5 Homeland Security ‘Bots Coming to Spy on You (If They Aren’t Already)

• By Robert Beckhusen for WIRED MAGAZINE

It's been 10 years since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) started up operations. During that decade, DHS has moved to the forefront of funding and deploying the robots and drones that could be coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

DHS funds research and development for surveillance robots. It provides grant money by the hundreds of thousands to police agencies to buy their own. And sometimes it's bought and deployed robots -- for their skies, the ground and the waters -- of its own, usually concentrated along the border. It's not clear how many of those robots police operate, and law enforcement isn't by any means the only domestic market for the 'bots. But the trend lines point toward more robotic spy tools for law enforcement in more places -- with more DHS cash.

But it's not going to be simple. The Federal Aviation Administration is cautious about opening the skies to unmanned vehicles -- so much so that Congress and the Obama administration ordered it to ease up on restrictions by 2015. But not all spy robots fly. DHS is also developing robots that resemble fish, and deploys tunnel-bots deep into drug-smuggling tunnels along the border.

Here are five examples.

Above:

Predator B

Unarmed Predator surveillance drones inside the United States have had a rocky history. The Department of Homeland Security's sub-agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has flown them off-and-on along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2004. Flights were suspended in 2006 after one of them crashed in Arizona, and drone flights were suspended again in 2010 after a Predator lost communications with its operators. At one point, drone boosters in Congress allocated funding for more drones than CBP had people to fly them.

How things have changed. In the past two years, DHS expanded Predator flights into the Caribbean to hunt for drug traffickers, and has taken to using the drones in an ad-hoc program to help out local police agencies, such as during a June 2011 standoff between SWAT officers and alleged cattle rustlers in Washington state. The drones have been used more broadly than that, reportedly assisting in police investigations from the Midwest to Texas. DHS has also gotten around to expanding its drone fleet. In November, DHS was revealed to be planning to expand its inventory of 10 Predators to 24, and isconstructing a testing ground for small surveillance drones at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

But in the years to come, the Predator is likely to have a numerically more marginal role as more law enforcement agencies join the drone bandwagon -- it's exceedingly likely the Predator will remain an exclusive item for the federal government. That is, a federal government putting the machines to work snooping on domestic turf.

Photo: Customs and Border Protection

BIOSwimmer

Catch it if you can. In September, the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate premiered a prototype of its tuna-shaped robot called BIOSwimmer, developed by Boston Engineering Corporation. The concept revolves around eventually deploying the swimming robot to use in port security operations, and could prove to have several advantages over human divers. For one, it can get into tighter spaces, and can work in areas that have been contaminated with oil or other hazardous chemicals that could pose a risk to human health. But mainly, it's designed to inspect ships and "flooded bilges and tanks, and hard to reach areas such as steerage, propulsion and sea chests," noted a DHS statement.

The flapping motion is also designed to reduce power consumption, and the robot itself is designed with the intention of its sensors being easily swapped out between missions. There's no public timeline for when it's expected to be deployed, if it makes it that far -- the tuna 'bot is still an experimental design. But it's generally a good idea to start on a small scale.

Photo: Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate

ShadowHawk

In a way, the trials of the ShadowHawk represent why police drones remain limited, at least for the time being. The Department of Homeland Security handed $220,000 to the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department -- just north of Houston, Texas -- for one of these 50-pound helicopter drones in 2011. Aside from a mishap in which developer Vanguard Defense Industries crashed a ShadowHawk into the department's armored SWAT vehicle during a photo-op, it seemed like a great idea. The drone has a maximum speed of 55 miles per hour, a range of 15 miles, and a turbine engine powered by jet fuel that can keep it in the air for more than an hour. For surveillance, it can be equipped with a Sony FCB EX-1020 camera or a Photon 320 thermal imaging camera, and in theory would've allowed the county's law enforcement to cease relying on over-worked and tight-budgeted agencies in Houston for aircraft.

In theory, that is. Actually using the drone is another question. The FAA has only granted Montgomery County authorization to train with the drone over a one-mile-wide piece of rural land in the county's northwest corner -- away from the county's built-up suburbs to the south -- and not for actual police work. The drone is also too heavy, exceeding the 25-pound limit for domestic drones set by the FAA. (The limit was 4.4 pounds until a 2012 agreement between the Justice Department and the FAA bumped it up.) That had the chief deputy in the county fuming. The deputy, William McDaniel, argued to the House Homeland Security Committee (.pdf) last summer that the FAA should be removed from overseeing and approving drone operations in the United States, "other than the regular, routine review of agency flight operations to insure [sic] flight safety rules are being followed." That doesn't sound too likely, which means Montgomery County might have ended up with a brick for a drone -- at a cost of more than 200 K's in DHS money.

