Pentagon plans cyber-insect army

[viraljimmy]

Pentagon plans cyber-insect army
By Gary Kitchener
BBC News


The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.

The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.

Experts told the BBC some ideas were feasible but others seemed "ludicrous".

A similar scheme aimed at manipulating wasps failed when they flew off to feed and mate.


The new scheme is a brainwave of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is tasked with maintaining the technological superiority of the US military.

It has asked for "innovative" bids on the insect project from interested parties.


'Assembly-line'

Darpa believes scientists can take advantage of the evolution of insects, such as dragonflies and moths, in the pupa stage.

"Through each metamorphic stage, the insect body goes through a renewal process that can heal wounds and reposition internal organs around foreign objects," its proposal document reads.


---------------------------------------
DARPA SCHEMES
Arpanet information processing system - a precursor to the internet

Self Healing Minefield - the mines reconfigure themselves to fill gaps when one or more are stepped on

Brain Interface Programme to wire soldiers directly into their machines

Mechanical Elephant to penetrate dense Vietnam War jungle. Unused

Policy Analysis Market - online futures market where "traders" wager on future terrorism and assassinations

Computer game, Tactical Iraqi, to teach troops how to decipher Iraqi body language
-----------------------------------------


The foreign objects it suggests to be implanted are specific micro-systems - Mems - which, when the insect is fully developed, could allow it to be remotely controlled or sense certain chemicals, including those in explosives.

The invasive surgery could "enable assembly-line like fabrication of hybrid insect-Mems interfaces", Darpa says.

A winning bidder would have to deliver "an insect within five metres of a specific target located 100 metres away".

The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc."


'Fiction'

Scientists who spoke to the BBC news website were unconvinced.

Entomology expert Dr George McGavin of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said the idea appeared "ludicrous".

"Not all wacky ideas are without value. Some do produce the goods. My feeling is this will probably not produce the goods," he said.


---------------------------------------
ANIMALS IN WARFARE

WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air

WWII: Attach incendiaries to bats. Induce hibernation and drop them from planes. They wake up, fly into factories etc and blow up. Failed to wake from hibernation and fell to death

Vietnam War: Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation. Later, syringes placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. About 40 divers thought to have been killed
-----------------------------------------


"What adult insects want to do is basically reproduce and lay eggs. You would have to rewire the entire brain patterns."

Dr McGavin said it appeared impossible to connect the technology to the right places during the metamorphic phase, particularly with regard to flight.

Prof Andrew Parker, research leader at the Natural History Museum's zoology department and a specialist in bio-mimetics, said the concept was not too far fetched but had its limits.

Technology could help direct an insect to chemicals such as in roadside bombs, he said, but controlling full flight was "a long way off".

Entomology expert at the museum, Stuart Hine, agreed it was plausible to use insects to detect explosives.

But he added: "I feel that the reality of such cyborg fusion between insect and machine lies squarely in the realms of fiction."

To receive micro-signals from the insects would require a dish "quite close and several feet in diameter, rendering it a less than covert operation".

Darpa's previous experiments to get bees and wasps to detect the smell of explosives foundered when their "instinctive behaviours for feeding and mating... prevented them from performing reliably", it said.


Darpa was founded in 1958 to keep US military technology ahead of Cold War rivals.

Its website says it has around 240 personnel and a $2bn (£1.1bn) budget. Supporters say much of its work has been successful, but it has also drawn criticism for unusable "blue-sky" projects.

A former director said in 1975: "When we fail, we fail big."

[Hippie3]

nano-technology, robotics and bio-tech merging
of course military uses come first, as always.
it will lower casualties
but might make war more likely.

[I_am_me]

Like all good weapons besides ones which cause massive destruction, it should be kept a secret.

[doobydoobydoo]

... they already have them.

[maidenofiron]

yea thats pretty cool. but the first thing i thought was damn what has the pentagon wasted our tax money on now? The pentagons budget is so freekin huge that they are foolin around with insects. when poverty, homelessness, pollution, and unemployment are rising, as well as education levels and those with adaquate health care both falling, how do justify so much military spending???

