Clarifying "Future Vertical Lift" for the US Military

What is Future Vertical Lift? There is no one answer. At one extreme is a single mega-program, building four variants for the four services to replace a host of existing helicopters, a vision in some ways even more ambitious than the long-troubled tri-service Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). At the opposite extreme, however, FVL would just be overarching guidance and common technology for a range of separate, service-specific programs, both new aircraft and upgrades to existing helicopters. The reality will almost certainly end up somewhere in between.

“We don’t know exactly where that sweet spot is,” Brig. Gen. Gary Thomas told me frankly. Thomas, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, is co-chair of the Pentagon’s executive steering group for FVL, and he’d just spoken about the initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The starting point is the desired capabilities [and] the desire to produce commonality,” he said, but they’re staying flexible about the end point.

“Eventually, this process will inform a new-build program, but we’re not there yet,” Thomas told me. Until then, he expects FVL to spin off technologies and ideas for upgrades to existing helicopter programs.

“The start of at least the first program has moved a little bit to the right, a couple of years,” said the other co-chair of the FVL steering group, Jose Gonzalez, deputy director for land warfare and munitions in the Pentagon’s acquisition, technology, and logistics (ATL) organization. “[But] one thing we need to keep in mind,” he told the audience at CSIS. “A lot of the Future Vertical Lift work — the analysis work that we’re doing and the technology work that we’re doing — could feed alternatives other than a new-start program. They could inform a major upgrade [i.e. to an existing aircraft], or there could be a CONOPS change” — that is, a change in concepts of operation not necessarily accompanied by new equipment at all.

“In the past,” Brig. Gen. Thomas told the CSIS audience, the military and industry have tended to think about vertical lift narrowly in terms of individual platforms: “It’s a helicopter,” full stop. In the FVL construct, however, the “air vehicle” and the “common mission architecture” are co-equal components. What’s more, it’s the latter — developing common, compatible, or even interchangeable mission equipment that can go into different kinds of aircraft — that may be “your greatest return on investment,” Thomas said, because it could simplify logistics and reduce operations and maintenance costs for decades to come. (This might well be a lesson learned from the JSF. Its software, computing power and sensors are the aircraft’s greatest assets.)

There are limits to commonality, noted Col. Kevin Christensen, an Army helicopter pilot who, like Thomas, works for the Joint Staff’s J-8, who handle force structure and resource assessment. “Laws of physics still apply, so the bigger [aircraft] is going to have a bigger engine and the smaller one’s going to have a smaller engine,” Christensen said. But the FVL vision is to design both engines so a single maintainer can work on both, without needing a special course on each aircraft.

link.

Here Come Lumpkin's Occular Implants!

Contact lenses sharpen our blurry vision, and free us from the hassle of pushing sliding glasses back up our noses. But the future of contacts is nigh: Researchers have created a super-thin infrared sensor that could lead to the development of night vision contact lenses.

Night vision, presently, is a rather clunky technology — epitomized in the rainy Tyrannosaurus rex scene in the original Jurassic Park. To see in the dark, a person dons a set of binocular-shaped goggles strapped to the head. The devices also produce a lot of heat, so they need to be cooled, adding to the overall volume of mechanics required.

Now, researchers from the University of Michigan are close to packing night vision’s clumsiness into technology that fits on your fingertip. They built a super-thin infrared light sensor using graphene — a material that’s a single carbon atom in thickness — that could be stacked on contact lenses or integrated into smart phone cameras for handy night vision.

link.

Liquid Metal Changes Shape, Moves on Command by Chinese Researchers

In the science-fiction classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the T-1000 is a robotic assassin with a liquid metal endoskeleton that can assume the form of any object or person. Its liquid nature makes it immune to attack by bullets and impervious to mechanical damage in general.

The T-1000 is an entirely fictional device that might as well be magic as far as conventional manufacturing techniques are concerned. And yet this might be about to change thanks to the pioneering work of Lei Sheng, Jie Zhang and Jing Liu at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

These guys have taken the first tentative steps to making liquid machines that work like the T-1000. Their first attempts can assume various shapes, move around and then transform into other shapes more or less without limit. And they say the work has profound implications for the design of robots, future machines and the nature of manufacturing.

While the most familiar liquid metal is the toxic mercury, there are other metals and alloys that are liquid at room temperature and much more benign. In particular, a gallium-indium-selenium alloy, with a melting point of around 10°C, has received much recent attention because it can be used for cooling microprocessors and even for liquid metal printing techniques.

Now Lei Sheng and co have made this liquid metal assume simple shapes by placing a thin film of it in water and applying an electric field.

With careful arrangement of the voltages and electrode geometries, these guys can make the metal form into a sphere. They say this is the result of the balance between the surface tension in the liquid metal and the electronic forces applied to its surface.

link.

