The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle

Victor Cheng writes "In developments that bring together a variety of technologies including robotics and digital imaging the Wasp Micro Air Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's latest tools currently in testing of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (although I'm thinking its not going to need a carrier to get this one up and flying). The 13 inch Wasp comes equipped with 2 video cameras, GPS and has a myriad of possible applications. Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

Comments

Picnic

[Anonymous Coward]

If one of these visits the family picnic, you can be damn sure I will swat it. I'm not in the US...

Privacy

[soniCron88]

"Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

Like hell I'd pay for it. Gov't should be think twice before spying on its citizens. Especially at such a close range!

Re:Privacy

[Richthofen80]

The only people these UAVs will be spying on are enemy combatants in hostile theatre. If the government wishes to spy on its own citizens, there are far more effective means. There are a large number of survelliance cameras in the US and elsewhere, not to mention satellite imagery and 'bugs'.

The reasons they build UAVs in the first place is because they can't bring agents into the area, because its still too hostile. I hardly think a family picnic is so 'hostile' as to require a UAV.

Re:Privacy

[SupremeSpod]

> The only people these UAVs will be spying on are enemy combatants in hostile theatre.

Which is pretty much the rest of the world thanks to your idiot of a President!

If you buzzed and took pictures at my picnic

[Moraelin]

I do believe you'd get that thing swatted, stomped and whacked with a hammer/shovel/whatever-is-handy for good measure too. And you might be looking at a lawsuit too.

Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.

One possible application

[Moggie68]

Search operation at sea. A couple of platoons of these could cover countless square kilometers in a hurry. You'd only need the spotters to monitor the video feed for any found subjects. Half the manpower as you'd skip the need for pilots.

Balance?

[Futurepower(R)]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

Re:Balance?

[jotok]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

Quick question, what qualifies as money for peace?

I ask because someone repeated your exact words to me the other day and none of the things of which I could think on which we do spend money (other than making weapons or moving them and their operators around the globe) qualified as "peace."

Environmentalism, education, health care, foreign aid, etc. Whatever your take on how the current administration is shortchanging these areas for allocation of funds, we still do it--but they don't seem to count for "peace" so I'm wondering what does, exactly?

Re:Balance?

[ScentCone]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence. The whole point is that as we get more precise, better informed, and more surgical in how we deal with bad actors, we don't have to use as many heavy duty, indiscriminate weapons. People wail and moan about the collateral damage from doing things like kicking Iraq out of Kuwait... but that conflict saw the debut of our military carefully avoiding older (much more violent) tactics and weapons. If we'd still been using the WWII/Korea/Vietnam style weapons and tactics, we'd have been much more "violent" to accomplish the same required result. Every time we trot out these new tools, we cut down on how heavy handed we have to be, and the bad guys (who read this site, too), are more and more aware of how difficult it is to conduct various murderous affairs.

In this particular case, a tool like this that helps the Coast Guard or Navy take a closer look a ship before sending men and women over in person will absolutely reduce the risk of ambush, suicide attacks, and other problems that have killed our people in the past. Since so many other comments here point out the obvious non-conflict uses for this technology, I won't repeat those (great as they are), but I will close by saying that force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military. As long as there are regimes like North Korea shipping out boatloads of missiles and explosives to places like Syria for sale to malicious third parties, superior military technology on our part will continue to reduce violence and save lives.

Re:Balance?

[Threni]

> Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer
> lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence.

Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.

Worked out why most of the people on the planet are against the actions of the US government yet? How about reading `understanding power` or `hegemony or survival` by Chomsky for starters.

Re:Balance?

[ScentCone]

prefer the modern military of Denmark, Canada etc, not that of the Americans, who spent more on their military than the rest of the world combined.

So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.

Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).

Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks

Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).

Re:Balance?

[Threni]

Is IS dumb. But who's saying it? I didn't. What's the connection between carpet bombing civilians in Afghanistan, and bringing to justice the people responsible for the 9/11 attack? Because Saudi national bin Laden happened to be in Afghanistan at the time of, or at least shortly after, the attacks? What if he'd been in Denmark, or Brazil? Or is it because there are `terrorist` training camps in Afghanistan? But there are `terrorist` training camps in the US too. It's always worth asking what the response would be from the people acting as agressors were they to be at the receiving end. If Brazil had bombed the US because a Greek guy had been in Florida at the time a French guy had committed a 9/11-style attack in Brazil, would you be applying the same logic?

