So I didnt hear anyone say that these robots are well on their way to wielding small arms ,bazookas and, causing havoc in enemy occupied neighborhoods overseas, what a thought, I’m supposing their main problem would be endurance, ie. power supply, but once that is overcome in a major way I these little guys easily beind armored and armed to the teeh to carry out special ops.

The Pentagon’s risk-taking research agency is kicking off a new program to turn everyday cameras into autonomous ‘bots with problem-solving smarts.

Darpa is already after all kinds of highly intelligent robo-critters. In the past few months, they’ve launched projects to create a real-life C3PO and a surveillance system to pinpoint threats in heaps of visual data. Now, the agency wants artificial intelligence-powered cameras that can recognize objects — and then tell a story about them.

DARPA Quote: One of the desired military capabilities resulting from this new form of visual intelligence is a smart camera, with sufficient visual intelligence that it can report on activity in an area of observation. A camera with this kind of visual intelligence could be employed as a payload on a broad range of persistent stare surveillance platforms, from fixed surveillance systems, which would conceivably benefit from abundant computing power, to camera‐equipped perch‐and‐stare micro air vehicles, which would impose extreme limitations on payload size and available computing power. For the purpose of this research, employment of this capability on man‐portable unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is assumed. This provides a reasonable yet challenging set of development constraints, along with the potential to transition the technology to an objective ground force capability.

Next month, Darpa will host a one-day conference to launch the project, which has been given a slightly Orwellian title: “The Mind’s Eye.” The idea is to create machines that are endowed with what remains an exclusively human ability: visual intelligence.

We’ve got the ability to take in our surrounding, interpret them and learn concepts that apply to them. We’re also masters of manipulation, courtesy of a little thing called imagination: toying around with made up scenes to solve problems or make decisions.

But, of course, our intellect and decision-making skills are often marred by emotion, fatigue or bias. Enter machines. Darpa wants cameras that can capture their surroundings, and then employ robust intellect and imagination to “reason over these learned interpretations.”

State-of-the-art cameras can already recognize objects — the “nouns” of cognition. What Darpa wants is the verb: “To add the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings for recognizing and reasoning … enabling a more complete narrative of action in the visual experience.”

Darpa’s end goal is a “smart camera” that can report back on war-zone activity with the same detail a trained human operative could offer.

A MIGRANT makes a furtive dash across an unwalled rural section of a national border, only to be confronted by a tracked robot that looks like a tiny combat tank – with a gimballed camera for an eye. As he passes the bug-eyed droid, it follows him and a border guard’s voice booms from its loudspeaker. He has illegally entered the country, he is warned, and if he does not turn back he will be filmed and followed by the robot, or by an airborne drone, until guards apprehend him.

Welcome to the European border of the not-too-distant future. Amid the ever-present angst over illegal immigration, cross-border terrorism and contraband smuggling, some nations are turning to novel border-surveillance technologies, potentially backed up by robots, a conference on state security at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, heard in November. The idea is to scatter arrays of sensors in a border area in ways that give guards or robots plenty of time to respond before their targets make good an escape.

The need to secure borders is evident across the globe, from India – which is constructing a 3400-kilometre, 3-metre-high barbed-wire and concrete border wall to close itself off from Bangladesh – to Libya, where foot patrols are being augmented with new people-sensing technologies.

Libya has an agreement with the European Union to try to limit the flow of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa traversing its borders before crossing the Mediterranean and entering Italy. To help it enforce this deal, Libya is spending €300 million on technology for what it calls a “large border security and control system”, made by Selex Sistemi Integrati, part of Italian aerospace firm Finmeccanica. Selex says its command, control and communication technology will include all the computers and software necessary to make sense of the data gathered by a raft of different sensors on the Libyan border. Project details remain under wraps, but Selex already makes acoustic, infrared and remote-imaging sensors, which could find uses in border control.

Elsewhere, the US Department of Homeland Security, along with Boeing Intelligence and Security Systems, is fielding sensors on the border with Mexico, in an $8 billion project called the Secure Border Initiative network.

SBInet will eventually comprise some 400 25-metre-high towers similar to cellphone masts and containing an array of remote-controlled optical and infrared cameras. The towers will also carry a primary sensor designed to detect humans. This sensor is a 10-gigahertz, or “X-band”, ground surveillance radar made by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in Tel Aviv. The towers will be dotted along the US’s 3000-kilometre triple-layered border fence.

The radar will supplement acoustic and vibration sensors strewn around the border zone that pick up voices and footfalls, and will provide patrols with early warning of activity in the border area – as far as 10 kilometres from the fence. So says Mark Borkowski, who directs the SBInet project for the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency in Washington DC.

The idea is that robotic cameras will zoom in automatically on any activity detected by radar or sensors. “Then we classify the event to gauge our response: is it just a stray cow? A person? If so, are they carrying weapons or maybe drugs?” says Borkowski. “We’re not foolish enough to think a fence alone will work: we know people can build ramps and cut through it.”

A prototype SBInet system, based on nine temporary towers, has been tested on a 45-kilometre stretch of the US-Mexico border near Sasabe, Arizona, for the past three years. Called Project 28, it had problems: the X-band radar produced too much signal clutter from the ground, making it tough to detect human activity. And the satellite links it used took too long to send sensor data to base – so people had often disappeared by the time an alert was raised.

