on and off the battlefield with a new level of integration. This virtual soldier will be based upon a highly complex model that is derived from biologically driven principles and populated with properties that are extracted from evidence-based data. The initial Phase 1 effort will consist of a two-component, three-dimensionally displayed model: (1) An organ-tissue system model component, and (2) a properties level model component. Once derived, the virtual soldier will provide multiple capabilities, including but not limited to automatic diagnosis of battlefield injuries, prediction of soldier performance, testing and evaluation of non-lethal weapons, and virtual clinical trials.

DARPA

And on another note...

SCO Soldier

Program Team: SCUM Group

The SCO Soldier Program seeks to scan source codes and find the printf function on those lines of codes and report them back to its owner. Using covert tactics and illicit (possibly) illegal methods, the SCO Soldier can then automate fascimile transmissions of source code to a database which can then quantum generate subpoenas on the fly.

With the speed rate of over 2billion lines of code per minute, the SCO soldier can quickly misconstrue every line of code for pseudo-authenticity and create a manically broad worded asinine report which sounds great on the outside but is actually empty on the inside.

SCO Soldier not available in Open Source and will be licensed to someone who is willing to be sued immediately afterwards in efforts to ensure that SCO Soldier is functioning properly and generating frivolous lawsuits.

At the end of the article was some interesting information:
The research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Perhaps this will help DARPA regain some of its cachet after the embarassingly stupid gaffe by Terror Bookie John Poindexter. Got to take the bad with the good, I guess... it's nice to be reminded that the Internet isn't all DARPA ever helped get off the ground.

> For that matter where did html/http (And the Internet itself for that matter)
> come from? I forget if it was academic or from DARPA. Not that I'd describe
> DARPA as corporate.

DARPA created the IP protocols and later when they gave the network away to corps it was renamed the Internet.

The web was made at Cern, which is a particle physics lab in Switzerland (For all of the past, and still now, the largest lab.)

Wireless sensor networks are not new; there is even a textbook published recently on them (Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures and Protocols). Many corporations have active WSN programs, including:

Motorola

Ember and

Figure 8 Wireless.

University research programs, in addition to Berkeley, include:

UCLA WINS

MIT uAMPS

plus those sposored by DARPA.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, was designed to support such networks. The ZigBee Alliance, an industrial consortium of over 60 companies, is the marketing and compliance arm of the 802.15.4 standard, as the Wi-Fi Alliance is to 802.11. The vitality of the ZigBee Alliance, which had over 350 attendees at its recent open house in Silicon Valley, is an indication that this technology is moving from research into commercialization; the commercialization of wireless sensor networks is the real significance of the Wired article.

As I've said before, this is all part of DARPA's Segway RMP project, which is very cool.

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/mars/rmp.htm

Mr. Spleen

No Battlemechs on the list?

This is the Department of Energy's projects list.

If you want giant robots, then you need to talk to DARPA.

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/mars/rmp.htm

Mr. Spleen

It's already in work. There's folks out there with the money and desire to make it happen.

This thing is coming and when it gets here it's not gonna be too funny.

You best enlist, then.

This competition is incredibly difficult. Travellling 250 miles in 10 hours over desert terrain, on a course which in some places is intentionally too narrow for GPS navigation, is almost certainly beyond the limits of current robotic technology. Because of the slow speeds necessary on portions of the course, the robot must drive at over 60 MPH much of the time! It will undoubtedly be several years before any team passes the test (unless they loosen the rules).

Although there are 100+ teams registered (see the team list here), that doesn't mean much. There was no entry fee to apply! At this point all the teams have to have done is supply a technical paper with their ideas for how their robot could work. There's a huge difference between doing that and actually producing a multi hundred thousand dollar vehicle.

Undoubtedly, only a small fraction of these teams will have the budgets and resources to show up with a vehicle on March 13. I doubt there will be more than 10. And none of them will meet the standards necessary to win the contest. But most of them will be back next year, with a few new entrants, and after enough years of experience they will hopefully succeed.

But for now, this is all a mountain in a molehill. People are making a tempest out of a teapot. DARPA simply failed to explicitly include a phase to weed out those contestants who won't have a vehicle. Now they are fixing that. I doubt very much that the numbers will be an issue at all.

This competition is incredibly difficult. Travellling 250 miles in 10 hours over desert terrain, on a course which in some places is intentionally too narrow for GPS navigation, is almost certainly beyond the limits of current robotic technology. Because of the slow speeds necessary on portions of the course, the robot must drive at over 60 MPH much of the time! It will undoubtedly be several years before any team passes the test (unless they loosen the rules).

Although there are 100+ teams registered (see the team list here), that doesn't mean much. There was no entry fee to apply! At this point all the teams have to have done is supply a technical paper with their ideas for how their robot could work. There's a huge difference between doing that and actually producing a multi hundred thousand dollar vehicle.

