Robot Helicopters To Single Out Pirate Ships

Hugh Pickens writes "Innovation News reports that the U.S. Navy plans to upgrade its robotic Fire Scouts with electronic 'brains' that are able to automatically recognize small pirate boats spotted through 3D laser imaging by bouncing millions of laser pulses off distant objects to create a 3D 'radar' image of any boats on the high seas — a technology known as LIDAR or LADAR — so that their new software can automatically compare the 3D images to pirate boat profiles on record. Having smarter robotic helicopters could ease the workload strain for Navy sailors, who must otherwise eyeball the data coming from the new Multi-Mode Sensor Seeker (MMSS) — a sensor mix of high-definition cameras, mid-wave infrared sensors and the 3D LADAR technology. Meanwhile, the Navy has begun testing other new technologies to tackle the problem of piracy — an especially thorny issue because of Somali pirates attacking ships off the coast of East Africa. Its more forceful countermeasures include a combination of lasers and machine guns, as well as swarms of smart rockets capable of picking out their own small boat targets."

Comments

This tech

[kelemvor4]

Soon will be applied to land pirates too. When you get up from your computer after downloading a movie, watch out for incoming automated missiles. Yesterday, they tried throwing a whole plane at some guy who downloaded a copy of Microsoft office illegally.

Alternatively

[Kupfernigk]

How about the US government stops listening to Netanyahu and the paranoid wing of the Israeli government, listens to its own intelligence (and the former head of Mossad), recognises Iran as a regional power that is no worse than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, and starts using serious diplomacy on the slow process of getting Iran's head out of the sand? As Churchill remarked, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.