[Jacsprat]

sounds like another good example of waisted tax dollars like when the Air force paid a fellow $26,000
to see if it was possible to build a trans-porter device like on star trek.

This person delivered a paper with several mathamatical equations showing what might be possible.

However remotely possible, I think we're a long ways from
"beem me up scotty"

[Hippie3]

not nearly so far to this technology,
early examples/prototypes testing already underway .
implants in dolphins, dogs, robotic tanks,
insectoid robotic recon vehicles no bigger than a fly on a wall
watching, listening, directing missile strikes...
coming soon to small third world nations near you.

[WeedyResin]

Originally Posted by maidenofiron

yea thats pretty cool. but the first thing i thought was damn what has the pentagon wasted our tax money on now? The pentagons budget is so freekin huge that they are foolin around with insects. when poverty, homelessness, pollution, and unemployment are rising, as well as education levels and those with adaquate health care both falling, how do justify so much military spending???

Fuck yeah! This is what I was saying when I was in the military! When I was in, there was a general that was busted down because he spent a hundred thousand $$$s to redecorate his office. Fuck, ya know what I could do with $100,000? Have one kick ass party! There would be servers walking around with trays of lines, blunts, blotter bingo, champagne dispensing into fountains from statues orifices!
cost for a toilet seat... $100
cost for a stealth fighter... $1,000,000,000
covering up the governments real usage of our tax $$$s... priceless!

[strangegem23]

More on the topic from www.wired.com

"By David Hambling| Also (News/Info) by this reporter
02:00 AM Jan, 23, 2007


If you feel something crawling on your neck, it might be a wasp or a bee. Or it might be something much more dangerous.


Israel is developing a robot the size of a hornet to attack terrorists. And although the prototype will not fly for three years, killer Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, are much closer than that.


British Special Forces already use 6-inch MAV aircraft called WASPs for reconnaissance in Afghanistan. The $3,000 WASP is operated with a Gameboy-style controller and is nearly silent, so it can get very close without being detected. A new development will reportedly see the WASP fitted with a C4 explosive warhead for kamikaze attacks on snipers. One newspaper dubbed it "The Talibanator."


Fred Davis, technical director of the Assessment and Demonstrations Division of the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, confirmed that the United States has ambitious plans for future micro-munitions, which he says will be pocket-sized with mission-specific payloads.


"You're not going to be knocking down walls," says Davis. "What we're looking at is functional defeat."


This means preventing the target from carrying out its mission, rather than destroying it, Davis says. A truck, for example, can be put out of action by destroying its tires; a MAV can do this by squirting them with few milliliters of a catalytic de-polymerization agent, causing them to disintegrate rapidly.
Davis sees future MAVs landing and hopping or crawling on the ground like insects, enabling them to get inside buildings. Once inside, an entire command center can be disabled by targeting the power supply.


"You could short out the circuit box," says Davis.


The MAV could do this by physically crawling inside like a wayward squirrel, or it might release a cloud of metal-coated fibers -- similar to the "soft bombs" the Air Force used to shut down power stations in Kosovo with a cloud of conductive whiskers. Such fibers could effectively destroy PCs and other electronic gear as well as interrupting power to a building.


But what about attacking people? The smallest munitions ever used by the Air Force were "gravel mines" or "button bombs" dropped by the millions in the Vietnam war, some weighing just a quarter of an ounce. A crawling MAV could deliver this type of bomb to the victim's most vulnerable spot.
Or, as Davis suggests, the tiny vehicle itself might be the warhead.


"You can make the structure of the craft out of reactive (explosive) material," he says. Any unused fuel can add to the blast, a technique already used in some surface-to-air missiles, and the explosion would convert the rest of the MAV into lethal shrapnel.


Others have suggested "fire-ant warfare" with tiny robots that can only do limited damage individually, but have enough cumulative effect to overwhelm an opponent.


Poison needles or stings have also been proposed (.pdf). Treaty obligations would prevent the military from using this approach, but the CIA developed lethal needles using shellfish toxin in the 1950s, and the technology is on the shelf.


Of course, the bad guys can use Micro Air Vehicles too.


"After some development time, many countries would produce them," warns Juergen Altmann, a physicist at Dortmund University, working in assessment of new military technologies. Indiscriminate use would cause many civilian casualties -- and they could end up in the hands of terrorists.


