army

People serving in the U.S. military now have their own Web site where they can upload, share, and watch videos.

Announced yesterday, the new MilTube site has been set up as a safer, more secure alternative to YouTube, with content protected behind firewalls. As such, it's designed to serve the interests of military personnel who want to share videos but also satisfy the concerns of the Department of Defense (DOD), which has never been comfortable with access to commercial social network and sharing sites.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel,&… Read more

Mozilla is looking for a few good people to join its army.

The new Army of Awesome program unveiled yesterday is designed to bring together Firefox experts and browser users in search of technical help.

Anyone with a Twitter account can join Mozilla's Army of Awesome. Volunteers just browse through a list of recent tweets from users that stream on the Army's Web page. If a volunteer spots a tweet that he or she would like to respond to, the volunteer just clicks on it. Firefox will open a window in Twitter in which the volunteer can choose … Read more

Sputnik may be the most famous satellite to have been launched on October 4--OK, so it's the most famous satellite, period--but it's not the only one. Three years to the day after the Soviet Union launched its little beeping orb and kicked the Space Race into high gear, the U.S. on October 4, 1960, lofted up a spherical satellite called Courier that turned out to be quite a wordsmith, or at least a stenographer.

"The Courier satellite," writes Rebecca Robbins Raines in "Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the U.S. Army Signal Corps,&… Read more

The U.S. Army is developing snakelike robots for battlefield action that could include search and rescue missions, opening doors, and handling improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in a bid to keep troops out of harm's way.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory's prototype Robotic Tentacle Manipulator is an array of three snake robots on a circular base. The snake bots form a hand of sorts.

While it doesn't look like much now, the Army says the device is scalable and could be deployed in various sizes and configurations, giving it maximum flexibility. It could be installed on … Read more

Routine use of robotic lift trucks may not be far off.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with a team of engineers, have transformed a Toyota 8-Series lift truck into an autonomous bot capable of working alongside human supervisors using voice commands or hand gestures.

The 3,000-pound-capacity lift truck from Toyota Material Handling (TMHU) is capable of locating, lifting, moving, and placing supplies while traversing just about any type of terrain. It was demonstrated last month at an event hosted by the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee, in Virginia.

"Robotic forklifts have the potential to protect both military and civilian personnel working in high-risk environments, such as hazardous material storage facilities, said Brett Wood, president of TMHU.

The demo included a review of the robot's safety features, sensor capabilities, and human-robot interface.

The researchers and engineers developed a complex network of systems to enable the lift truck to navigate real-time conditions faced by lift truck operators (navigating obstacles and interacting with other moving vehicles, for example). To do this, they added a camera, sensors, laptops, servomotors, Wi-Fi, and a PDA.

"We chose the internal combustion Toyota lift truck because it can be operated outdoors on packed earth or gravel and because, with mini-lever control some of its functionality can be controlled electronically rather than solely mechanically," said MIT Professor Seth Teller, who headed the project.

The modified vehicle wirelessly exports video from its own point of view, so the human supervisor, even if hundreds of miles away, can see whatever is nearby (provided there is network connectivity between the lift truck and supervisor's tablet).

In September 2009, for example, the team demonstrated the lift truck operating autonomously at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., while under the supervision of an operator in Washington D.C.… Read more

An Army analyst jailed for allegedly leaking a video of a controversial Iraq air strike also allegedly leaked classified information about a U.S. investigation into cyberattacks on Google that originated in China, the hacker who turned in the analyst told CNET on Saturday.

U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning had confided to well-known hacker Adrian Lamo in e-mails and instant messages that he was the one who provided the 2007 video of a military helicopter gunning down journalists and civilians in Iraq, as well as other information, to whistleblower Web site Wikileaks, Lamo has said.

Along with leaking … Read more

ZAP this week is demonstrating its line of electric trucks, vans and ATVs at the Renewable Energy Rodeo and Symposium, at the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command's Tank and Automotive Center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

The two-day symposium has brought energy experts from around the world together with specially selected exhibitors showcasing solutions ranging from energy-efficient ground vehicles to renewable-energy generation equipment./p>

The event is organized for federal, state and local government legislators, GSA and various fleet managers, Pentagon-level officials from all U.S. service branches, as well as students from … Read more

The futuristic-looking XM-25 shoulder-fired weapon, a sort of a souped-up grenade launcher, will soon be getting its trial by combat.

U.S. Special Forces soldiers will be trying out the XM-25 in Afghanistan this summer, according to a report Thursday at Military.com. It's not clear how many of those weapons will be going, but the numbers are likely to be quite small, given that it's still early days for the specialized system.

The XM-25, which fires a 25mm airbursting, high-explosive round, packs a whole lot of smarts to go with its punch. With the click of a … Read more

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more