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.)
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