Versatrax 150

The past decade has seen a big build-up in border security under Homeland Security's watch, including a doubling of Border Patrol agents and hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. But to keep their wares flowing, the drug cartels in Mexico have turned to an inventive tactic: digging more and more tunnels deep underground. Then in 2008, the DHS tunnel task force -- a joint team of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the DEA -- got its hands on a Versatrax 150 crawler-bot, designed by Canadian robotics firm Inuktun.

But the Versatrax wasn't first intended to be used for border security -- it's a pipe inspection robot more commonly used by sewage and water workers. The machine is waterproof, has a 500-foot tether cable and can travel at a rate of 30 feet per minute. A high-resolution camera can rotate in all directions, and the robot itself can squeeze through an opening as small as six inches in diameter. Border tunnels can also be dangerous places, at the risk of collapse and even booby-trapped -- with no telling who's inside or what weapons they may be carrying. The Versatrax was designed for sludging its way through sewer tunnels, so it's not that big of a leap.

Photo: Jason Thomas Fritz/Wired

Draganflyer X6

The Draganflyer X6 mini-helicopter is perhaps the first police drone to see regular active use inside the United States by a local police agency. In July 2010, the Mesa County Sheriff's Office in western Colorado used funding from the Department of Homeland Security to buy one of the machines, while also becoming one of the first police agencies for the FAA to authorize using the drones for police work. Weighing about four and a half pounds, the X6 can only stay in the air under its own power for about 20 minutes, but can travel at 30 miles per hour -- allowing it to travel about six miles in one go. The drone packs either a Panasonic DMC-ZS20 camera or an infra-red thermal imaging camera, and can transmit video (when it's not recording) in real-time back to an operator. The camera is stabilized against vibration, and a sensor head made of carbon fiber contains the gyros, accelerometers, GPS receiver and a barometric pressure sensor to keep it in the air. Mostly, the sheriff's office claims it uses the drones to map out crime scenes and traffic accidents, although the office claims (.pdf) it's been used to help a SWAT team track an armed suspect, and photograph a minor airplane crash.

Meanwhile, the DHS provided more than $80,000 to the Seattle Police Department for a pair of X6 drones. The department claims it intends to use the drone for criminal investigations and search-and-rescue operations. But Seattle hasn't yet been approved by the FAA to use them in actual police work beyond training officers in how to fly it, and it hasn't made it this far without objections from civil libertarians. On Feb. 4, Seattle City Councilman Bruce Harrell proposed legislation to prohibit the department using its drones for "general surveillance" -- that is, spying on anything or anyone other than an individual suspect with a warrant.

Photo: Mesa County Sheriff's Office

Drone Boosters Say Farmers, Not Cops, Are the Biggest U.S. Robot Market

The pro-drone organization AUVSI expects remote-controlled helicopters, like this Yamaha RMAX, to provide the biggest growth market for drones inside the United States. Photo: Flickr/timtak

By Spenser Ackerman for WIRED Magazine

When the flying robots that loiter in Afghanistan’s and Yemen’s airspace come home, they won’t just be headed for the local police station. They might prefer a pastoral existence of spraying crops, scanning soil patterns and other features of America’s farms.

No, Predators and Reapers aren’t going to scan large swaths of vegetation for suspected militants. And there’s tremendous interest from state and local law enforcement in drones as surveillance tools. But to Chris Mailey, a vice president with the drone promotion organization known as AUVSI, the cop shops represent short money. “Agriculture,” Mailey tells Danger Room, “is gonna be the big market.”

To Mailey, it’s a question of where the growth opportunities are. Military drone purchases are plateauing, even as the drones become increasingly central to U.S. counterterrorism. And there are limits, financial and otherwise, to the ability of police departments to purchase drones. Farming looks like a drone market with both fewer impediments and bigger incentives for early technological adoption.

“A manned crop sprayer is flying 10 feet above his crops — how accurate is it? Any crop you spray that isn’t on your farm you have to pay for, and a remote-controlled ‘copter can be very precise,” Mailey says. “Spraying, watering — there’s a whole market for precision agriculture, and when you put that cost-benefit together, farmers will buy [drones].”

AUVSI intends to publish a study in the next few weeks anticipating the scope of the domestic, non-military market for drones. But there’s already some data to support Mailey’s hypothesis. “Precision farmers” love using data tools to increase crop yields. In 2009, an Idaho farmer homebrewed his own drone, slapped a commercial digital camera on it, and began extracting data on soil patterns to help his business expand. Companies like CropCam build lightweight, modular, GPS-driven gliders to give farmers an aerial view of their fields without requiring pilot training or the expense of buying a small manned plane. Of course, this is all dependent on drone manufacturers pricing their robots inexpensively enough for farmers who also have to buy a lot of other expensive equipment to ply their trade.