Undoubtedly, only a small fraction of these teams will have the budgets and resources to show up with a vehicle on March 13. I doubt there will be more than 10. And none of them will meet the standards necessary to win the contest. But most of them will be back next year, with a few new entrants, and after enough years of experience they will hopefully succeed.

But for now, this is all a mountain in a molehill. People are making a tempest out of a teapot. DARPA simply failed to explicitly include a phase to weed out those contestants who won't have a vehicle. Now they are fixing that. I doubt very much that the numbers will be an issue at all.

heterogeneous computing environments, whether within small networks or on the global network increase security.

Check out the website. They'll have a field referee vehicle following every entry. The field vehicle will have a kill switch implemented and tested by DARPA.

Consider the funding agency

".arpa" used to represent DARPA, but now it represents the Address and Routing Parameter Area, a backronym.

Poindexter was in charge of DARPA.

Poindexter was in charge of DARPA.

There's more info on LifeLog here and here.

nms

From the display board, "It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces...that by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the Armed Forces are unmanned." -National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (S. 2549, Sec. 217)

That is very scary to me. Who decided we want this? I do not want our military, any military sending ROBOT TANKS into battle.

If anybody can provide any history or background on where this "mission statement" is about, I'd love to know. The development of autonomous, mobile killing machines is extremely distrubing. I also wonder if some of the participants in this challenge are so focused on the million dollars that they don't quite realize what they are building.

I'm reminded of the movie Real Genius, where the huge laser they spend all semester working on turns out to be some black ops superweapon.

Just imagine what an autonomous tank with human targeting capability could do against even a lightly armed population. For example: "You have fifteen seconds to comply."

There is, somehow, a line between war and senseless slaughter. I think unmanned ground combat vehicles cross that line. They need to change the name back to Department of War if they're going to be building stuff like this.
And as cool and engaging as this challenge is, I can't support it.

Also interesting is the fact that the winner wins 1 million dollars. I wonder what sort of design budgets these teams have.

My only concern is, is this ESPN2 quality programming or merely cable access?

N

Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.

DARPA is currently funding a project called RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) that would use such a high-altitude, high-speed aircraft to launch small (on the order of 100 kg) spacecraft into LEO quickly and cheaply. Earlier this year they awarded a contract to a startup, Space Launch Corporation, to continue design work on RASCAL. First flight is tentatively scheduled for 2006.

Jeff Foust
The Space Review

It seems that this should be something we are rooting for, not against. Regardless of how far-fetched it seems, I am glad someone is making a run of it. What if something comes of it? After all, it's not our money, right?

Wait, it's funded by DARPA?

Oh well, anything that keeps them from putting energy into causing panic and classifying me as a terrorist can't be all bad, I guess.

It seems that this should be something we are rooting for, not against. Regardless of how far-fetched it seems, I am glad someone is making a run of it. What if something comes of it? After all, it's not our money, right?

Wait, it's funded by DARPA?

Oh well, anything that keeps them from putting energy into causing panic and classifying me as a terrorist can't be all bad, I guess.

Mod the product with location track/recording and you're a good ways towards having a functional LifeLog for DARPA. 'course you'd need a bunch of external battery power and probably a better camera setup than the Archos plug-on. Maybe a little pencil camera + microphone stuck inside your beanie to record concert footage or basic candid camera.

For more on Lifelog, check out the Wired article

Actually, I believe DARPA envisions using TRIPS as a general-purpose high-end embedded CPU; think radar signal processing, surveillance imaging, general control tasks, etc. I think they looked at all the different kinds of CPUs in tanks and fighters and said "wouldn't it be nice if one kind of CPU could so everything?"

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?

By Cheryl Seal
25 August 2003

DARPA Bioengineering Program Seeks to Turn Soldiers Into Cyborgs

Not long ago, the public was stunned by the practical and moral idiocy of the Pentagon researcher (and unprosecuted war criminal) John Poindexter, who proposed a 'football pool' scheme for predicting terrorist attacks. We all laughed at such insanity and were relieved to see the scheme speedily deep-sixed. However, this bit of lunacy was just the lightest ice in the tip of the very large, very dark iceberg that the Pentagon's research program, better known as DARPA, has become.

Just a few weeks before the bizarro world 'terrorism gambling' project was exposed, a DARPA (which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-sponsored conference was held in Washington, DC, that showcased the latest love child of the Bush Pentagon: military bioengineering. The euphemisms being used by the Pentagon to disguise the true nature of this research are being spread as thick as bondo and cheap paint at a used car lot. For example, the title of the conference was: 'Harvesting Biology for Defense Technology,' while the subheading of the section on human 'bioengineering' was entitled, rather ominously, in light of the military's history, 'Enhancing Human Performance.'

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Home of Borg

Their web site talks a little bit about DARPA's quantum computing projects, but the page seems to be a little outdated. Anyone know if they're pursuing this as well?