Launch This New 9-Hour Solar-Powered Drone from Your Shoulder

Photo: AeroVironment Inc.

A new small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) boasts something no other has been able to do thus far: continuous flight for 9 hours and all on the clean energy of solar power.

AeroVironment‘s 13-pound Puma AE can be assembled and hand-launched in minutes and requires no infrastructure for launch or landing, making them attractive for frontline use where time and space can be too scarce for the requirements of full-scale drones.

And while it may be some time before the Pentagon is showing off solar-powered tanks, AeroVironment insists these types of solar technology advancements are indispensable for the military.

“This is a critical milestone with far-reaching implications for the many ways small UAS can benefit military, public safety and commercial customers,” said Roy Minson, senior vice president of the Monrovia, CA-based AeroVironment.

AeroVironment enlisted the help of Alta Devices for its proprietary, ultra-thin solar cells. Past attempts to attach solar power to small UAS were either too heavy or couldn’t produce enough power for long-range flights but, according to Minson, recent tests prove that the solar Puma AE technology  ”can produce enough power, while adding negligible weight, so that endurance is no longer an issue for most customer missions.”

“Our integration of this cutting-edge technology dramatically increases Puma’s current flight endurance using a clean, renewable power source,” said Minson. “This development can give Puma AE customers significantly increased capabilities that approach those of the next class of UAS at a much lower acquisition and operating cost, and with much greater operational flexibility.”

Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration gave the Puma AE a “Restricted Category” certification, which permits commercial operators to fly the UAS in the regions of the Arctic. It was previously not permissible to operate drones in national airspace for commercial purposes.

“Aerial observation missions can now be safely accomplished in hazardous Arctic locations, which will reduce the risk of manned aviation in an efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly manner,” said Tim Conver, AeroVironment chairman and chief executive officer, at the time.

By Alan McDuffee for Wired Magazine

Tiny, Suicidal Drone/Missile Mashup Is Part of U.S.’ Afghanistan Arsenal

U.S. troops may be winding down their war in Afghanistan, but they’re now also operating one of the most bleeding-edge lethal drones available.

 Afghanistan is the trial by fire of the Switchblade, AeroVironment’s much-hyped miniature mashup of drone and missile. Most killer drones are designed like aircraft and fire missiles at a target. The Switchblade is the missile.

Unveiled to much fanfare in 2011 — it even got its own weird Taiwanese animation — as of last fall, Army soldiers in Afghanistan had yet to use the six-pound Switchblade they paid some $10 million to procure. But the U.S.-NATO military command there says they’re loving what they’re seeing from it.

“Switchblade is in use in Afghanistan and has proven to be a very effective tool in our campaign,” the 3rd Infantry Division’s Lt. Col. Ben Garrett, a spokesman for U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, confirms to Danger Room.

But that’s all the military will confirm. It’s not saying anything about “deployment,
effectiveness, distribution or tactical employment” of the system, Garrett says, beyond an assurance that the Switchblade is “very effective.” Nothing about how many times it’s been operated; nothing about the breakdown between its surveillance missions and its lethal ones; and certainly nothing about its accuracy.

This is getting to be a thing with the International Security Assistance Force. The U.S.-NATO military command recently opted to stop publishing data on Taliban attacks. Danger Room has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with U.S. Central Command to learn more about the Switchblade.

Still, the specs alone on the Switchblade make it worth watching. Unlike every other drone in military use, the Switchblade only looks like an aircraft once its wings unfold, following a launch from a tube. Once in the air, the Switchblade’s size limits its flight time, but its cameras send a video feed back to a remote operator who could be a dismounted soldier. AeroVironment bills it as a tool for pursuit of an adversary on the move or for close air support-in-a can for troops pinned down by enemy fire. That’s because once a target comes into view, the operator can send the Switchblade on a one-way mission, careening it into an enemy position to detonate. It can also be pre-programmed to hit a set target.

While little battlefield information on the Switchblade has emerged, the Army already wants more than the 75 units it’s sent to Afghanistan, as Danger Room pal Paul McLeary of Defense News reports. Ultimately, the Army wants to acquire a “Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System” of tiny Switchblade-like drones — possibly based on the Switchblade itself — to spot and kill a target from six miles away. Much hinges on just how effective the Switchblade’s trial by fire in Afghanistan actually is.