Japan also provides some indication of the potential demand for drones by farmers. Yamaha introduced its RMAX unmanned helicopter for crop-spraying in 1990. By 2010, the drone ‘copter and its robotic competitors — some 2,300 of them — sprayed 30 percent of Japanese rice fields with pesticides, according to a recent Yamaha presentation. The Japanese farm hectares sprayed by manned helicopters dropped from 1,328 in 1995 to 57 in 2011, as unmanned helicopter spray rose to 1,000 hectares that year.

Closer to home, last year the Electronic Frontier Foundation, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained data from the Federal Aviation Administration detailing who’s been cleared to operate drones in U.S. airspace. Local, state and federal police and homeland-security agencies had received 17 certificates of authorization for flying drones. Universities received 21 of them. “All those universities are focused on agriculture,” Mailey says.

Of course, your local police, if they can, are very likely to buy drones, ushering in a new era of tech-enabled aerial privacy erosions. Several already have — although a full list is unavailable — like the Miami-Dade Police Department, whose use of Honeywell’s T-Hawk spy drone I profiled in the December 2011 Playboy. (Link is SFW.) Mailey’s argument is that there’s a hard limit of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., many of which may not be able to afford the expense of what could be argued is an optional piece of hardware that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and requires cumbersome FAA licenses. (Which, in fairness, farmers will need as well.) Put a different way, Mailey and AUVSI forecast a steeper growth in the drone market for farms than it does in the drone market for law enforcement — but it sees both on the rise.

The biggest reversal? While the U.S. market for drones is “almost 100 percent military,” Mailey puts it, the drone industry doesn’t think it can rely on the Defense Department much longer. Last year, the Pentagon indicated in a congressional report that it was going to level off most of its drone purchases through 2017; it currently spends about $6.5 billion annually on unmanned robotic systems. Maintenance and replacement-level purchases, rather than inventory expansions, is likely to characterize drone purchases — at least until the Navy’s carrier-based drone joins the fleet at the end of the decade.

“There’s still a lot of money [in military drones], but it’s more predictable,” Mailey says. “This wild wild west we’ve had is consolidating.” Sounds like time to farm.

2013 Global UAV Trends

The Congressional Research Service has just published a report on UAV Manufacturing Trends and forecasts.

World UAV Budget Forecast

Summary

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) represent a bright spot for the technology-intensive aerospace manufacturing sector, but military and civil government agencies will likely be the predominant customers for an extended period while such systems are integrated into the U.S. National Airspace System (“national airspace”). Airspace access by commercial UAS users is projected to be much slower than for governmental entities.  U.S. export control policies pose an issue for manufacturers that seek to export UAS. Some UAS are classified as weapons under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and require an export license approved by the U.S. State Department. UAS are also covered by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a voluntary arrangement among 34 member countries to restrict the proliferation of missiles or UAS capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction.  Under MTCR guidelines, export of UAS carries a “strong presumption of denial” of an export license. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) has stated that advances in UAS technologies have resulted in the development of some systems that are not suited to weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) delivery. The association says the regulations will allow nonmember countries (such as Israel or China) to sell UAS with advanced capabilities. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the major user of such systems, has demonstrated the effectiveness of UAS in Iraq and Afghanistan, but continued development of new systems and capabilities depends on access to the national airspace. UAS spending has been driven primarily by military needs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where terrorist groups were or are active. Numerous forecasts project that U.S. and global UAS markets will experience strong growth during the next 10 years. A forecast of global UAS demand by the Teal Group shows worldwide annual spending on research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) and procurement rising from $6.6 billion in 2013 to $11.4 billion in 2022. Total spending for the decade is projected to amount to $89.1 billion.  U.S. aerospace and defense manufacturing firms have a significant lead in military UAS, but Israel is also a strong competitor. Europe, China, and Japan are also expected to press ahead with significant UAS development programs—an area of aerospace deemed critical in terms of defense and industrial capabilities. European manufacturers in particular appear to be focused on potential sales to nonmilitary government and commercial customers. Many of the U.S. firms that are engaged in UAS research and development and production are privately held companies or small divisions of much larger publicly traded companies. The lack of data on companies, combined with a very limited market for public (i.e., governmental) and commercial users of UAS, makes analysis difficult and speculative. Although the commercial market for UAS is protected to grow, it is forecast to remain below 2% of total global production through 2022.  The full report can be found here.