Sweetman @ AvWeek: Hypersonic Speed the New Stealth

Lockheed Martin has labeled the hypersonic technology to be used in the proposed SR-72 Mach 6 aircraft as the “new stealth.” It is really the old stealth, and it points to a classic example of how almost every military and political leader in Western defense fell in line behind a technical miscalculation.

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He's wrong on a few points.  I ought to be well enough either on Sunday or Monday, a response will be posted. 

Counter Robopocalypse: Robots for Humanity

Sandia National Lab Works on Transformer Drone

link.

Probably Like Moller's Flying Cars: Thorium Powered Car

A US company says it will have a nuclear-powered prototype vehicle on the road within two years.

Laser Power Systems from Connecticut is developing a method of propulsion that uses thorium to produce electricity to power a car engine.

Thorium is an element similar to uranium and because it is such a dense material it has the potential to produce massive amounts of heat.

According to Laser Power Systems CEO, Charles Stevens, just one gram of thorium produces more energy than 28,000 litres of petrol. Mr Stevens says just eight grams of thorium would be enough to power a vehicle for its entire life.

link.

Take a look at their website.  Not terribly encouraging.

I have a hard time believing the DMVs and NTSB are going to be giving this a thumbs up.  Esp in California.  I can imagine Berkeley banning the car outright.  Even though its just 8 grams.  You ought to see the heart attack they have over our tritium work on the Hill.

First Brain to Brain Interface Created: Prof Controls College's Arms

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."

The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. The version available at the end of this release has been edited for length.

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing (BCI) in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in BCI technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the "fire" button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

LINK!

DARPA Wants "Cortical Processor" Which Mimics the Neocortex for Recognition Problems

In the never-ending quest to get computers to process, really understand and actually reason, scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to look more deeply into how computers can mimic a key portion of our brain.

The military's advanced research group recently put out a call, or Request For information, on how it could develop systems that go beyond machine learning, Bayesian techniques, and graphical technology to solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time."

Current systems offer partial solutions to this problem, but are limited in their ability to efficiently scale to larger more complex datasets, DARPA said. "They are also compute intensive, exhibit limited parallelism, require high precision arithmetic, and, in most cases, do not account for temporal data. "

What DARPA is interested in is looking at mimicking a portion of the brain known as the neocortex which is utilized in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. Specfically, DARPA said it is looking for information that provides new concepts and technologies for developing what it calls a "Cortical Processor" based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

3D Printed Aircraft?

Using Bacteria to Make Africa's Great Green Wall

DARPA's Hydra Unmanned Submarine Program

Unmanned vehicles designers at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., will brief industry next month on a project to develop an unmanned submersible designed to transport and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) stealthily close to enemy operations.

DARPA will conduct industry briefings on the Hydra program from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on 5 Aug. 2013 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory – Kossiakoff Center in Laurel, Md. Briefings will precede release on a broad agency announcement (BAA) for the Hydra program, DARPA officials say.

The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned undersea system with a new kind of unmanned-vehicle delivery system that inserts UAVs and UUVs. stealthily into operational environments to respond quickly to situations around the world without putting U.S. military personnel at risk.

The Hydra large UUV is to use modular payloads inside a standardized enclosure to deploy a mix of UAVs and UUVs, depending on the military situation. Hydra will integrate existing and emerging technologies in new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of payloads close to where they’re needed, DARPA officials say.

The Hydra program also will seek to develop and demonstrate not only the unmanned vehicle mothership, but also examples of the UAVs and UUVs that could be carried into battle covertly.

The rising number of ungoverned states, piracy, and proliferation of sophisticated defenses severely stretches current resources and influences U.S. military capability to conduct special operations and contingency missions, DARPA scientists say.

The Hydra program represents a way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission. Technologies are to be adaptable to several different delivery options, including airborne, surface, and subsurface. The Hydra program could enable other new capabilities not currently performed from undersea, DARPA officials explain.

The program will demonstrate individual high-risk components and systems before the military commits to a specific full-system approach, and refine technologies prior to operational demonstrations of the UAV and UUV payloads.

Hydra will have three phases. First, the program will define concepts, develop component capabilities, and reduce subsystem risks with one or more contracts in several technical areas. Later, the program will develop and test a full system. Technical areas involve modular enclosures, air vehicle payloads, undersea payloads, concepts of operation, and supporting technologies.

Neural Dust: Smart Dust for Mind-Machine Interfaces

The real time monitoring of brain function has advanced in leaps and bounds in recent years. That’s largely thanks to various new technologies that can monitor the collective behaviour of groups of neurons, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalopathy and positron emission tomography.

