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US Army Hopes To Outfit Soldiers With Tiny Drones By 2018 (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The U.S. Army has requested industry information on the feasibility of making tiny drones that would help infantry gather intelligence on a small scale, such as peeping over a hill or around a building. its dream recon machine would weigh no more than a third of a pound, launch within one minute and fly for at least 15 minutes. Ideally, the drones would be in service as soon as 2018. "[A nano-drone] will send real-time video back to the operator to give them real-time situational awareness of what's in the immediate vicinity," says Phil Cheatham, the deputy branch chief for electronics at the Army's Maneuvers Center for Excellence (MCOE). Cheatham says he and his team want something cheap enough to deploy with every squad, noting the Army already uses satellite imagery and larger drones to provide broader battlefield intelligence.
It lets us save American lives since they are worth more than other lives AND it lets us rotate our warhead stock so we can keep it fresh. WIN WIN
When I read soldiers would be outfitted with tiny drones, I thought they finally, after almost 3 long decades, have the Innerspace technology perfected... But alas, it is just small RC helicopters... Strangely (to me) they are not quadcopters, I thought is small sizes quadcopters have all sorts of advantages over helicopters, am I wrong?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Cheap means it needs to cost $50k at least.
tiny drone
If you are doing it *today* , get them each a 'Cheerson CX-10-W'. for under $US 40 bucks in qty 1. no sizable transmitter needed, just use any exiting wifi-enabled phone/tablet ( which I'm sure everyone in the army has multiple of ) .
And, those Tepbulicans want to make it even more painful.
If remote controlled tiny aircraft were better on the battlefield we would not need soldiers at all. There is a huge issue with putting soldier under the dependency of gadgets. I say this as a Veteran (US Army) in case you weigh things by experience.
Communications is important, but so is a lack of communications. Soldiers walking around with broadcast devices have no ability to hide, they also run the risk of interception and force feeding bogus orders.
Save a soldier's life and write Congress. Tech companies don't need to make money off of soldier's lives.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm gonna sic Posse Comitatus on you GI ass.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
1) How much will this thing cost? Because their version of "affordable" sometimes means more than the annual salary of the soldier controlling it which isn't very affordable.
2) If this thing really is affordable, you can quickly expect to see consumer versions of it available regardless of legality rather quickly and if that is the case, how do they expect to handle it along with soldiers and officers who misuse it?
3) The more electronically dependent our soldiers become, the more that becomes their single biggest point of failure so at what point, will miniature EMP like devices or GPS blockers become used in war time regardless of rules and how do they expect to handle that on the battlefield without making the devices too expensive or heavy to use due to the shielding needed to protect them?
Not saying this is a bad thing as I really don't mind giving the soldiers this ability while on the battlefield as long as the person is in control and not some bureaucrat half a world away and shielded from public scrutiny or accountability, but the side effects of this must also be taken into account as well.
Let's let the enemy know where we are by flying a noisy thing around the place.
Or, stick a mirror or camera on the end of a stick and do it completely silently.
But as everyone who has ever played Battlefield 2142 such drones even when capable of providing supporting fire, simply made you a bigger target.
I don't it will be any different in reality.
Why not within a second? Put a docking station on top of the helmet. It would also be able to return autonomously, align itself and be captured with an electomagnetic latch.
Fiber optics, AR semi-goggles, overlays, drone control and displays, next generation miniaturized scopes for aiming, eye protection. The next generation soldier will have a remaining eye in addition to the remaining ear due to the additional protection.
They need to come up with some security, such that the enemy can't take it over like existing $50k drones.
Having experience with both quads and planes (not copters, too difficult to fly), I see advantages in both. Plane made of foam is light weight, long flight time and distance, little noise, but of course can't stay stationery, a bullet is no problem, unless it kills battery or motor. With a flight controller, they are easy to fly. Quads are dead if hit by anything. Short flight time and range. But can stay in place, and fly where there is less room. But they make a lot of noise.
250 size is probably what is needed. But it needs new radio tech for both video and comms to stay secure, and difficult to jam. And GPS is not a trustworthy option, will be jammed since it is trivial to to. It is just 2 frequencies. 1575.42 MHz and 1227.60 MHz. Clearly GPS was never designed by the military for military purposes.
