Networked Landmines Work Together

crazedpilot writes "New landmines will soon communicate via a radio network, and move from place to place in order to be most effective." Termed the "self-healing minefield", the individual mines are capable of detecting an enemy breach and then moving to seal the gap.

Comments

Hoppers!

[LiquidCoooled]

These fucking mines HOP.
I swear I use the same things in Half-Life 2.

from the site though, the best part has to be:

Technical Support for your hopping mines!

I really want to know what happens when they run out of power though?

Are they inert or do they revert to a dangerous stepper?
The inert option would seem the best since they can be tended to for the duration of the war then afterwards no children will lose their legs or anything.

Detection

[Khomar]

Wouldn't a landmine that transmits a signal be relatively easy to detect? Just look for the signal and disable the mine. On the plus side, maybe these would make it easier to clean them up when the particular war that used them was over. There are many countries that are potted with landmines from wars that ended years ago. Taking a stroll in the country in these places is extremely dangerous.

Sunset Clause

[DigitalRaptor]

We already have ~way~ too many landmines, and way too many innocents being killed or disabled by them.

IF you're going to design a high-tech landmine, for heavens sakes, design in a renewable sunset clause so that if the landmine doesn't hear from you in 30 days it disables itself. If you need to reenable it, fine, but disabled should be the default.

Re:The last thing the world needs is more landmine

[Anonymous Coward]

They do reduce civilian casualties.

But first can I say: holy crap! I was one of the main software engineers on this project (heck I still have the source code on my laptop) but that was like 5 years ago. NOW we get slashdotted?

In any case, the story we got was: normally, anti-tank mines are surrounded by anti-personnel mines. Anti-tank mines have magnetic triggers and are (relatively) safe for people: they are vulnerable to simply being picked up and moved out of the way. So the anti-tank mines are surrounded by APLMs to prevent the enemy from trivially disabling the field.

APLMs are the nasty ones that kill kids decades later. So in an effort to reduce the number of APLMs deployed DARPA tried this crazy idea of making self-healing anti-tank mines. in other words, since the anti-tank mines can protect themselves by moving, the anti-personnel mines are no longer necessary. And the world gets a little better.

This was a heck of a project to work on. I got to FIRE ROCKETS! Under software control! Super cool.

When it's hacked...

[Lally Singh]

How about when a hacker starts sending bad "mine blown" messages to the grid, making the mines reconfigure? Maybe they keep detonating off each other, maybe they start all hopping (with some nice navigational hacking) back towards the ones who deployed them?

Developed from the Sandia hopper

[Animats]

This started with the Sandia spherical hopper. "A pre-programmed microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction. The combustion chamber fires, the piston punches the ground, and the hopper leaps." That was back in 1997. Now, it looks like it is approaching production.

America's army of killer robots is coming. Soon.

Re:who supports land mines ?

[Anonymous Coward]

People bring this up to explain the US refusing to sign the treaty but it's not really a valid point. The US could, if it wanted to, do numerous things:

1)Stop selling mines to other countries(!!!)
2)Stop using mines unilaterally, except at the DMZ in Korea
3)Negotiate a waiver for the DMZ field

The first and second options are no-brainers, the fact that the US has not done either of these and is in fact developing these new mines is utterly disgusting. We stand with the scum of the earth when we stand up for the use of mines.
The last option would involve some kind of quid pro quo where the US kicks in some significant capital for mine removal, but we have no money spending billions per week in Iraq and mine removal will save a LOT of people from dying or spending their lives horrifically disfigured. Of course this will never happen since the warmongers at DOD resist all restrictions on what toys they get to play with, from mines to nuclear bunker-busters to White Phosporous to Napalm... is it any wonder the world thinks so poorly of us?

Useful for post-war clean up too!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The biggest problem with mines is that they stay active for years after the conflicts have finished. A mine is a very cheap thing (a few $), but costs hundreds of dollars per mine to clean up. An intelligent mine could be told that the war is over and told to inactivate itself. That would make clean up very simple/safe.

Re:Useful for post-war clean up too!

[arivanov]

True.

In fact historically true.

The Russians did this to the German destroyer fleet on 10/11th of Novermber 1916. The Germans were given a fake map with the corridors through the minefield defending the Finnish bay. They sent in a single destroyer to investigate which safely came back. After that they sent in a whole detachment which went in and the russians mined the exit behind them. By that time the end of the channel was also mined.

As a result the Germans lost 7 capital ships and had twice more heavily damaged which is one of their 3 biggest naval losses comparable only to Jutland and Falklands. An impressive testament to what "moving" mine field can do.

Re:Useful for post-war clean up too!

[Ihlosi]

I've never understood how mine clean up is so expensive or hard.

You're confusing military and civilian demining.

Military demining is about getting a safe path through the minefield. That is relatively simple to do, but takes a bit of time (enough for whoever laid the minefield to respond).