Suicidal Sensors: Darpa Wants Next-Gen Spy Hardware to Literally Dissolve

By Spenser Ackerman for WIRED MAGAZINE

Forget about a kill switch. Planned obsolescence? Already obsolete. The Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers want tomorrow’s military hardware to literally cease to exist at a predetermined point. Welcome to the age of suicidal sensors.

Darpa isn’t imagining planes or ships that melt into a metallic puddle when their replacements come off the production line. The research agency is thinking, in one sense, smaller: sensors and other “sophisticated electronic microsystems” that litter a warzone — and create enticing opportunities for adversaries to collect, study and reverse-engineer. Since it’s not practical to pick them all up when U.S. forces withdraw, Darpa wants to usher in the age of “transient electronics.”

If you’ve ever lost your phone and worried about random strangers sifting through your data, you have a sense of why the idea appeals to Darpa. But you probably never imagined Apple creating a piece of hardware “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner.” That’s where Darpa comes in. Next month, it’s going to invite interested scientists and manufacturers to a Virginia conference to kick around ideas for creating what it calls “triggered degradation.” Oh, and some of that degradation will occur inside a soldier’s body.

“VAPR will focus on developing and establishing a basic set of materials, components, integration, and manufacturing capabilities to undergird this new class of electronics defined by their performance and transience,” its program manager, Dr. Alicia Jackson, tells Danger Room.

Sometimes the hardware will be pre-programmed to self-destruct. Other times a human should be able to step in and signal to the device that the cold grasp of oblivion beckons. All of this is supposed to go much, much farther than a circuit board rigged to explode if it falls into enemy hands. And it’s nottotally mad science. Last year, Darpa researchers successfully demonstrated that super-thin electronics made out of silicon and magnesium could be fabricated to dissolve in liquid. “This program follows on that study and seeks to develop the technology through the demonstration of a basic circuit,” Jackson says.

“The efficacy of the technological capability developed through VAPR will be demonstrated by building transient sensors with RF links,” explains a Darpa announcement about the February VAPR confab, “representative of what might be used to sense environmental or biomedical conditions and communicate with a remote user.” Imagine throwing a bunch of sensors around a given swath of forest, ravine or desert that could impart “critical data for a specified duration, but no longer” — after which they “decompose in the natural environment.”

That natural environment might include you. Devices that “resorb into the body” might prove to be “promising transient electronic implants to aid in continuous health monitoring in the field.” That is, if Darpa can figure out a safe, “bioresorbable” material that can safely implant an electronic device, complete with transmitter, inside the most sensitive parts of your body. “One example of a possible biocompatible application for transient devices is a non-antibiotic bactericide for sterilization at surgery site,” Jackson says.

VAPR’s approach views the persistence of battlefield sensors as a problem to be solved. It’s worth noting that some defense companies view it as an opportunity to be exploited. Lockheed Martin is working on something called an Unattended Ground Sensor, a monitoring device designed to look like a rock and recharge with a solar battery, to collect and transmit data on a warzone for decades after most U.S. troops there have packed up and gone home. While there’s no reason those Unattended Ground Sensors couldn’t someday be built out of whatever “transient” materials VAPR ultimately favors, those sensors represent a different attitude toward the virtues of long-term monitoring.

Of course, all this is academic if Darpa can’t figure out what materials can actually make up its transient electronics. And there it concedes that “key technological breakthroughs are required across the entire electronics production process, from starting materials to components to finished products.” (That might be a concession that it’s old BioDesign project, which involved creating a “synthetic organism ‘self-destruct’ option” for artificial lifeforms, didn’t bear fruit.)

Transience can’t mean poor performance while the device still exists. Nor can it mean destructionbefore a human programmer extracts all the necessary data from the device. Makers can talk this all through at the Darpa “Proposer’s Day,” on Valentine’s Day at the Capitol Conference Center in Arlington, Virginia. A more elaborate description of the VAPR program is supposed to follow.

If it works, transient electronics could provide “fundamental and practical insight into the development of transient electronics of arbitrary complexity” — such as, perhaps, the self-destructing plane or ship of the far, far future. (That might have come in handy in 2011, when the U.S. lost an advanced stealth drone over Iran.) For now, Darpa will have enough of a challenge building a sensor that accepts its days on this Earth are tragically numbered.

Thermopile-Based Ardupilot

Even though the RVOSD (the thermopile-based "autopilot") is just return-to-launch, its very cool nontheless. It's not programmable, and not yet really in the class of true autopilot but a great step forward.