I can definitely see the use of small autonomous drone that can fly a perimeter around the soldier and give a sneak peek around corners and walls and hidey holes.
Make it small and silent and that will definitely give a squad some tactical advantage. Make it cheep so that the squad can be equipped with a pack of them and use them in any kind of hazardous environment and not be worried about getting those damaged.
"If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped--say with a stone ax---will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier".
- Robert Heinlein (“Starship Troopers”)
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Or, stick a mirror or camera on the end of a stick and do it completely silently.
A mirror or camera on a stick can't take an aerial photo. It can't move hundreds of yards away from you to do recon. And a reflection from it most certainly can give away your position. But a soldier behind a hill who pops a drone up over his head is only giving away his position in the vaguest way, and even then, only if someone even notices the tiny speck hanging in the air. Just painting it blue will help with that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someone must have watched the movie Allegiant and thought to themselves "Hey, that's a good idea! Let's make that." Drones that can be tied to an operator and feed visual information back to them from around corners or watch their back INSIDE the same structure would be a huge improvement in situational awareness.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
So drones are probably kind of a bad idea in a situation that requires stealth, so they are always bad? How about putting a grenade on one and getting it to fly over a fortified position? The army does this today with much larger, more expensive drones and missiles. These could be used for the same thing all drones are currently used for, except they're quicker to deploy and operate in a much tighter area.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Is your drone fully charged? No. Yours? No. Mine either
Disclaimer: I work as an acquisitions engineer in the Navy and for the USMC
For the meantime, lets ignore the Marines already have something like this and that the Army aren't being, well, the Army about reusing something like this.
The logistics costs are way too low. Moving things into a FOB (i.e. war zone) is massively more expensive than moving it anywhere else in the world. There are a few articles on the real world cost of fuel (JP-8) per barrel
(http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-gas-another-cost-of-war-in-afghanistan-). This applies to all inbound supplies, be it fuel, ammunition, batteries, pants, mail, etc. because convoys get blown up and shot at "from time to time". In reality shipping cost more than the object itself until you get to very large and/or heavy items.
There would be standard acquisition to make sure something like a downsized Raven wouldn't be more acceptable than a quadrotor. There are also massive issues with wireless devices because they can be used to give away troop positions (and it has happened in the past--won't elaborate). So, common off the shelf UAV's probably aren't going to work with causing a massive known security flaw (or an expensive search of the market to find one that does). Finally, any that use Ch--er, foreign components will have to be handed over to validate security. (https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+embedded+chips+in+DoD+equipment), or redesigned and configuration managed to use known good parts. Same for control software and the controller (which will be much more complicated and expensive if the controller is a smartphone and app, with all the extra ways for IA to be violated and the extra wireless communications that a modern smartphone has, even if not "turned on" (802.11, BT, NFC, various GSM, various LTE, etc.). A plan needs to be in place to ensure hardware and software upgrades for at a minimum the ongoing state of maintaining software security.
In reality any system given to Marines or soldiers fits into one of two bins
a) It's not worthwhile and is ignored, abused (things with cameras in the hands of the bored are a sore point for many CO's--think "can not unsee"), or destroyed maliciously until it goes away.
b) It is useful and made to do tons of things it was never meant to do. Example: Fly it into a sniper's face to distract them long enough to move a fire team safely. Then someone tapes a grenade to it, or a microphone (extra smartphone / controller set to record?), etc. A bored or pinned warfighter is capable of both incredible ingenuity and stupidity. The device has to withstand both as well.
There are a lot of other standards that have to be met. Some are debatable, some have similarly good reasons. This is how DoD spending on these things ends up going high quickly.
First, you need to design quieter propellers because the sound of a bee swarm is going to give away your position. Second, you need to come up with a battery that has a much higher energy density.
Or, at least, mark them like "Paywall" links. They block you if you use an ad blocker, and they interpret any disinclination to run any random malicious script they or any of the advertisers on any of the ad serving companies they use might choose to push at you "an ad blocker." Evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.
For the record, I do not use an ad blocker. But I do run NoScript, and I will continue to run NoScript. "Wired"'s oh so very helpful link on their intercept page says about allowing access to NoScript users "It's complicated, we recommend you don't use NoScript." To which my reaction is "Oh HELL no!"