Crave

(Credit: CallPod)

Most new laptops have built-in Bluetooth these days, but if yours doesn't, you might want to get what CallPod introduced on Thursday, the Drone.

The Drone is not a regular Bluetooth adapter. It's a high-powered device that offers a range of up to 300 feet; that's 10 times the range of regular Bluetooth devices.

Designed mainly for audio purposes, once plugged in, the Drone is recognized by a computer as a speaker. The Drone's built-in firmware then streams the computer's audio feed to Bluetooth headsets or speakers.

For this reason, the device is perfect for computer-based VoIP calling, and works with Skype, right out of the box. If you are listening to music when a Skype call arrives, the Drone automatically switches over the the call.

As an audio device, the Drone is 100 percent plug-and-play; software installation is only required for advance functions, such as data transfer.

The Drone Bluetooth adapter is A2DP-compliant and compatible with both PCs and Macs. It's available now for $49.95, which is significantly more expensive than other regular Bluetooth adapters.

This is not your father's remote-controlled boat.

Qinetiq's Sentry is a unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance craft that the company says "boasts an advanced stealth design" and can hit speeds of up to 50 knots. Only now it's just a little less stealthy as it gets its first public demonstration at DSEi, the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition, taking place this week in London.

Qinetiq's remote-controlled Sentry looks a little like a stealth fighter plane--on purpose.

(Credit: Qinetiq)

We're not exactly sure how Qinetiq will perform the demonstration. The Sentry is much bigger than a rubber ducky, or dinghy even. It's 11.5 feet from stem to stern and has a beam (its widest part, for you landlubbers) of just over 4 feet, and certainly would need some running room. When it gets running, the company says, it can go for about 6 hours.

Whatever the demo actually entails, it's certainly worth a closer look. The Sentry's operator uses a PC-based console for remote control, including non-line-of-sight operations of up to 16 miles. It can also operate autonomously. The vehicle carries microwave data-link communications gear, a camera for day or night use, and a lighting rig that meets maritime navigation standards, according to the company.

Qinetiq says the Sentry combines its own research findings with "tried and tested commercial Jet Ski design"--we're assuming the company actually uses that brand of aquatic machinery and isn't, unlike many of us, rather too casual in using the brand name to describe generic gear that Jet Ski would prefer we call a "personal watercraft."

Missions for the Sentry, which stands just a little more than 3 feet above the waterline, could eventually include harbor patrol, battlefield recon and damage assessment.

But will it ever gain the sort of historical fame that now attends to PT-109 and John Kerry's Swift Boat? Only time will tell.

Qinetiq's solar-powered Zephyr takes flight.

(Credit: Qinetiq)

It looks like a giant version of the $2 styrofoam airplane toys you buy at the hobby shop, put together in two minutes, and render utterly useless after just a pair of overzealous throws. But this bird can soar.

So says its maker, the British defense contractor Qinetiq, which is crowing about the 54-hour flight turned in by its Zephyr High Altitude Long Endurance flyer. That's a record and then some for an unmanned aircraft, the company says, though it acknowledges the official word will still have to be delivered by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.

And did we mention that it's solar-powered? High endurance and green-tech cred--not bad at all for a contraption with all the design flair of a Q-tip lashed to a couple of broken rulers.

The two-day test flight (and a second, shorter flight) of the UAV were the first time all the particular components--solar arrays, lithium-sulphur batteries, a "bespoke autopilot" and more--had flown together, Qinetiq says. The U.K.'s Ministry of Defence ponied up the funds for the New Mexico trials.

For more details and more pictures, see "Photos: Solar-powered UAV flies and flies."

Major Mac checks his laptop for battlefield information from....

(Credit: MightyWorld.com)

Take one part G.I. Joe and one part Fisher-Price Little People, mix in a few dashes of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems paraphernalia, and you might just come up with the Mighty World line of preschool-friendly military action figures.

These very little soldiers, distributed by International Playthings, are well-provisioned with some of the very latest in 21st-century battlefield gadgets. Consider Major Mac and his stealthy reconnaissance drone (an ultramodern, top-secret stealthy reconnaissance drone, that is). "Operated from his laptop, it swoops over enemy territory and relays back vital field information," says the Mighty World site. Not via mere Wi-Fi, of course: "The camera mounted on the front is said to bounce its signal off orbiting satellites."

...his trusty camera-equipped drone.

(Credit: MightyWorld.com)

As far as we can tell, Mac's aerial gadget is so secret it wasn't even on the program with futuristic designs from Northrop Grumman and others at this week's drone-focused symposium of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

The Mighty World drone, alas, is unarmed. When Major Mac and pal Captain Cliff, the ATV scout, need to engage wee bad guys, they have to turn to their newest gadget, the RDS (Robotic Defense System), "a multipurpose weapons system that can track incoming missiles and blast them from the sky just as easily as it can defend against land-based threats." That would seem to outclass anything the PackBot or Talon systems are carrying these days.