By Spenser Ackerman for WIRED Magazine

Drone Regulations: Spying Concerns Prompt States To Consider Legislation

CINCINNATI -- Thousands of civilian drones are expected in U.S. skies within a few years and concerns they could be used to spy on Americans are fueling legislative efforts in several states to regulate the unmanned aircraft.

Varied legislation involving drones was introduced this year in more than 40 states, including Ohio. Many of those bills seek to regulate law enforcement's use of information-gathering drones by requiring search warrants. Some bills have stalled or are still pending, but at least six states now require warrants, and Virginia has put a two-year moratorium on drone use by law enforcement to provide more time to develop guidelines.

Domestic drones often resemble the small radio-controlled model airplanes and helicopters flown by hobbyists and can help monitor floods and other emergencies, survey crops and assist search-and-rescue operations. But privacy advocates are worried because the aircraft can also carry cameras and other equipment to capture images of people and property.

"Right now police can't come into your house without a search warrant," said Ohio Rep. Rex Damschroder, who has proposed drone regulations. "But with drones, they can come right over your backyard and take pictures."

Since 2006, the Federal Aviation Administration has approved more than 1,400 requests for drone use from government agencies and public universities wanting to operate the unmanned aircraft for purposes including research and public safety. Since 2008, approval had been granted to at least 80 law enforcement agencies.

But the FAA estimates that as many as 7,500 small commercial unmanned aircraft could be operating domestically within the next few years. A federal law enacted last year requires the FAA to develop a plan for safely integrating the aircraft into U.S. airspace by September 2015.

Damschroder's proposed bill would prohibit law enforcement agencies from using drones to get evidence or other information without a search warrant. Exceptions would include credible risks of terrorist attacks or the need for swift action to prevent imminent harm to life or property or to prevent suspects from escaping or destroying evidence.

The Republican said he isn't against drones but worries they could threaten constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"I don't want the government just going up and down every street snooping," Damschroder said.

By Lisa Cornwell for Huffington Post

Don’t Be Alarmed by the Drone Blimps Hovering Over D.C. They’re Here to Stop Cruise Missiles

Brian Resnick National Journal

DRONESRESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

If America is attacked, we might be saved by blimps. No, not state-of-the-art jet fighters that can fly well beyond the speed of sound. But blimps: lumbering, relatively jovial blimps—the manatees of aviation.

Within a year, a pair of souped-up $2.7 billion blimps (price includes R&D) will be floated 10,000 feet above the District of Columbia and act as a 340-mile-wide eye in the sky, detecting incoming missiles and the like.

The design and testing phase for JLENS—the (deep breath) Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, produced by Raytheon, a major weapons manufactuer—is over, relays Program Director Doug Burgess to Popular Mechanics. Now, it is time for implementation. Or, as he puts it, "[We're] getting away from the Ph.D. engineer types running the system to the 20- or 25-year-old soldier running the system."

The idea to employ blimps to protect a city is actually not new. During World War II, London deployed a similar system to protect against Nazi air strikes. The barrage balloons, as they were called, acted as fence posts for a spool of wire that would make it difficult for planes to maneuver in the city. Basically, they were barbed wire fences suspended a few thousand feet in the air. They were also filled with hydrogen, which upon impact with a plane would explode. This is what they looked like:

The balloons that will fly over D.C. will perform a similar function, and look remarkably similar—but swap the wire cabling for state-of-the-art radar and computer processors. And these won't be keeping out Nazi propeller planes; they'll detect more-modern threats, such as cruise missiles. According to Raytheon, the units will protect a city at 500-700 percent less than the cost to operate the reconnaissance planes necessary to maintain the same amount of coverage. They will provide a comforting amount of "minutes," rather than the current "seconds" of time for U.S. forces to decide what to do with the threat of an antiship cruise missile.

The blimps, or aerostats as they are technically called, are 77 yards long, and have a range of 340 miles. They fly at 10,000 feet for 30 days at time. According to an unclassified report by the Defense Department, they've performed well in testing. "The JLENS radars successfully tracked fighter aircraft, towed targets, and cruise-missile targets, meeting accuracy requirements within margin," the report states. A test on the Great Salt Lake, reportsPopular Mechanics, revealed that the JLENS can detect a swarm of boats from 100 miles away. The aircraft could potentially carry weapons, and have fire-control radar, which means they can send information that a ballistic system can interpret to aim a shot.

