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UAVs On Parade

One technology more than any other has stood out as a success story for the U.S. military in Iraq: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, says C/Net’s Crave.

The best-known of the UAV is the MQ-1 Predator, built by General Atomics. It has evolved from its early use as simply a reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft to become an armed weapon, firing Hellfire missiles. It can track enemy combatants and fire on them with pinpoint accuracy by homing in on a reflected laser beam aimed at the target. A more recent version of the Predator, called the MQ-9 Reaper is a “hunter-killer” drone also built by General Atomics.

While the Predators carry out missions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and are handled by ground crews there, the pilots generally operate from thousands of miles away, in places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The 42d Attack Squadron was formed at Creech on November 8, 2006 as the first Reaper squadron.

During last spring’s fight for Sadr City, for instance, UAVs including the Predator and the RQ-7 Shadow proved instrumental in finding and destroying insurgent targets. Cameras on the aircraft help commanders on the ground see and map out a wide area of operations with their “persistent surveillance” capability.

U.S. officials credit the high-tech aerial systems as among the top reasons that violence in Iraq dropped so dramatically this year. The Predator–with its “snowmobile” engine and unobtrusive presence–has also become a favored tool of the CIA

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can be classified as “Class I” platoon-level UAVs, the smallest flying platforms and are used for reconnaissance, security and target acquisition. Class II UAV Systems are designed to be be deployed from and return to one of the FCS’ armored personnel carriers or related vehicles. The larger Class III UAV systems provide remote reconnaissance and terrain information, and can take off and land in unimproved areas.

The Global Hawk is a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) vehicle, capable of flying at 60,000 feet or higher for 40 hours or more per mission. It can be flown from a console with the take off and landing processes all automated. The real pilot can communicate with Air Traffic Control, in controlled airspace, just like a manned airplane. But the Global Hawk needs no surrogate pilot on the ground to guide it and can fly autonomously.

Jeff Hawkins (audio interview), of Palm Pilot fame, wrote the book “On Intelligence“and started a company called Numenta to apply neuroscience to computing. Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Labs (LMT), is talking with Numenta about “cognitive computing” for DARPA projects involving UAVs. Lockheed Martin initiated a two-year, $6.6-million study contract to develop a Polymorphous Computing Agent Architecture (PCAA) that will perform cognitive tasks for military systems.

The neocortex is a memory system, according to Hawkins.

All the brain does is store and recall patterns. Every sensory input — whether sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell — is translated into a sequence of patterns that is stored in the neocortex. “Through exposure,” Hawkins explained, “it builds a model of the world. If you step off a plane in a new city and walk through the terminal, your brain will compare that terminal to others you’ve been to before and will predict that when your foot hits the carpet it will encounter a firm surface that will support your weight. If your foot slips through the carpet and you fall into a vat of chocolate pudding, you will be surprised. If the carpet sprouts tentacles and grabs your leg, you will be surprised. If anything happens that is not consistent with your past experience of carpets in terminals, you will be surprised.
That’s because your brain is always predicting what will happen next based on what has happened in the past. The last time you were in a terminal, your foot hit the carpet, then you took another step, and another, and another, all without incident. Similarly, when you hear the opening bars of a familiar song, your brain anticipates what notes will come next because it is comparing what it hears to the stored pattern of the entire song. Intelligence, then, is pattern recognition. The brain is intelligent, Hawkins said, because “it lets you imagine the future.”