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DIY Ordnance Disposal With An RC Truck
kpw10 writes "My company, Tackle Design, put together a do it yourself ordnance disposal robot for use by one of the partners in our company, currently serving in Iraq. It is a very simple solution costing only about $1,000, but it performs the same functions as the super-expensive robots issued by the military. We looking to see if we can get more of these devices over there - particularly as the treat of IEDs seems to be on the rise. We're also looking into including more advanced cameras and other types of sensors including explosives detectors (MEMS and SAW based) as well as RF detectors."
I didn't know that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) were a treat. How did they taste?
StrayByte.Net
RC Car + Wireless Camera?
Whats the groundbreaking part of this? That they shipped it to Iraq!?
Well?
Anyone else had to immediately think of that truck in Knight Rider (I think it was called Goliath) when he read the headline? :-)
The first glaring problem with this is the use of a radio controled device in close proximity to ordinance. One of the first things they tell you, and continue to repeatedly tell you, about situations with IED's and UXO's (Unexploded Ordinance) is NOT to use any radios or electrical devices for an area around them. Presumably these "overly expensive" robots used by the experts are not just expensive for kicks, but, among other things, have sheilding and control systems to counter this danger.
A do it yourself aproach is admirable in a lot of situations, however, when dealing with military and terrorist style explosives, It seems doubtful that's the time to employ the pioneering spirit. The EOD guys are there for a reason, and this is one case where patience is a virtue.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
and $1 million in bribes to the department of defence to get them to actually buy the things.
I think they mean ordnance, not ordinance. Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, along with affect/effect, its/it's, etc.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
It needs to be milspec in order for the military to use it, especially in a combat situation. It will take you a long long time to get this device approved and assigned a milspec number. I mean, like, years. I really hope the war is over before then. But it looks like Bush will just start up another war, so you may be in luck.
Also, the military generally only does business with military contractors. This is starting to change, at least in principal. There has been a recent push for COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) purchases, to save money, but there is still a huge amount of paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with. They are going to have to take your robot and freeze it, bake it, irradiate it, EMP it, and maybe even shoot at it. All at great taxpayer expense.
I salute you and your idea, but you should be forewarned about the effort involved. Also, my experience with this is limited. My close friend designed a rebreather that was almost assigned a milspec number by the US Navy. After several years and millions of dollars in testing and a final report approving the rebreather, the navy decided to stick with it's current model. I suspect this had something to do with internal politics that I should not even speculate on. Basically, my friend had put two years of his life into this, had a better machine which outperformed and way underpriced the competition, was one signature away from a milspec number assignment, and suddenly he got the silent treatment.
So, basically, I'm saying Be prepared for a lot of red tape. Oh, and you may need to be ISO 9001 certified. Which is basically another form of red tape.
Does anyone else find it depressing that US services personnel seem to be increasingly buying their own equipment?
I had already heard stories of soldiers' families investing in flak-jackets/body armour to give them additional protection, and i believe i recall even from Gulf War I that soldiers were bringing their own GPS kit.
Now they're putting together their own, affordable, bomb-disposal robots. I admire the initiative, but deplore the circumstances that make it necessary. Especially since the fact that a soldier/marine and his/her family can invest in the equipment means it is relatively inexpensive. If many soldiers buy it, it's *probably* useful too. So how come the government doesn't provide it?
Putting on a cynicism hat, i wonder if it is because they'd rather spend high-margin-megabucks on a few robots from InsertHugeSupplierHere, than divert a fraction of that to buy larger volume cheaper alternatives.
While this device will work in a lot of situations, there are actually some damn good reasons that the military pays a lot of money for the EOD systems they buy.
Example one: Intrinsic safety. This is something that's used a lot in fuel and chemical industries. The basic idea is to design the system so that no component that is exposed to the outside world can cause a spark. This is not as straightforward as you might think. And it's definitely a feature I'd want implemented for a robot that's going to be crawling around IEDs.
Example two: Verification. This new system is a great thing-- don't get me wrong-- but it's essentially just a hack. Typical procurement for something like this is going to include a whole series of tests under a LOT of different conditions. This new thing-- well, I'm sure it works just fine in the garage.
Example three: Landline control. One of the key rules when dealing with UXOs (UneXploded Ordnance) is that you never use a radio within a certain distance of the UXO. Hand radios must be at least 25 feet away, car-mounted radios must be at least 100 feet away. This is done because there is a chance that the trigger for a given ordnance might be radio-based. A lot of robots come with landline controls for just that reason. Makes me a little anxious about seeing a radio-controlled truck as the base for an EOD system.
