April 24, 2002
MILITARY RESEARCH TARGETS SMART ROBOTIC SENSORS
A new, four-university military research initiative, led by Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, is working on robotic aircraft and land vehicles that can sense and close in on targets hidden in trees, caves or bunkers. Stationary and moving sensors might scan for communications signals emanating from a bunker, different kinds of electromagnetic signatures put out by machinery or the infrared waves emitted by a heated object. Other sensors installed aboard airborne or surface vehicles would autonomously coordinate activities with minimal intervention from humans and narrow a search using special back-tracing mathematics to locate "fields" in space where tell-tale waves vibrate. Researchers say the technology would allow increasingly localized sensor searches for quarry so hidden that you would not even know where to start looking for it without it.
COMET CHASER ON TRACK FOR JULY 1 LAUNCH
NASA's Contour spacecraft left home in Maryland this week for Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it is scheduled for a July 1 launch aboard a Delta II rocket for an unprecedented comet study. Contour, short for Comet Nucleus Tour, set out from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt after eight weeks of being baked, frozen, spun, shaken and probed in Goddard's test facilities -- getting a dose of the conditions it will face during launch and in space. Contour will encounter two very different comets as they zoom through the inner solar system. From as close as 60 miles away, it will snap the sharpest pictures yet of a comet's nucleus, map the types of rock and ice on the surface and analyze the surrounding gas and dust. Targets include comets Encke in November 2003 and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 in June 2006, though the mission team can steer the solar-powered probe to a scientifically attractive "new" comet should the opportunity arise. For more information go to contour2002.org.
MIT DEVELOPING FIBER MIRRORS FOR BATTLE GEAR
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created high-performance mirrors in the shape of hair-like flexible fibers that could be woven into cloth or incorporated in paper. Applications may include fabrics with embedded "bar codes" that identify the wearer, potentially useful in the battle suits of future soldiers, or a lightweight cloth that reflects radiation, protecting from blasts of heat. These mirrors could also be used as filters for telecommunications applications. The work builds on the omnidirectional dielectric reflector -- dubbed the "perfect mirror" -- created in 1998 and which combined the best characteristics of the familiar metallic mirror with those of the dielectric mirror -- alternating layers of non-metallic materials that allow much greater control over reflectivity but which can only reflect light from a limited set of angles and is polarization sensitive. Dielectric mirrors most are used in high-performance applications such as in laser cavities and for adding and dropping channels in telecommunications systems. Perfect mirror can reflect light from all angles and polarizations, just like metallic mirrors, but unlike its metal counterpart can also be "tuned" to reflect certain wavelength ranges while transmitting others. So an array of mirror fibers or even a single fiber can be "tuned" to reflect light at different wavelengths to create a kind of optical bar code that could be woven into fabric or incorporated into a paper.
SKY INTERNET TO GUIDE UNMANNED VEHICLES, HELP EMERGENCY WORKERS
More and more unmanned vehicles are taking up positions on the modern battlefield and UCLA researchers are designing a portable, rapidly deployable network to allow these robotic agents to communicate. The Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents -- Minuteman -- a portable airborne network system, will provide local communications for the increasing array of unmanned air and ground vehicles. This "Internet in the sky" will support the demanding communications requirements of unmanned missions, says Mario Gerla, UCLA professor of computer science at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Minuteman will enable the Navy to bring fully networked force to the battlefield," Gerla said. "This will be the 'glue' that holds together supporting technologies such as mission planning, path planning, reasoning, decision making and distributed real-time computing and control." Gerla heads the $11 million, five-year project that could also be useful for emergency workers responding to natural or manmade disasters.
