Darpa’s Robots Practice Scavenging Space Junk From Satellites

By Spenser Ackerman for WIRED Magazine

One day, robots will ascend into the heavens, take working parts off of dead satellites, and use them to construct new ones. That’s the dream of the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers, and they’ve already gotten started in the laboratory.

The video above, released by Darpa on Tuesday, displays the initial stages of Darpa’s Phoenix project, an effort that began last year to make satellites cheaper. And the way Darpa wants to control those costs is to have space robots pluck functional antennas off of dead satellites floating above geosynchronous orbit, and combine them with small, modular “satlets” into new, longer lasting communications satellites. Darpa combined the footage of the lab research on the Phoenix component robots with a computer-generated rendering of how the project might work in space four years from now when Darpa tests it.

“The fundamental precept is cost,” says David Barnhart, Darpa’s program manager for Phoenix. “That is the bottom line: is there a way that we can completely rethink the cost-calculus of how satellites are put together?” Satellite launches are really expensive: think tens of millions of dollars for the satellite and then tens of millions of more to get it into space. And most of what’s floating in space is debris, junk and dead sats: out of 1300 “space objects,” Barnhart says, only 500 are functioning satellites. If Darpa can resurrect just a fraction of that floating junk, it points to a cost-effective way to maintain the U.S.’ edge in space.

So the ghoulish, $180 million effort depends on things like the FREND, a robotic arm designed by the Naval Research Laboratories‘ space-engineering division. The arm will be one of Phoenix’s main limbs, used to sever an antenna from a dead satellite and attach it to the network of satlets Darpa’s building. Another crucial part of

Phoenix, unveiled to the public in this video, will bond materials together in space without using any mechanical parts: one model Darpa’s working with will adhere them using an electrostatic charge, and another “is patterned after how a Gecko crawls up walls,” Barnart says, “using thousands of individual micro hair-like follicles on its foot pads.” A touchscreen, shown here in a laboratory, will theoretically allow a remote human operator to control a robot as it cuts through a piece of space debris.

 That is, if the tech isn’t so ridiculously complicated that it cancels out the reduced launch costs. There are a lot of variables: keeping costs down while launching the satlets into orbit; controlling fuel use; and not destroying space antennas that weren’t designed so that robots could deconstruct them. “If you cannot replace the appropriate function, which we translate into mass, of that very large satellite… to control that [antenna], then it doesn’t make sense,” Barnhart concedes. Darpa will host a “proposer’s day” for makers who might want to build the satlets, robots and associated Phoenix systems on Feb. 8 in northern Virginia.

Lab work, extending to 2015, will test the concept. Next month, Darpa will announce the next wave of its Phoenix research, which will explore such concepts as “safe and responsible space-to-space interaction.” Just because Darpa wants its celestial handymen to combine old antennas with new mini-satellites doesn’t mean it’s cutting back on robotic workplace safety.

50-quadrocopters-take-to-austrias-skies-for-synchronized-swarm

By Mat Smith

If AscTec's Hummingbird quadrocopters continue to fly around in your nightmares, you might not want to watch their latest video -- even if they resemble hypnotic robot fireworks. Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ascending Technologies teamed up for this latest show, programming 50 LED-equippedquadrocopters to frolic over the Danube last week. Watch them dance 

CyPhy Works reveals tethered flying bots that can spy on you indefinitely

By Steve Dent 

A new venture from an iRobot co-founder called CyPhy Works has borne fruit in the form of two flying drones dedicated to surveillance duty. The first, called Ease, is a mere foot in diameter by 16-inches tall and can fly safely in tight spaces or through open windows or doors, thanks to its petite size and ducted rotors. It packs a pair of HD cameras along with a thermal imager and can stay aloft permanently, in theory, thanks to a microfilament tether attached to a ground station -- which also makes it impervious to weather, tracking and interception at the same time, according to CyPhy. The second drone, an insect-like quadrotorcalled Parc, is designed for higher flying missions thanks to its larger size and maximum 1,000-foot altitude. It also uses a tether and can stay aloft for 12-hours on a single ground-station battery, letting it spy from afar with on-board HD, night-vision and thermal cameras. The company's yet to take any orders, but thanks to investors and government grants, the snoopy little bots could be getting up into your business one day soon -- as creepily shown in the video after the break.

Municipalities are Buying Drones for Surveillance

• Excerpt from Wired Magazine by Kim Zetter and David Kravets 

Aeryon Labs has submitted a bid to Alameda County, California to sell this 3-pound “Scout” surveillance drone.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, It’s a Government Spybot!

It’s not enough that the U.S. government uses drones to pick off targets on a death wishlist — unmanned spybots are being scooped up by municipalities across the country as if they were one-off wedding dresses at a Filene’s fire sale.

The Seattle Police Department is already using them, as are the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Alameda County in California is looking to purchase them, too.

This despite the fact that privacy and security issues around the use of drones have yet to be worked out.

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office warned that the push to bring drone surveillance into U.S. airspace had failed to take into account either of these concerns.

“[T]here is very little in American privacy law that prohibits drone surveillance within our borders,” points out Ryan Calo, the director for Privacy and Robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The GAO report called for the government to set guidelines on drone spying in order to “preclude abuses of the technology.” But the report seemed more concerned about the negative public perception that could result from such abuses — and how that could affect the public’s acceptance of drones — than the actual consequences of the abuse on members of the public.

FAA documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation indicate that dozens of local law enforcement agencies already fly drones in U.S. airspace. The Seattle Police Department’s drone comes with four separate cameras that offer thermal infrared video, low-light “dusk-dawn” video, and a 1080p HD video camera attachment.

Commercial and government drone expenditures are expected to top $89 billion over the next 10 years.

Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet

• BY NOAH SHACHTMAN

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.

But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.

Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.

But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”

However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”