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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."
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.
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The point is valid, but in some situations this may not be such a big problem.
Reading the article, the intention of the designers is to come up with a robot that will drop some explosives on an enemy's bomb/mine so as to destroy it. Before doing this, everybody will have to have "retired to a safe distance", at which point it might not matter so much whether an electromagnetic transmission/lump of C-4 does the detonating.
However, your point still stands in so far as an unpredictable detonation due to stray radio waves gives you less control of the situation than would a more controlled explosive intervention.
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.
No
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.