Military Tech

(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory )

Carbon nanotech has been applied to everything from boat construction to windshields and now, with a licensing agreement from Livermore Lab, a Hayward, Calif., company will apply it to water desalination and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has licensed a new carbon nanotube technology to its spinoff company Porifera. The company will develop permeable membranes for CO2 sequestration, water desalination, and other liquid-based separations based on discoveries made at Livermore.

The technology integrates carbon nanotubes into polymer membranes, increasing the flux of carbon dioxide capture by two orders of magnitude thanks to the material's unique "nanofluidic" properties. This technique could enable a less expensive method of capturing carbon from coal plants, according to the Livermore. Sequestering CO2, a greenhouse gas emission, is one strategy for curbing global warming, although this particular process has yet to prove out on a industrial scale.

"The technology is very exciting," said Olgica Bakajin, former Livermore scientist and now chief technology officer at Porifera. "The reason it makes sense to do it is because of the unique nanofluidic properties of carbon nanotube pores. It's at the right place to take it to the marketplace."

Nanotubes are graphitic layers wrapped into cylinders a few nanometers in diameter, (approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair) and up to several millimeters long. Their extraordinary strength and unique electrical and thermal conductive properties make them attractive for many applications.

Porifera is funding the carbon capture project with a $1 million-plus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's pursuing the water purification angle with a $3.3 million DARPA grant to develop small, portable self-cleaning desalination systems.

(Credit: Volkswagen Group of America)

If you're a person who would gladly relinquish the task of parking your car to a computer, there may be a Volkswagen in your future.

Last weekend, Volkswagen Group of America and Stanford University's School of Engineering hosted a dedication ceremony on the Stanford campus for the new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) that included the "first ever" autonomous parking demonstration by a driverless car.

(Credit: Volkswagen Group of America)

The car, a VW Passat called Junior, was developed jointly by VW and Stanford and is the same one that finished second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Driverless cars have come a long way since the first DARPA race in 2004, when not one contestant made it over the finish line, much less parallel-parked itself.

VW donated $5.75 million for the new laboratory, which it called "the next step in the evolution of the two organizations' commitment to drive innovation in automotive development."

"When the new building opens early next year, VAIL will provide a home on campus for faculty and students from around the university to work on advanced automotive research," said Jim Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering.

The company also unveiled the Pike's Peak Audi TT-S, the latest iteration of driverless vehicles developed through the VW-Stanford partnership.

(Credit: Lockheed Martin Skunk Works)

The race to develop an unmanned aircraft that can stay aloft for five years at a stretch has entered its second phase, where the prize is a $155 million DARPA contract to build a small-scale demonstrator model.

The project, called Vulture II, will pit three defense contractor teams--Aurora Flight Sciences, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin--against one another and the clock for the right to build a small-scale, working version of a high-altitude, electric-propelled UAV capable of remaining aloft and on station for three months.

The Vulture is expected to serve as an electronic sensor and military communications platform, and might eventually emerge as an affordable alternative to communications and reconnaissance satellites.

DARPA specs call for a 5-kilowatt power system and up to a 1,000-pound payload capacity. All three companies propose to power their aircraft with solar power during the day and batteries at night. These aircraft would operate above the clouds from 60,000 to 90,000 feet, and must be able to withstand jet stream-power winds typically found at those altitudes.

Ever been out on patrol and had a sudden urge for chapli kabobs with a side of bendai?

That's the sort of mix-and-match experience that could be addressed through a new deal between DARPA and Geosemble Technologies, which makes a product called GeoXray that aims to quickly answer the question "What's around here?" for both government agencies and civilian users. In a nutshell, it works this way: you can peruse dining options or identify enemy assembly areas simply by clicking on aerial images of your area of operations.

GeoXray uses artificial intelligence to assign textual keywords to geospatial datasets, which in turn allows the customer to view information associated with a specific location. The data is summarized and displayed chronologically on what the company calls an "intuitive, user-friendly interface."

In its new DARPA program, Geosemble will expand its range of information sources beyond text to include video and audio sources.

"An integrated interface makes it simple for anyone to view a satellite image of any place in the world, then click on a location or object to automatically extract relevant information," DARPA program manager Todd Hughes said in a statement. "The application uses automatic techniques to accurately display geographically relevant news articles, business intelligence, events and databases onto satellite and aerial imagery."

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company is already pitching GeoXray as a quick and efficient way for shoppers to scout out retail opportunities without having to walk or drive around. It's easy to imagine this program linked to a Zillow-like real estate site.

"The seamless integration of news and data with imagery and maps brings an important new capability to government users, and has game-changing implications for online publishing and real estate," said Andre Doumitt, Geosemble CEO. "There is a lot of imagery available out there - high resolution, 3D, ground level, etc. This DARPA program enhances our position as the 'data inside' provider for those who need accurate and timely intelligence about their imagery, with accuracy down to the building level."

DARPA is spending millions of dollars to identify trash cans, which may have raised a few eyebrows, except these and other common urban objects could in the course of today's combat missions prove to be tactically significant.

BAE Systems received a $7.1 million contract to work on Phase II of the Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT) program, which is designed to improve the quality and timeliness of geospatial intelligence U.S. troops receive when facing enemy threats in urban environments.

This phase of the program's goal will be to "develop a 3D reasoning engine to query over object shapes, locations, and classifications for rapid urban mission planning, mission rehearsal, and situation analysis," according to DARPA.