The radar has been modified and satellite links abandoned in favour of fast ground-based microwave links, says Tim Peters, Boeing’s SBInet project chief. The project moves to its deployment phase in mid-2010, when 17 permanent towers near Tucson will be turned on. Magnetic sensors will be added to detect vehicle movements and weapons, too. CBP is also trialling Predator drones on the border to feed surveillance pictures into SBInet.

IAI is a partner in the EU’s Transportable Autonomous Patrol for Land Border Surveillance (TALOS) programme, which eschews static ground sensors and border walls in favour of the aforementioned bug-eyed robots – replete with human-sensing radar – and aerial drones.

TALOS is needed because the expanded 27-nation EU has a porous eastern border that it cannot afford to monitor conventionally, says Agnieszka Spronska of the Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements (PIAP), based in Warsaw, Poland. PIAP is leading the 10-nation TALOS consortium, which is spending €20 million on developing the architecture for a mobile network of ground robots, drones and the command centres from which they are run.

“TALOS will be very scalable depending on the terrain – you can use as much of it as you need without static elements,” says Spronska. More than one ground robot will approach people, she says, as groups often split up.

But where does this deep-probing 24/7 surveillance technology leave residents who are living near borders, in terms of privacy? “We protect the camera and sensor systems from any kind of illegal or unauthorised use,” says Borkowski. “But it is indeed a balancing act. People are right to be asking such questions.”

Robots that rescue failing satellites and push “dead” ones into outer space should be ready in four years, it has emerged. Experts described the development by German scientists as a crucial step in preventing a disaster in the Earth’s crowded orbit.

Last year it was reported that critical levels of debris circling the Earth were threatening astronauts’ lives and the future of the multibillion-pound satellite communications industry. But senior figures at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) told the Observer they have been given the go-ahead to tackle a crisis that will come to a head in the next five to 10 years as more orbiting objects run out of fuel.

Their robots will dock with failing satellites to carry out repairs or push them into “graveyard orbits”, freeing vital space in geostationary orbit. This is the narrow band 22,000 miles above the Earth in which orbiting objects appear fixed at the same point. More than 200 dead satellites litter this orbit. Within 10 years that number could increase fivefold, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety has warned.

Klaus Landzettel, head of space robotics at DLR, said engineering advances, including the development of machines that can withstand temperatures ranging from -170C (-274F) to 200C (392F), meant that the German robots will be “ready to be used on any satellite, whether it’s designed to be docked or not”.

In 2007, the US Orbital Express project succeeded in refuelling an orbiting satellite. However, that satellite had been specifically designed to dock with the device.

The Israeli navy will shortly begin deploying unmanned craft along the Mediterranean coast, particularly off the Hamas-held Gaza Strip in the south and Lebanon in the north where Hezbollah guerrillas operate.

Video Detailing the Protector Naval UWV
These highly maneuverable unmanned surface vehicles, operated by remote control from land stations, can carry out a wide range of missions, such as patrolling coastal waters to counter gun-running and infiltration with less prospect of being detected than the much larger manned vessels.

“There are areas that the navy preferred to first enter in an unmanned capacity before a manned capacity,” a senior navy officer told The Jerusalem Post Sunday in reference to the Gaza and Lebanon sectors.

The Protector, built by Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd., is one of the new systems acquired by the navy. It can carry a wide range of payloads, including cameras, sensors and weapons.

These new craft are making Israel one of the global leaders in the development and combat deployment of unmanned systems in the air, on the land and now at sea.

Israel’s defense industry recently announced the development of an unmanned land vehicle for carrying supplies in combat zones.

Elbit Systems will be displaying a newly developed land robot, the Beagle, at the Association of the United States Army defense exhibition in Washington.

The Beagle is self-navigating and can avoid obstacles and climb stairs. Its extendable arm can lift up to 4.5 pounds and carry a wide variety of payloads.

But it is in the air that Israeli expertise in the unmanned vehicle sector is most widely seen.

Elbit will be also be displaying for the first time at the Washington exhibition its Hermes 90 long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle, which can remain aloft for up to 18 hours and has a range of up to 62 miles.

Poland is currently considering buying Israeli UAVs to support its forces deployed in Afghanistan.

“We’re going to buy a whole range of drones, from short to medium range,” Defense Minister Bogdan Klich told Jane’s Defense Weekly in August.

He comments followed Warsaw’s Aug. 11 announcement that Poland would create a backup force of 200 troops for its 2,000-man contingent currently serving with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Elbit announced Sunday that it opened an office in Baku, capital of the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan where Israeli influence is growing. Israel is a major buyer of Azeri oil from the Caspian Basin.

Elbit is currently working on UAV projects with the Azeri Defense Ministry, whose budget this year was increased to $2.5 billion.

According to Azeri media, Israel defense contractor Aeronautics Defense Systems will construct a factory to help the Azeris build UAVs and satellites.

The company’s chief executive officer, Avi Leumi, accompanied Israeli President Shimon Peres when he visited Baku in June.