For amphibious operations, the figurine to turn to is Captain Perry. His gear includes a re-breather apparatus that would do any SEAL proud, and a Combat Rubber Raiding Craft equipped with satellite link and radar.

Major Mac, Captain Cliff and their Robotic Defense System.

(Credit: MightyWorld.com)

(Hasbro, we should note, has marked 2007 as the 25th anniversary of G.I. Joe--unexpectedly, in our eyes, given that Joe's time in service dates back to the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It turns out that the "vintage" action figure was retired in 1976, with the line returned to duty in 1982 by a "Real American Hero" version reinvigorated for the Reagan era.)

A tip of the garrison cap to Wired's Danger Room blog for alerting us to these tech-savvy toy soldiers.

WASHINGTON--A handful of new drones is expected to begin patrolling the nation's northern and southern borders within the next few years.

For the moment, we're not talking swarms, here. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, backed by the Bush administration and some in Congress, are nevertheless hoping to steadily increase the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles aloft in an effort to nab illegal immigrants and drug traffickers more effectively, said Michael Kostelnik, a retired U.S. Air Force official who now serves as assistant commissioner of the CBP's air and marine unit.

U.S. Homeland Security officials plan to add more drones like these in an effort to nab illegal immigrants and drug traffickers.

(Credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

For the past few years, CBP agents have already been launching a pair of Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from the Arizona desert to work along the southwestern border with Mexico.

The agency plans to take on two more aircraft this fall, with the idea that they'll undergo further testing and start flying surveillance missions next year, Kostelnik said in a speech at the annual symposium here of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. In September, CBP plans to inaugurate one of the flying machines at an operations center in Grand Forks, N.D., and in November, it plans to accept a second UAV as part of its southwestern fleet.

There's also funding available for the addition of two more Predator B vehicles next year, Kostelnik said. CBP hopes to outfit one of them with sensors specially designed for policing the seas and station it along the Gulf of Mexico coast, which he suggested has "a lot going on" from an illegal-immigration and drug-trafficking perspective.

For what are probably obvious reasons, the idea of sharing the domestic airspace with vehicles lacking human eyeballs has caused a stir among many pilots. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, citing safety worries, has repeatedly called on Congress to urge federal regulators to step up their enforcement of potentially unregulated uses of the aircraft in the national airspace.

Kostelnik attempted to downplay those concerns on Wednesday by boasting about the perceived benefits derived from the policing tactic. He noted that CBP has received certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate only in certain areas along the border.

He also said the Predator is "probably one of the most experienced and safest of all vehicles we fly" and noted that most missions occur at night and in relatively remote areas. ("We're not flying downtown New York; we're not flying across Dallas, Texas," he said.) While they're up there, CBP's planes could likely be used to conduct other federal agencies' missions, too, such as collecting weather data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he added.

"You have to understand what these things are doing," Kostelnik told the gathering of UAV industry and government representatives. "I'm not trying to make a buck, I'm trying to protect you and your families."

WASHINGTON--We tend to hear more about the growing number of human bodies being shipped off to combat to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the U.S. Army is also dispatching more and more robots.

This ground-based robot, on display by the U.S. Army at an unmanned systems symposium this week, was battered recently when it detected an IED in Iraq. Military officials want robots, not humans, doing more of that dirty work.

(Credit: Anne Broache)

Since the conflicts began five years ago, the military branch has been steadily stepping up deployment of both unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, Col. John Burke, the Army's director of unmanned systems integration, said Wednesday.

Burke, who was speaking at the second day of a confab here hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, touted the machines' surveillance capabilities as a proven success, at times, in keeping live soldiers out of harm's way.

On the airborne side, four systems--the Raven, the Shadow, the Hunter and the Sky Warrior--have logged more than 270,000 hours during Operation Iraqi Freedom. When that operation first started, "you could measure the (use of) unmanned aircraft systems in maybe tens of hours a day," Burke said. By 2005, that number had climbed to about 100 hours per day, and now that figure has reached about 500 hours per day, he said.

Only 180 robots were on the ground in 2004, but that number had grown tenfold by the next year. Now, more than 5,000 are in the theater.

Expect that trend to continue in the future, Burke said, although he noted that the Army believes it's necessary to integrate both manned and unmanned techniques. Thanks to the ready availability of "storage in the terabytes," the Army is also counting on arming soldiers with a heightened amount of "real-time, multidimensional" data gleaned from various kinds of UAV sensors about their surroundings. A commander, for instance, could pull up archived information about what has transpired at a particular road intersection in the past week and ideally use it to help establish patterns.