DARPA's contention is that since target recognition in urban environments is so far removed from what soldiers have historically focused on, i.e. military objects such as tanks and armored personnel carriers, that the need to preemptively identify urban objects has become an important requirement.

That's going to be news to veterans of Chechnya, Hue, and Sarajevo.

Still, the reasoning is that tanks and cannons have unique signatures and were usually positioned in relatively isolated areas away from civilians and that's not so with today's asymmetric threats, where troops are forced to engage enemy combatants in cities with large civilian populations.

"Even the most common urban objects can have tactical significance: trash cans can contain improvised explosive devices, doors can conceal snipers, jersey barriers can block troop ingress, roof tops can become landing zones, and so on," hence the need for an all-knowing system.

BAE contribution will be to fuse Light Detection, and Ranging and Geographic Information Systems' data to automatically detect and classify an urban object's attributes, function and geospatial features, company officials said.

The BAE team has already developed "a system that combines a suite of complementary feature extraction and matching algorithms with higher-level inference and contextual reasoning to detect, segment, and classify urban entities of interest in a fully automated fashion."

Next up could be the market to identify domestic urban threats-like errant shopping carts and guys with squeegees.

The X-51A WaveRider hypersonic flight test vehicle was uploaded to an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 for fit testing at Edwards Air Force Base.

(Credit: USAF)

The X-51A WaveRider is one step closer to its inaugural test flight later this year, now that airmen at Edwards Air Force Base have successfully "mated" the scramjet-propelled vehicle to a B-52 Stratofortress.

In December, an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 is scheduled to papoose the X-51A to 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean before cutting it loose. At that point, a solid rocket booster from an ATACMS missile will fire up, accelerating the X-51 to about Mach 4.5. That's when the supersonic combustion ramjet kicks in, pushing the WaveRider to more than Mach 6 for up to five minutes, longer than all of its predecessors combined. NASA tests have reached Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph, according to some reports, but not for very long. The previous record was less than 10 seconds. Flight data will be telemetered back to Edwards Force Base before the X-51A test vehicle crashes into the Pacific.

A scramjet is an air-breathing engine that burns regular jet fuel, and may be the key to allowing airplanes to travel at speeds normally reserved for rockets. The engine requires no onboard oxidizers, but rather uses its own forward motion to compress air for fuel combustion. The X-51's chiseled nose allows it to "ride" shock waves that would pulverize a lesser craft. The X-51 was developed by Boeing and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA in order to "demonstrate a reliable system capable of operating continuously on jet fuel and accelerating through multiple Mach numbers."

"The heart of this aircraft is its engine," said Charlie Brink, X-51 program manager at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

"We're really breaking new ground in our understanding of hypersonic propulsion, but our four planned test flights will also enhance our knowledge of airframe-engine integration, high-temperature materials and other technologies. Together they will help us bridge air and space."

Future applications for the scramjet include access-to-space, reconnaissance and speedy, global strike capability.

(Credit: DARPA)

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.

DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with. (PDF)

The military will use the Machine Reading Program, as it's officially called, to automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations-which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N.

To pull it off, BBN will "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information."

"The machine reading system that DARPA envisions is not evolutionary, but revolutionary," said BBN Technologies VP Prem Natarajan. "Such a system could eliminate many of the impediments to stability that our military faces such as a lack of understanding of local customs, and give us the ability to assess global technology developments continuously."

However, BBN also expects the program to enable a plethora of new civilian applications, everything from intelligent bots to personal tutors. The system could provide unprecedented access and automated analysis of the world's libraries, allowing for vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical research, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.

BBN already offers a broadcast monitoring system that automatically transcribes real-time audio stream and translates it into English, creating a continuously updated, searchable archive of international television broadcasts.

"Imagine if the Reading System could be applied to scouring the World Wide Web for good deals on cars one time, and then applied to integrating new findings in genetics to an automated theory of disease," DARPA posits in its bid solicitation.

It should also be able to crank out one a heck of a term paper.

(Credit: DARPA)

An all star research team is developing a putty-like material to help regenerate shattered bones, a technology that could allow soldiers to avoid amputation and quickly regain full use of badly broken legs.

'Fracture putty' is a biocompatible compound designed to be packed in and around non-union fractures. It provides a load-bearing, osteoconductive, bone-like structure to give regenerative growth a chance. Then, once the bone heals, the putty degrades into harmless, absorbable by-products.

"The fracture putty will serve as a bioactive scaffold and will be able to substitute for the damaged bone," said principal researcher Mauro Ferrari. "At the same time, the putty will facilitate the formation of natural bone and self-healing in the surrounding soft tissue through the attraction of the patient's own stem cells. The putty will have the texture of modeling clay so that it can be molded in any shape in order to be used in many different surgical applications, including the reconnection of separated bones and the replacement of missing bones."

Traumatic, compound bone fractures are very difficult to treat on the battlefield, often requiring multiple surgeries with bone screws, plates, and rods to cobble together grafts with healthy bone. They also take a long time to heal. Bone putty could have the patient up and around in as little as a week, according to the researchers.

The program, which has been called "the ultimate convergence of materials science, mechanics, and orthopedics," will first be tested on animals, but could eventually lead to the use of 'bone putty' in emergency rooms to treat civilians injured in traffic accidents and other traumatic events, researchers hope.

The two-year research project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and includes the University of Texas Health Science Center and M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Harvard University, the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine at Northwestern University among others.