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| --Tech & Moderator Notes | |
| Air Force Wants Tiny Drones That Squirt Trackable Goo | |
| 2011-04-29 | |
| Having a target painted on one's back just took on a whole new meaning. The Air Force wants a new kind of tracking tech in which a tiny drone surreptitiously "paints" an individual with some kind of signal-emitting powder or liquid that allows the military to keep tabs on him or her. Or perhaps upload his coordinates to a hellfire missile. On Tuesday, the Air Force put out a call for proposals for such technology, though it didn't specify exactly what kind of drone might deliver the magic powder, or what the magic powder might be. But as Danger Room notes, there are a range of experimental technologies that could potentially serve both purposes. Regular readers of PopSci know that tiny insect drones, while not yet perfected, abound in the lab. From larger hummingbird drones to other tiny ornithopters to DARPA's remote-controlled beetle, the delivery system for such a technology isn't so far away from being a reality. What most of these tiny drones lack is range, and that will only improve with advances in battery life and materials science. What's less clear is how the tracking might go down, though the Pentagon is hard at work on a range of what they call "Clandestine Tagging, Tracking, and Locating" (TTL) technologies. Some Pentagon ideas include marking targets with biological paints or micromechanical sensors. Other ideas proposed by outside groups are equally out there. One proposal from a University of Florida researcher uses insect pheromones encoded with unique identifiers that could be tracked from miles away. Other plans employ biodegradable fluorescent "taggants" that can be scattered by UAVs. Voxtel, a private firm in Oregon, has already made available a product called NightMarks, a nanocrystal that can be seen through night-vision goggles and can be hidden in anything from glass cleaner to petroleum jelly. DARPA is even looking into "smart dust" -- which is essentially a cloud of dust mote-sized sensors that could be sprayed into the air near a target in hopes that he or she might walk through the cloud and be tagged, meaning the drone or delivery system wouldn't even have to make direct contact with the target (think bird-like drones that can crop-dust a vehicle or person). Of course, the Air Force also notes that the technology it is fostering will be useful for things like tracking wildlife -- though why anyone would want to fire a hellfire missile at a flock of migrating birds is unclear.
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| Posted by:Sherry |
| #3 Personally, I've long hoped that the military would develop a powder that could be mixed with water, and sprayed from an ordinary crop duster over roads frequented by IED teams. The idea is that once the water had dried, the residue on the roadway would be invisible to the naked eye, but would reflect to say, invisible UV light, in a unique but still invisible "color" that could be picked up by a special camera mounted on a UAV. The roadway would look fairly homogeneous, except for the tire stripes where vehicles had driven. Yet a large, round patch in the paint would indicate that somebody dug up a lot of pavement right there, then covered it up to look normal. Granted, far more useful in a developed place like Iraq, instead of Afghanistan, it would still be worth some investigation. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-04-29 14:53 |
| #2 Tired, read that as tobacco goo, which I would suggest bchnut. Clearly has never happened across a Mississippi Kite nest. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2011-04-29 14:27 |
| #1 Screw the smart dust idea. Just develop a drone in the shape of a European House Sparrow designator that shines a laser on a target that a Hellfire missile in the form of a Sparrow can home in on and blow to Kingdom Come. |
| Posted by: gorb 2011-04-29 14:10 |