The unmanned activity, to be sure, isn't limited to the Army. The Air Force has also come to consider a flying machine called MQ-1 Predator a mainstay of its operations in the theater, with more than 250,000 flying hours logged since it first came into use in 1994. A higher-end aerial drone called the Global Hawk is also flying daily missions in Iraq, according to Lt. Gen. Donald J. Hoffman, an official in the Air Force's acquisition office, who also spoke at this week's symposium.

WASHINGTON--Singapore may not occupy much more than a tiny dot on the world map, but it's counting on drones and other remote-controlled vehicles to make its military mighty.

As one of the world's busiest sea ports, the Asian city-state's "survival and prosperity depends on national security," Tan Peng Yam, deputy chief executive of the country's Defense Science &Technology Agency, told attendees at the first day of the annual North America symposium put on here by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Singapore recently added this Israeli-made UAV to its Air Force fleet.

(Credit: Government of Singapore)

Because a third of the world's trade--including 90 percent of China's trade and 80 percent of Japan's trade--flows through the bordering Straits of Malacca, the country of about 4.5 million people could find itself a "lucrative terrorist target," Yam said.

That's where the robotic vehicles come in. Since the late 1970s, shortly after the British withdrew from the colonial outpost, Singapore's military has been testing out unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an attempt to make up for its limited human resources. They've now become "indispensable" for tackling the dreaded four d's of military missions--"the dull, dirty, dangerous and demanding" ones, that is, Yam said.

Earlier this year, the Singapore government unveiled plans to revamp its Air Force organization into five commands--including a new one devoted solely to building up UAV "expertise and capabilities." In late May, the Air Force added to its lineup Israeli-made Hermes 450 UAVs, which are designed for surveillance and have also been used by the British government and by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The country is also trying to get "people who never worked in defense before" interested in the robots, Yam said. The government announced a contest in January to build the best "urban warrior" robot, backed by a $1 million cash prize. The idea is for teams to devise an unmanned ground vehicle that's the swiftest at completing a sequence of tasks--climbing stairs, navigating pavement, moving along corridors, entering rooms and even operating elevators.

A country whose area is less than a quarter of Rhode Island's does encounter some unique challenges in its UAV rollout, though. "If a UAV goes out of control," Yam said, "it will go into our neighboring countries." (To help get around the skimpy-airspace problem, the government has taken to using a simulator.)

Not everyone's gadget craving can be satiated by Hello Kitty pirates or Barbie MP3 players. If you've ever wondered what military folk dream of finding under their Christmas trees, you might wander the aisles of the Navy Opportunity Forum being held this week in Arlington, Va.

(Credit: Lite Machines)

This year's show featured all sorts of unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used to fly (or swim) up ahead to check out potentially dangerous areas while their human operators stay at a safe distance.

Let's not delude ourselves. These things don't come cheap. This one, from Lite Machines, is expected to cost less than $2,000 if it makes it to market. But if we can program it to seek out doggie land mines before we take a stroll in the park, it might be worth every penny.

Check out some of the other drones on display at the conference on sister site News.com.

Three aircraft in the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) pipeline promise to change some assumptions we have about air travel--the assumption that there's a pilot in the cockpit, for instance.

(Credit: IAI)

In the works is an unmanned cargo plane with a 30-ton payload capacity. IAI could have gone for an unmanned passenger jet--the technology does exists--but "the world is not yet ready to be flown without a pilot at the stick," Shlomo Tsach, IAI director of flight sciences, told the Jerusalem Post. "A psychological obstacle needs to be overcome before people are willing to fly in unmanned planes." Ya think?

No such reservations however, when it comes to consigning innocent cargo to the uncharted skies of unmanned delivery. While most people admit they would not get on an unmanned flight themselves, they had no problem sending their cargo that way, according a Boeing poll quoted by the Post.

The Israelis have two other projects they say will "revolutionize civilian and military aviation": an eco-friendly inter-city commuter aircraft powered by fuel cells and a drone called the Sun Sailor, a solar-powered UAV that weighs 4 kilograms and is capable of carrying a small digital camera or other detection equipment. The latter should be able to stay up indefinitely because it has no need to refuel. The 10-seat commuter, which runs on fuel cells, is supposed to reduce noise and exhaust pollution, plus it's expected to be a stepping stone for the use of alternative energy in other aircraft.

That's not the end of it. We'll all have a chance to fly pilot-less soon enough, according to Tsach. "Once the new cargo plane takes to the air, it will only be a matter of time before there also are unmanned passenger planes." Quick! Drop a dime to the Airline Pilots Association.