Hacker's Tiny Spy Computers Aim To Track Targets Around Entire Neighborhoods And Cities

The ten CreepyDOL computers Brendan O'Connor built for his proof-of-concept surveillance system, with his business card shown in the center for scale. 

The National Security Agency, argues Brendan O’Connor, doesn’t have a monopoly on mass surveillance. In fact, he’s developed a cheap system of open-source spy boxes and mapping software that he says will let anyone “track everyone in a neighborhood, suburb, or city from the comfort of their sofa.”

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

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CreepyDOL is O’Connor’s latest addition to a surveillance setup he’s been developing for more than 18 months, integrating earlier research funded by small grants from the Pentagon research arm the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He revealed the first piece of his CreepyDOL system, a small, homemade spy computer known as the F-BOMB (an acronym for Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors) at the Shmoocon hacker conference in January of last year, describing at the time how the small box of sensors could be planted in a corporate network or dropped from a drone to wirelessly snoop on a target. Since then he’s been reproducing and evolving those small machines and building new software based on the widely-used Unity video game engine to collect and map the data from multiple F-BOMB-like computers to track surveillance targets over a wide area.

“With these F-BOMBs, I can gain creepy identity information pretty easily and passively,” says O’Connor. ”I can track people over whole areas of a city just by tracking watching their wireless devices as they wander around.”

Each CreepyDOL computer is built from a $25 tiny, single-board computers known as a Raspberry Pi and designed to be inconspicuously plugged into a power outlet anywhere with public Wifi; O’Connor suggests that the outlets in corners of coffee shops would make perfect hiding spots. When a user’s phone or laptop comes close enough to one of the boxes to connect with the same public Wifi network, the unit can pick up the target device’s MAC address and feed the data back to O’Connor’s server. If the user browses the Web or runs certain apps while on that network, O’Connor says the CreepyDOL software can run the network sniffing program Kismet to ferret out other information from target devices, including users’ names, email addresses and his or her version of Apple’s iOS software revealed by certain applications that send that information over the Internet unencrypted.

Creepiest of all, O’Connor has even designed the software to grab the user’s photo if they visit a certain dating site that lacks SSL encryption, adding that to the target’s profile. “I take all this data, throw it together, and visualize it to show people with real faces and identities and histories moving around a map in 3D,” he says, though he declined to share any screenshots of the mapping software ahead of his Def Con talk or name the apps or dating website from which he’s pulling users’ private information.

Aside from the sheer hacker challenge of assembling a DIY surveillance kit, O’Connor says he built CreepyDOL to demonstrate just how much data is constantly leaked from smartphones and other computers. “At some level I’m doing this because it’s interesting,” he says. “But I’m also doing it to prove that this level of knowledge and detail isn’t only the province of intelligence agencies anymore. If you think that only the government, with millions and billions to blow on watching someone can create this problem for privacy, then we’re not going to solve it.”

O’Connor isn’t the only hacker to use inconspicuous spy boxes to gather data on targets. Other researchers have built similar tools small enough to fit into an Altoids tin, or even ones that resemble a power strip. Those stealthy computers, loaded with hacking software, are designed to be snuck past a corporation’s front desk and planted in an empty office or wiring closet to create a backdoor into the company’s network.

O’Connor has experimented with similar devices: One earlier version of his F-BOMB was designed to masquerade as a carbon monoxide detector. But CreepyDOL is his first attempt to produce a larger crop of the spying devices and tie them together to cover a large area. He says he’s experimented with the machines around his own property and the houses of friends to track test targets, but hasn’t tried them in public due to legal concerns.

Because CreepyDOL’s computers are designed to be left in public places, O’Connor has taken special pains to make them difficult to tie back to their owner. Each spy node runs the anonymity software Tor to obscure the location of the central server that collects their data. All data stored on the boxes is encrypted–the cryptographic key is kept on a memory card that can be removed when the device is planted. And the computers are assembled from off-the-shelf parts to prevent any sort of supply chain analysis from revealing who built them, he says.

If all of that subterfuge seems to enable real privacy invasion by amateur snoops, O’Connor says that’s his point: He argues that his CreepyDOL setup proves that it’s time for everyone from device makers to app designers to users to acknowledge the potential for cheap, widely available intrusion tools. “If every person on the planet can use this surveillance technology, I think we should start to design things not to leak information at every level,” he says. “You leave behind a trail that can be tracked not just by the NSA or a law enforcement agency, but by any kid in a basement with less than $500.”