There are other issues, too. Image quality, level of control over the motors, you name it. There's a lot more to ordnance disposal than simply getting a camera up close to the damn thing and sending back a picture.
That said, a system like this probably WILL work in the majority of cases, especially in Iraq. I just don't think it'll ever be adopted by the military, despite its obvious usefulness.
This is one of the reasons that there is so much milspec testing (and hence the $500 hammers). I mentioned in another post that my friend had developed a rebreather for military use (http://www.steammachines.com/aa1-Testing.asp). One of the primary uses of a military rebreather is to defuse underwater mines. Originally we sent in SCUBA divers to defuse mines. Then the soviets started adding audio sensors to listen for bubbles. After a few SEALs got blown up the navy added more requirements to the mission gear, and more testing, and we started sending in rebreathers, which are silent. Then the soviets added metal detectors to their mines and more SEALs got all blowed up. So we started using non-ferrous metals like brass and inconnel and more testing and more specs. Then the soviets added sensors for electromagnetic fields, and when the rebreathers O2 injecttion solonoid fires, youe guessed it, more SEALs got blowed up. So, now we need low wattage solonoids and shielded electronics, and more tests and specs... I may be mistaken about what order the SEALs got blown up in, or whether they were EODs guys instead, but you get the idea.
So that is an instance where the military testing really means something. There are a million ways that something can go wrong, and combat is a special situation with it's own set of rules. On top of that the military is so concerned with it's soldiers getting blown up, at least by their own gear, that they go way overboard with the safeguards sometimes.
This will get somebody killed. Let EOD do the job correctly
A number of the posters here have referred to the long design, test and deployment cycle in the military, and in very many cases, their comments are accurate. But, there is a history of wartime hacks thought up by soldiers or people who knew soldiers. A good example from the WWI was the trench periscope. During WWII, Sgt. Curtis Culin welded pieces of steel cannibalized from German beach defenses to make the "Rhino", a tank capable of cutting through the high bushy walls that lined the roads in Normandy. Today, US Reservists and National Guardsmen are figuring out ways of mounting steel plates as armor on their HUMMVs. That soldiers and marines are coming up with field expedient devices external to the Department of Defense R&D system is nothing new. Some of the hacks get incorporated into actual milspec equipment; some doesn't. The DoD has whole organizations dedicated to cataloging and studying these things as "lessons-learned". It will be interesting to see if this idea gets picked up and widely applied in Iraq.
Bureaucracy loves company.
They're having a severe problem with new home owner's associations creating ridiculous ordinances, and this robot is designed to edit the bylaws in such a way as to totally obliterate those ordinances!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
One senior military analyst, whose job was precisely to find out why equipment did not perform as expected, described it to me as major's logic and sergeant's logic. The Major says, we do it by the book. The patrol goes out and the sergeant says, we'll do it this way, lads, because the official way doesn't fucking work. Then he reports back to the major that the mission was accomplished and everything went by the book. And the major, if he wants to be a colonel, doesn't ask stupid questions. The hard bit is to get through the official chain of command wall to find out what really happens on the ground, investigate the good bits, and turn them into an official solution.
Faced with a choice between certainly getting killed and trying something that might save you, armed forces everywhere become inventive. People bleating on about "No RF near potential booby traps" miss the point. The people on the ground are likely to have a pretty good idea of enemy capability. They might be wrong, occasionally, but that is better than having being dead most of the time. War is not a computer game, and it is not played according to neat rules by any of the sides involved. The hard bit is to strike the right balance between discipline and flexibility, and this must change from conflict to conflict.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
20 years ago, true, but I was a Combat Engineer in the Marine Corps.
In a perfect world, you call up the Engineers, and they handle it. In peacetime you may even be able to call up the EOD guys to handle it. In war, they're never around when you want them. But we usually are.
True, as pointed out, you don't want a lot of stray RF around, esp. since these IEDs are mostly controlled by your car alarm system key fob. However, if your frequencies are not in that range, it won't set it off.
If it does set it off? MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! That's what we do! We are not some movie or TV show hero who defuses the bomb! Most of the time we prefer to set it off in place to eliminate the threat.
If these little robots can lug a block of C4 up to the IED, and either get away before the C4 is set off, (prefered) or sacrifice itself and get rid of it, good job! I've almost pissed my pants doing the same thing, hoping that the device wouldn't go off when I touched it.
To sum up: in war, it's not about defusing, it's about detonating (safely) so the mission can continue!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!