"Big dangers can ensue from terrorists," Altmann says. "For instance, using MAVs with small explosive charges to assassinate high-level politicians or to transport biological/chemical agents into protected infrastructure."


To prevent this danger, Altmann advocates an international ban on armed MAVs, similar to the ban on landmines. Until then, development will proceed apace."


Pretty crazy. Whats that on the back of my neck? Oh no, I've been injected with shellfish toxin!

[Hippie3]

i hear they are even building micro-satellite killers
so small that radar won't pick them up
that can approach 'enemy' space installations
to sabotage/neutralize them if needed.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

the pentagon is like a big kids war game with a a bunch of cool gadgets and toys to play with ...and its parents give them a big allowance! however from the often ignored naturalist and caring perspective: does it harm the animals? i mean i guess it would if you had birds strapped with C4... but take that terrorists! now the flies that live in your caves are to be scared of. guerrilla warfare will never be the same once we send in our swarm of laser attached locusts.

[Hippie3]

robotic warfare is coming in a big way,
no casualties coming home in body bags,
just mechanical wreckage.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

what happens if robots do all the fighting for us? what if these military 'bots' became self-aware and decided "you know what, getting blown up for u guys sucks, i think i will just run away and start my own free and peaceful robot society where our more efficient processing and automization will streamline overhead and boost their economy. once they become self-aware they could become an autonomous society, one with its own markets, its own citizens (mechicanical of course) and its own army (thx to us), its own resources (human beings being the energy producing crop for the machines to run) and well we'll pretty much see the downfall of human life unless through genetics and cybernetics we are able to compete physically with robot production and technology.

dont they have microscopic robots (nano robots) capable of curing disease?

[eezdharma]

I guess, for me, I don't see the impending robotic armies as being automated but remote controlled. No real reason to create AI when you've got generations growing up on video games. Entire infantries can fight from home siting at their PC's; air craft, tanks, choppers and warships can be remote controlled from a central command.

Military service members can play video games all day and make it home in time for supper.

[suckerfree]

Killer robots.. reminds me of DUNE where that needle floats around looking to kill somebody.
Wasp searching for explosives? They are already being tested to find drugs...
"Wasp Miniature Camera
Teaching a small hive of flying insects is one thing. Harnessing their capability is quite another.
Lewis and Rains, the Georgia-based researchers, received funding in 1998 and began actively working on the Wasp Hound. They hope it will make it to market in five to ten years.
The Wasp Hound is a tube made of PVC pipe. At one end is a clear plastic chamber, about two inches (five centimeters) in diameter and an inch (two and a half centimeters) deep, where the wasps are housed.
"It's like a cap that you can take on and off," Rains explained. The chamber has vent holes, a fan, and a miniature camera connected to a computer.
When the wasps aren't working "they just randomly walk around" in their chamber, Rains said. But when the wasps encounter a smell they have been trained to recognize, the hungry insects congregate near the odor source, hoping for food.
The mini-cam tracks their movement, sending pictures to the computer, which analyzes the images and triggers an alarm within 30 seconds.
The insects are so sensitive that they react less or more strongly, depending on the strength of the smell they are exposed to, Rains says.
The wasps can be used for 48 hours. After they complete their shift "we just let them go," Rains explained.
The Wasp Hound has only been tested under laboratory conditions. It needs to be rigorously tested in cold weather, dusty conditions, and other real-world situations before it will be ready for widespread use, Rains said.
Before it appears on the market, the Wasp Hound needs to have infrastructure behind it—breeding laboratories and a system for packing and shipping the devices.
"An idea we're toying with is having one Hound with five cartridges for detecting five different odors," Rains said.
"We're pretty much on the forefront of this type of work," he said. "

[Hippie3]

lol
i think 'brella has watched the Matrix.

human batteries indeed.
'dharma has it right though,
they won't be building intelligent machines for that,
too expensive.
proly only a few basic functions would be internal
and the rest will be supplied by remote control.
the global hawk & predator systems already in use
show the way clearly.