This work is revolutionising our understanding of the way the brain is structured and behaves. It has also lead to a new engineering discipline of brain-machine interfaces, which allows people to control machines by thought alone.

Impressive though these techniques are, they all suffer from inherent limitations such as limited spatial resolution, a lack of portability and extreme invasiveness.

Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.

Ultrasound seems like a really, really bad idea, but...

Second Crazy Thought of the Day

This is going to annoy Noel.  A lot.

However...

Noel and I have been discussing the Robopocalypse in email for some time.  Carlos, James and Doug have also been participants, for that matter.  However, the basic thought has been whether or not the coming of automata, computer driven automata, will be a problem for people, especially for Americans (the rest of you, too, but we're both yanqi, and somewhat nationalist, so we're viewing our tribe first).

Yes, Virginia, the droids are going to take a lot of jobs.  The argument is whether or not this is a bad thing (Noel, yes.  Me, no).  And whether or not the Singularity style uploads or their equivalent will allow force obsolesce of even the creative class or insight driven jobs (Noel, worried.  Me, not concerned in the least; why is for a post after the holidays).

However, one point Noel makes very, very well is with the Robopocalypse, labor in the sense of manufacturing, construction, many basic service jobs, etc will be going away.  Labor will be replaced by capital.  This helps divorce productivity from population size.  So long as you have the money to buy the equipment, the number of people running it will be quite low and wages will not dominate.  Why send it off to China (originally for the wage differential), when the machines will cost the same here or there and you do not have transport costs for the end goods.

Now, this has some concerns (lower employment for production, even for many, many services) and how to solve that is something to be addressed.  However, that's not the question I am going to address here.  Its not the Crazy Thought.

If it takes $ to buy the machines of the Robopocalypse and it grows the economy greatly, it would seem to follow the more $ you have, the more you are able to build out and have the greater production and economic growth in the sense of lower level services. 

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world.  Our economy is second to none and the part of the reason we're 'losing ground' to China (and in the future India) is their numerical superiority: if they had the same percentage of middle class, they'd have far, far more folks which to draw their creative class from and work the jobs we have, etc.  And they'll do it for less for some time.

 So.  We're richer.  Those machines cost $.  Those machines negate China's advantage.  or India's.

Seen the crazy thought yet?

If we, as in the United States, wanted to stay on top of the heap in the 21st and possibly later centuries, the Robopocalypse seems like a damned good way.

Airships: The Zombie Aerospace Idea

Obviously, no one has succeeded at a headshot just yet.

3D Printing Microbatteries

3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them.

To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less than the width of a human hair.

"Not only did we demonstrate for the first time that we can 3D-print a battery, we demonstrated it in the most rigorous way," said Jennifer Lewis, Ph.D., senior author of the study, who is also the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Lewis led the project in her prior position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with co-author Shen Dillon, an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering there.

The results will be published online on June 18 in the journal Advanced Materials.

The Robopocalypse Will Slither

Even Our Feline Overlords Must Worry About the Robopocalypse

Using Synthetic Biology to Grow Clothes

Robopocalypse Comes to Agriculture...in Australia

A robot effortlessly plucking fruit is some way off, though a range of simpler tasks are within reach to add to existing technology such as automatic steering of harvesters.

Salah Sukkarieh, Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney and developer of Mantis and Shrimp, says the next phase aims for robots to do increasingly complex jobs such as watering and ultimately harvesting.

"We have fitted them with a lot of sensors, vision, laser, radar and conductivity sensors - including GPS and thermal sensors," said Sukkarieh, speaking at his laboratory housing a collection of both ground robots and unmanned air vehicles.

The technology could have the biggest application in horticulture, Australia's third-largest agricultural sector with exports of $1.71 billion in the last marketing year, since a fixed farm layout lends itself better to using robots.

Robots and an unmanned air vehicle that are being developed at the University of Sydney had passed field tests at an almond farm in Mildura, Victoria state, said Sukkarieh.

Propelled by sets of wheels and about the height of a man, the robots were named after the native Mantis shrimp because of the marine crustacean's 16 different color receptors, capable of detecting up to 12 colors. Humans only have four, three of which pick up colors.

This capacity to recognize color already allows the robots to sense whether fruit is ripe.

The data can then be processed by computer algorithms to determine what action the robot should take. This could be to water or apply fertilizer or pesticides, or to sweep and prune vegetation, and eventually the aim is to harvest the crop.

"If tomorrow we got an apple, orange or tomato farmer that wants a robot to go up and down these tree crops reliably and accurately, we can do that within six months to a year."

"The question is can we make them more intelligent," added Sukkarieh, who also sees the technology being attached to standard farm vehicles and foresees a fully automated horticulture farm within 10 years.