Tag Archives: military

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Snake robots to aid injured soldiers

snakebot_x2202A snake-like robot is being developed to aid medics in the rapid diagnosis and treatment of injured soldiers, from Technology Review:

Choset and his students have engineered a highly articulated robotic arm that consists of multiple actuated joints, which give the robot a snakelike flexibility. Each joint has two degrees of freedom that, working together, allow the robot to flex, retract, and twist into different configurations, much like a live snake.

As ever snakebots+military immediately put me in mind of Alastair Reynold’s excellent Century Rain.

[via Slashdot][image from Technology Review]

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Fabricate your own military hardware

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Fabrication technology – sometimes known as ‘rapid prototyping’ or 3D printing, among other names – is a real Pandora’s box. The benefits of being able to ‘print’ a solid object are manifold (reduced industrial wastage, low overheads and so on), but the technology doesn’t care what it is that you’re printing out, or who’s doing it… or what they’re doing it for.

This is a topic that Futurismic‘s own Sven Johnson has discussed here and elsewhere, but it’s rapidly moving from the realm of the theoretical into reality. For example, fabrication start-up Shapeways has a video of of a guy who has printed off a miniature remote controlled helicopter:

“So what?”, you might be thinking. But as Bruce Sterling points out:

… all that’s missing from the nightmare scenario is a tiny fabbed bomb and some fabbed GPS. Given those, the Israelis are in for hell on earth.

It’s still a relatively pricey way of doing things, but as the overheads drop the potential of 3d printing to put dangerous tools in the wrong hands rises in parallel with its ability to make our lives better. A rising tide floats all boats, after all.

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Royal Navy gets PWNZ0R3D by virus

HMAS Adelaide auxiliary warshipRemember when I mentioned that the UK’s Royal Navy has been installing a Windows derivative on its warship and submarine control computers? [image by Serendigity]

Well, it’s a different set of hardware, but apparently a bunch of RN computers have been knocked out of action my an email-borne virus in recent weeks. There’s got to be a great opening for an open-source contractor with a clean security history over there right now… [via SlashDot]

More seriously, though, this highlights a very real risk to ‘traditional’ military forces. After all, if small territorial conflicts like the Gaza situation can go worldwide on the web, that suggests that any opponent worth deploying your navy against is at least going to try futzing with your computer systems… and if the combination of your installed operating systems and a lack of basic email security savvy means you can have warship systems out of action for a few days, there’s some opportunities for a really nasty David and Goliath scenario somewhere down the line.

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Military kids to be issued virtual stand-ins while parents on deployment

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soldier and babyOK, file under “hearts in the right place, brains possibly not”: the US military has noted that having parents away from their kids a long time on active duty (and hence not exactly able to call home regularly) probably isn’t so great for the kids’ well-being. [image by SoldiersMediaCenter]

Their potential solution? Virtual parental avatars powered by chatbots. Here’s a snippet from the DoD’s solicitation for proposals:

“The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics,” the solicitation says. “For instance, a child may get a response from saying, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I miss you,’ or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent.”

So many potential responses, so little time… I guess I’m mostly surprised that it was thought up as a request from the DoD rather than at a DARPA coffee-break bull session.

Also – how many old sf stories does this sound like? I’m sure I remember a PKD short featuring something very similar. [via Gizmodo; tip-off from the Whitechapel Massive]

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U.S. military wants interactive virtual soldiers for the home front

spookyKnow how to make a virtual human avatar that could convincingly interact with a family member? If so, the U.S. Department of Defense wants to talk to you. Its Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury is seeking proposals for a Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members.

We are looking for innovative applications that explore and harness the power of advanced interactive multimedia computer technologies to produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families via a pc- or web-based application using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying “I love you”, or “I miss you”, or “Good night mommy/daddy.” This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent. We are seeking development of a tool which can be used to help families (especially, children) cope with deployments by providing a means to have simple verbal interactions with loved ones for re-assurance, support, affection, and generic discussion when phone and internet conversations are not possible. The application should incorporate an AI that allows for flexibility in language comprehension to give the illusion of a natural (but simple) interaction. The current solicitation is not aiming to build entertainment, but a highly accurate and advanced simulation platform.

Slate.com columnist William Saletan seems to like the idea, though he does concede that “Critics call the proposal “creepy” and “dystopian.”

[Spooky Hologram by atmasphere]