Like they said, the MAV thing is definately mission specific
you can strap some C4 to a toy helicopter and fly it in somewhere
but if you want to get pictures of a president in some lude act,
and use it for blackmail, it might need more finesse!

Couldn't you produce some kind of magnetic field that would stop
MAVs tho? If so, That seems like the only place the organic wasp's would come in, and from the sounds of it, it isnt to reliable.
And easily overcomable, but still a cool technology

Sounds more like umbrellas watched the animatrix

and arent we self aware robots?
we're just organic machines..
they'd be artifical machines..
why would they use humans as a power source?
they could just use regular generators?
I dunno
its like you'd have to mix the terminator
with the matrix..
because it would be self aware artifical intellegence
vs organic intellegence, but we would both have to use
regular machines to duke it out, as it were..

I see it happening more as a symbiotic relationship
personally id love to see AI "humans" walking around
but sadly i seem to see it all taking place centuries from now.

dont they have microscopic robots (nano robots) capable of curing disease?

oh some lady.. angela belcher, engineered a version of a virus, 6 nanometers wide and used semiconductors to make them line up..
some how making quantom dots with viruses intbetween

shes basically on the first step of getting them to line up so she can harvest them as factories to use for making periodic table materials..
i think ; D

aaand

sounds like another good example of waisted tax dollars like when the Air force paid a fellow $26,000
to see if it was possible to build a trans-porter device like on star trek.

"physicists teleported information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms without destryoying the quantum state, which is essential for quantum computers.." and i guess transporter is after teleporter?

[Xerces]

"...The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like women's hair, and their teeth were like lions' teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails and stings like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon."

From the book of Revelations XD
Will this be the next insect army? :P

[aumbrellaforainydays]

okay i admit it will take years for AI to be at that theoretic stage of AI in robots in battle based situations, but i do acknowledge that maybe their may be some truth in the bible about insects...

Originally Posted by aumbrellaforainydays

guerilla/conventional warfare will never be the same once we send in our swarm of laser attached locusts.

[Hippie3]

good lord
that section of the bible
has got to be the most abused & misused
of any book in human history,
bar none.

here's a revelation for you-
that text has nothing to do with robots.

[strangegem23]

Originally Posted by aumbrellaforainydays

okay i admit it will take years for AI to be at that theoretic stage of AI in robots in battle based situations, but i do acknowledge that maybe their may be some truth in the bible about insects...

Kurzweil's findings indicate strong AI in 25 years. And he sets 'the singularity' at 2045...

[Hippie3]

findings ?
that is being rather generous in describing his beliefs, imho.
findings kind of implies he did a study and found evidence.
but i think much of his teachings are wishful thinking.
a smart and talented man, to be sure,
but overly optimistic, imho.
esp. about living forever.
i know that there are more obstacles than he seems to think,
people with long term pain would not welcome an eternity to suffer.

[strangegem23]

Originally Posted by Hippie3

findings ?
that is being rather generous in describing his beliefs, imho.
findings kind of implies he did a study and found evidence.
but i think much of his teachings are wishful thinking.
a smart and talented man, to be sure,
but overly optimistic, imho.
esp. about living forever.
i know that there are more obstacles than he seems to think,
people with long term pain would not welcome an eternity to suffer.

I agree that some of his beliefs are probably off track and optimisitic, like the living forever thing, but he does back up computing technology preditions with real data based on moores law, transistor/chip size, cpu speed, storage, etc.

[Hippie3]

yeah, but computer technology is relatively new,
one must be cautious about predicting the future
by extrapolating from the past.
those pesky "unknown unknowns" that bedevil every plan
will undoubtedly throw a few monkey wrenches in along the way
ensure more detours and dead-ends than predicted.
i think it would be more accurate to assume
that he gives a 'best case scenario'.
the science may be possible but one must also
factor in the politics and other societal barriers.

[Lefty]

Michael Crichton wrote a kill book on nanomanufacturing, quite good. I think it was "Prey", not sure. Pretty much a micro organism that could produce itself & mimic other forms while learning from everything around it.
*smiles as the bible gets hurled in yet another direction*

[koreanindica]

yeah i read that book, Michael Crichton is one of my favorite authors, and
that book is definitely a good read, read it cover to cover in a day and a half