Students Design Unmanned Drone to Take Action Against Terrorist Activity
Kevin Kochersberger, director of the Unmanned Systems Laboratory at Virginia Tech, looks at the current design of an unmanned vehicle built by mostly undergraduate engineering students. (Virginia Tech Photo)
In less than two years, an unmanned aircraft search and rescue competition will be happening in a remote area in Australia. Kevin Kochersberger, director of the Unmanned System Lab (USL) at Virginia Tech, hopes to take a student design team and believes they have an excellent shot at winning the $50,000 prize money.
Kochersberger of Blacksburg, Va., has reason to have a lot of faith in his student design teams. When he assumed responsibility for the USL, his first team won second place in the 2008 outdoor aerial robotic competition. The pot was sweet then, too. They came home with $17,000 in prize money, partially because no team among the 40 entrants was awarded a prize for first.
The Association of Unmanned Vehicle System International altered the competition the next year to an indoor event. The entrants must fly their autonomous unmanned vehicle, a quad-rotor vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, safely into and through a building. Each year, the students are building upon the previous teams’ research.
In 2012, the sixth international competition will be based on the following real-life scenario. Credible information from an intelligence agency indicates that highly sensitive information detailing plans to sabotage the control of the Eurasian banking system is contained on an unsecured USB flash drive kept in a remote and highly secured office. The mission of the autonomous vehicle is to remove the flash drive by entering through an identified upper-story broken window. Added to the complicated task, the vehicle must be able to read Arabic, and then decide how to proceed once inside the building. (more…)
Engineers Develop Safer, Blast-Resistant Glass
To protect from potential terrorist attacks, federal buildings and other critical infrastructures are made with special windows that contain blast-resistant glass. However, the glass is thick and expensive. Currently, University of Missouri researchers are developing and testing a new type of blast-resistant glass that will be thinner, lighter and less vulnerable to small-scale explosions.
“Currently, blast-resistant window glass is more than 1 inch thick, which is much thicker than standard window glass that is only one-fourth of an inch thick and hurricane-protected window glass that is one-half of an inch thick,” said Sanjeev Khanna, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the MU College of Engineering. “The glass we are developing is less than one-half of an inch thick. Because the glass panel will be thinner, it will use less material and be cheaper than what is currently being used.” (more…)
Robotic Ferret Will Detect Hidden Drugs, Weapons and Human Trafficking
A new type of robot being developed will make it easier to detect drugs, weapons, explosives and illegal immigrants concealed in cargo containers.
Dubbed the ‘cargo-screening ferret’ and designed for use at seaports and airports, the device is being worked on at the University of Sheffield with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The idea for the project emerged from an event organised by EPSRC, the British Home Office Scientific Development Branch and the UK Borders Agency.
The ferret will be the world’s first cargo-screening device able to pinpoint all kinds of illicit substances and the first designed to operate inside standard freight containers, according to a news release issued today. (more…)
Improved Sensor Technology For Surveillance Drones Under Development
Photo: Current controls for MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial drone. (U.S. Air Force photo.)
Scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology are designing a new kind of optical sensor to fly in unmanned air vehicles, or surveillance drones, tracking suspects on foot or traveling in vehicles identified as a threat.
“The Air Force has clearly recognized the change in the threat that we have,” says John Kerekes, associate professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. “I think we all understand that our military has a paradigm shift. We’re no longer fighting tanks in the open desert; we’re fighting terrorists in small groups, asymmetric threats.”
Kerekes won a $1 million Discovery Challenge Thrust grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to design efficient sensors using multiple imaging techniques to track an individual or a vehicle. (more…)
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