Civilian demining is about making sure that there's not a single one of the damned things left. That's the hard part, since you need to find every single one of the little buggers and disarm it (or, if that is not possible, detonate it on site, but this is not preferred since it might toss other mines around, and maybe into areas that were already demined).

Re:Useful for post-war clean up too!

[maxwell demon]

But even without that option, I guess those mines are much easier to find by just looking for their radio wave communication. After all, in order to cooperate, they have to transmit their location.

Re:Useful for post-war clean up too!

[forgetmenot]

Mines have become rather sophisticated (as the article demonstrates). Some mines detonate only under specific pressure ranges (to specifically target light vehicles versus heavy vehicles versus personnel), others only have they've been hit once or twice (to prevent being detonated by mine removal equipment like bowling balls). Some detonate only in response to changes in air pressure or the presence of magnetic fields. Others quite frankly are left in the ground long enough that natural deterioration makes them rather unpredictable.

Point is, without going into an area and doing a thorough survey of the ground and dealing with them on a case by case basis you can't really tell what you're dealing with. Thus adhoc methods like throwing bowling balls aren't very effective in the general case. You're certainly not going to be able to deal with anything but the most primitive mines and oddly enough sophisticated methods of clearing an area won't deal with many of the less-than-sophisticated mines.

Re:What's next? Electric chair stories?

[Chrax]

> There is such a thing as in immoral technology. That this was posted to Slashdot is disgusting.
>
> If you're going to report on anything, ScuttleMonkey, try posting about technology that saves lives.

I wasn't aware that news only involved the prettier uses of technology. Here I sat in my naïveté, thinking we ought to hear about both good and bad things.

Sarcasm aside, /. is acting as a news service here. It's not as if they appended praises to their report.

To address the first quoted claim, I disagree that this is an immoral use of technology. In a war, the two essential objectives are to preserve your resources (such as soldiers lives) and to neutralize the enemy, with preference going towards the latter. As such, any technology that aids in either of these objectives is moral, or at least amoral (I tend to think of war -- it's execution, not necessarily its objectives or motivations -- amorally, but that you can assign value judgments based on various objectives allows us to speak in moral terms if we like).

Is this use of technology disgusting? I think so. So are assault rifles and hand grenades, in my opinion. But this does not make them immoral in the context in which they are meant to be used.

Re:The last thing the world needs is more landmine

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked the same question; can't you just keep grabbing one at a time, wait for them to hop in, and clear it for you?

The answer was: the minefield is not designed to kill people, its purpose is to be an obstacle. The threat of deadly force, unfortunately, is required for it to be an effective obstacle. If you want to spend the next 6 hours fucking around with the minefield as if it's a toy while there's a war going on around you, you're not going to live long. A ranger who cleared mines for a living stopped by our demo site during one of our live-rocket demos and said, "If I saw this in the field I'd tell the unit to just mark it on the map and go around." Which is its purpose.

I'm not surprised, but still dismayed, at the "dude you're a monster!" venom that was unleashed at my original post. That's too bad. Was I uncomfortable with the project? Yes, a bit, and that was part of the reason I left the company. But I find it amusing that everyone on here claims to have such a clear-cut moral compass. "Don't work on anything that could possibly have a bad use" covers an awful lot of ground. Our SHM prototype used Linux; have you ever contributed to the kernel, and if so does that make you an accessory too? Why do you write open source software when some of it can, conceivably, be used for doing evil?

Re:The last thing the world needs is more landmine

[MillionthMonkey]

Look at non-lethal policing weapons. They haven't replaced lethal force, they've just allowed the police to weaponize conflicts they previously wouldn't have had weapons for: they can shoot first against a civilian demonstration if they aren't using bullets.

Which is completely unfair if the civilians aren't going to be armed with the same range of devices that are available to police. So the public needs to start arming itself with these weapons immediately. This means all of you- open another tab right now and start buying some non-lethal weaponry for the next time you run into the police in a crowded public setting. Tasers are sold to nervous women all over the Internet, and you can buy "X-Ring" rubber bullets in a variety of calibers up to .45. But the police have way more nonlethal toys than that, and if you've decided that these standard options are just not for you, you'll still be able to find something that fits your style- perhaps tear gas grenades, or pepper spray, or even something as simple as the lowly police baton.

The non-lethal weapon I want is the capture net that is fired from a 37 mm launcher, with weights at the corners that spiral around the guy. I'd use that one at meetings for when someone comes up with a really bad idea- the kind of bad idea that needs to be stopped now before too many PHB-types hear it. I'd stand up, say "stop right there" and fire the net around the person, immobilizing him before his bad idea got any traction. I really think that would help me make my point.

If everyone in the meeting were afraid that anyone there might be armed with one of these things, it could really cut down on bad ideas.