Liteye Systems, Inc and Red Six Solutions. Responds to Saudi Drone Attack
Centennial Colorado — The deliberate and calculated drone attack on Saudi Aramco oil facilities is of strategic and global significance. Access to inexpensive unmanned aircraft has changed the landscape for malicious activities, heightening the threat to critical infrastructures; airports, energy, agriculture, commercial, government and public venues.
“Incidents and effectiveness of drone related attacks are steadily increasing. As this trend continues, the next incident will happen, and it could be larger and more destructive,” said Kenneth Geyer, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Liteye Systems, Inc. “Protecting human life and critical assets from nefarious drone use is vital and requires layers of defensive capabilities. We’ve partnered with expert organizations in industry to bring these solutions to fruition. Only by integrating multiple levels of security can we hope to defend against attacks such as what happened on Saturday.”
Liteye Systems, Inc. has protected personnel and critical infrastructure against enemy or hazardous use of small drones when our systems first deployed with US forces in Iraq. Those first systems, and many more since, are still in operation today protecting U.S. DoD sites, but little is being done to protect equally important sites like critical transportation, energy and chemical infrastructure. Layered CUAS systems can prevent another incident.
“US security officials are aware of the seriousness of the situation faced by all critical facilities. There is an urgent need for the government to approve policies and release comprehensive solutions to provide direly needed protection to these high priority assets” said Scott Crino, CEO of Red Six Solutions.
Not to excuse the use of this imagery, but it’s worth mentioning that the new Modern Warfare is currently in a pre-release state, and it’s possible that this is being used as placeholder art until the game launches later this year. Still, you’d figure that a big corporation like Activision would be a bit more cautious when it comes to potential intellectual property violations for their multi-billion dollar franchise.
This is the thirty-eighth installment of ‘Max Talk Monday’ which shares select episodes from a series of instructional videos. Max Velocity Tactical (MVT) has established a reputation on the leading edge of tactical live fire and force on force training. MVT is dedicated to developing and training tactical excellence at the individual and team level.
This video examines, with the help of army men on a sand table model, the concept of the ‘assault through’ as part of the dismounted light infantry attack. Including a thorough background and context on how and when to run the drill, it also gives variations on the standard U.S. Army doctrinal drill.
This is the fourth installment of ‘Max Talk Monday’ which shares select episodes from a series of instructional videos. Max Velocity Tactical (MVT) has established a reputation on the leading edge of tactical live fire and force on force training. MVT is dedicated to developing and training tactical excellence at the individual and team level.
Max is a tactical trainer and author, a lifelong professional soldier with extensive military experience. He served with British Special Operations Forces, both enlisted and as a commissioned officer; a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Max served on numerous operational deployments, and also served as a recruit instructor. Max spent five years serving as a paramilitary contractor in both Iraq and Afghanistan; the latter two years working for the British Government in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — A U.S. Army project took a new approach to developing robots — researchers built robots entirely from smaller robots known as “smarticles,” unlocking the principles of a potentially new locomotion technique.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University published their findings in the journal Science Robotics (see related links below).
The research could lead to robotic systems capable of changing their shapes, modalities and functions, said Sam Stanton, program manager, complex dynamics and systems at the Army Research Office, an element of U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, the Army’s corporate research laboratory.
“For example, as envisioned by the Army Functional Concept for Maneuver, a robotic swarm may someday be capable of moving to a river and then autonomously forming a structure to span the gap,” he said.
The 3D-printed smarticles — short for smart active particles — can do just one thing: flap their two arms. But when five of these smarticles are confined in a circle, they begin to nudge one another, forming a robophysical system known as a “supersmarticle” that can move by itself. Adding a light or sound sensor allows the supersmarticle to move in response to the stimulus — and even be controlled well enough to navigate a maze.
The notion of making robots from smaller robots — and taking advantage of the group capabilities that arise by combining individuals — could provide mechanically based control over very small robots. Ultimately, the emergent behavior of the group could provide a new locomotion and control approach for small robots that could potentially change shapes.
“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator. “We are not looking to put sophisticated control, sensing and computation on them all. As robots become smaller and smaller, we’ll have to use mechanics and physics principles to control them because they won’t have the level of computation and sensing we would need for conventional control.”
The foundation for the research came from an unlikely source: a study of construction staples. By pouring these heavy-duty staples into a container with removable sides, former doctoral student Nick Gravish — now a faculty member at the University of California San Diego — created structures that would stand by themselves after the container’s walls were removed.
Shaking the staple towers eventually caused them to collapse, but the observations led to a realization that simple entangling of mechanical objects could create structures with capabilities well beyond those of the individual components.
“Dan Goldman’s research is identifying physical principles that may prove essential for engineering emergent behavior in future robot collectives as well as new understanding of fundamental tradeoffs in system performance, responsiveness, uncertainty, resiliency and adaptivity,” Stanton said.
The researchers used a 3D printer to create battery-powered smarticles, which have motors, simple sensors and limited computing power. The devices can change their location only when they interact with other devices while enclosed by a ring.
“Even though no individual robot could move on its own, the cloud composed of multiple robots could move as it pushed itself apart and shrink as it pulled itself together,” Goldman said. “If you put a ring around the cloud of little robots, they start kicking each other around and the larger ring — what we call a supersmarticle — moves around randomly.”
The researchers noticed that if one small robot stopped moving, perhaps because its battery died, the group of smarticles would begin moving in the direction of that stalled robot. The researchers learned to control the movement by adding photo sensors to the robots that halt the arm flapping when a strong beam of light hits one of them.
“If you angle the flashlight just right, you can highlight the robot you want to be inactive, and that causes the ring to lurch toward or away from it, even though no robots are programmed to move toward the light,” Goldman said. “That allowed steering of the ensemble in a very rudimentary, stochastic way.”
In future work, Goldman envisions more complex interactions that use the simple sensing and movement capabilities of the smarticles. “People have been interested in making a certain kind of swarm robots that are composed of other robots,” he said. “These structures could be reconfigured on demand to meet specific needs by tweaking their geometry.”
Swarming formations of robotic systems could be used to enhance situational awareness and mission-command capabilities for small Army units in difficult-to-maneuver environments like cities, forests, caves or other rugged terrain.
The research project also received funding from National Science Foundation.
I can’t think of a better way to kick off your Monday morning.
A day in the life of U.S. Army Rangers assigned to 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, as they hone the skills needed to succeed in the world of Special Operations. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, August 2019. (U.S. Army video by Sgt. Jaerett Engeseth)