Re:Powerconsumption

[Anonymous Coward]

• At 12 pounds I wonder how long time this can be in the air before it needs to be recharged?

Where do you get this information from? Slashdot?

Article says 7 ounces, which equals 0.198446662 kg "see-how-hard-it-would-be-to-use-SI-system" kilograms.

Surveillance

[elgatozorbas]

A few years ago we had a master's thesis (jointly with the military school) evaluating the design of such a vehicle. These vehicles are mostly meant for observation, and can even be equipped with a radar (which was the case).

The main challenge is, not surprisingly, the weight. One of the trade-offs we were faced with was wether to do signal processing on the plane (requiring more CPU), or on the ground (requiring more link capacity). Another problem is that, because it is so small, it is very prone to wind, vibrations etc which have to be taken into account when post-processing

Re:Swat it?

[MyLongNickName]

I don't think it is THAT big. It will be very useful for keeping an eye on a small area (say a block in Falluja) without being obvious. No, it is not designed to fly five foot over Osama without it being noticed. But this doesn't make it useless.

Re:Swat it?

[hey!]

Suppose they had an autonomous surveillance vehicle that was literally the size of a housefly. Do you think they'd tell us?

Not that I think such a thing could be built right now, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't on somebody's drawing board. American needs intelligence and loves technical fixes. If there's a technical solution to an intelligence problem, somebody's bound to be workig on it. Remember how US Navy subs tapped Soviet undersea communication cables right in their harbors?

I actually surprised they acknowledge that something this size exists. It's small enough that it is probably hard to distinguish from a sea bird.

Re:A neat little toy...

[johnjay]

I could see an application for this in use against smugglers... Fly two wasps out in front of the coast guard cutter to put the suspect ship in the center of a triangle of viewpoints. Open water, no flying inside the other ship. In theory, the wasps would have enough power/range to be in place before the coast guard got close. Since the badguys' focus would be on the coast guard, the wasps would be stealthy enough and provide a view of the hidden side of the boat (in case anything was quickly dumped) and a hint at the kind of arms the smugglers might have.

Smaller autonomous recon vehicles

[Infonaut]

Insect-sized surveillance vehicles have been in the works for some time. I saw a pitch at the Pentagon for something similar to this in 1996 or '97. The point of a very small autonomous surveillance platform is that it can be used in tactical situations. It's not for looking at North Korean missile facilities, it's for checking out the inside of that building your platoon is about to assault.

The obvious early adopters of a tool like this would be Delta Force, because so much of their work involves forced entry. If such a vehicle existed, they'd put it through its paces before it trickled down to Special Forces and SEAL operators, and finally down to regular light infantry forces.

Re:More importantly...

[tehcrazybob]

A 13" paper plane will have no chance of returning alive if it isn't taking off from a stationary carrier in calm see and no wind. It will have a very short range and speed. Bottom line: will it ever be able to see what a powerful set of binoculars wouldn't be able to see from the carrier anyways? And also, what't the point of having the stealth of a 13" paper plane, when just a few kilometers away is a ginormous aircraft carrier?

First, it's not a paper airplane, it's probably made of a bunch of exotic lightweight plastics and composite materials. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was capable of going faster than 15 knots. Then again, if you are attacking some smugglers, it's unlikely you are going to be doing it with an aircraft carrier - those are not generally used for direct ship-to-ship combat. It's likely you would be on a smaller, more heavily armed ship, and you could float around at a safe distance and go take a peek with your planes. You know, just to make sure they aren't all packing rocket launchers.

As for the binoculars: The key with this plane isn't getting a closer view of the same thing. If that's what we wanted, we could get telescopes big enough to watch the rust spreading on the hull of the other ship. The point of this is to get a view of something from a different direction. I don't care how powerful your binoculars are, they aren't going to be able to see the back of a ship you are approaching from the front.