Burka foils thermal imager

Over the past few years, thermal imaging cameras have been used to locate people by capturing images of the heat emitted by their bodies.

That's because, of course, that when viewed through a thermal imaging camera, warm objects stand out well against cooler backgrounds, hence humans become easily visible against the environment.

Now, due to the miniaturization of electronic and electro-mechanical components, such infra-red cameras can be easily mounted onto inexpensive small unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used by the police forces to assist with public safety missions.

Although relatively few of such drones are currently flown over US soil, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that 30,000 drones will fill the nation's skies in less than 20 years.

However, some Members of Congress and the public fear there are insufficient safeguards in place to ensure that drones are not used to spy on American citizens and unduly infringe upon their fundamental privacy.

Proponents have responded by emphasizing their potential benefits, which may include protecting public safety, patrolling borders, and investigating and enforcing environmental and criminal law violations.

Clothes designer Adam Harvey  is one individual that falls into the former camp. It's clear that he thinks that thermal imaging systems mounted on drones are a threat to our civil liberties. And his concern with protecting the privacy of individuals has now led him to create a range of so-called 'Anti-Drone' garments designed with a fabric that apparently protects the wearer against thermal imaging surveillance.

They work by using highly metallized fibers to reflect heat, thereby masking the wearer's thermal signature. Of the three 'Anti-Drone' pieces that have been created so far, two are inspired by Muslim dress: the burqa and the scarf. A third piece -- the hoodie -- is intended to thwart overhead thermal surveillance from drones.

While I'm as concerned about protecting the privacy of the public as anyone else, I can't help but think that Mr. Harvey may not have thought his idea out quite as thoroughly as he should.

You see, while the metalized fiber burka shown above might well reduce the chances that an individual is spotted by a thermal imager mounted in a police drone, it will certainly increase the chances that the individual will be spotted by police on the ground, since he or she will stick out like a sore thumb.

Reference: Drones in Domestic Surveillance Operations: Fourth Amendment Implications and Legislative by Richard M. Thompson II.

UAV crowd-sourcing project fails to take off

It must have seemed like a rather good idea to the folks at DARPA to hold a competition to discover who might be capable of designing, building and manufacturing an advanced small unmanned air vehicle (UAV) that would be capable of performing a simulated military perch-and-stare reconnaissance mission.

Indeed, as the so-called UAVForge project took shape, they must have been delighted and encouraged to see more than 140 teams and 3,500 individuals from 153 countries crawl out of the woodwork to attempt to develop systems that would meet the rigorous demands laid down by the agency. But that was hardly surprising, since a whopping $100,000 prize was up for grabs for the team that could demonstrate that their system met the agency's goals.

With so many teams competing and so much cash at stake, it seemed inevitable that one of the teams would win the competition. Sadly, however, none of the nine finalist teams managed to do so. When they demonstrated their air vehicles at an event at Fort Stewart, Georgia, not one of the teams proved that they had what it took to fly home with the big bucks.

The fly-off scenario, conducted on a training site at Fort Stewart was a simulated military perch-and-stare reconnaissance mission that required that the teams' UAVs performed a vertical take-off, navigated to an area beyond the line of sight from the take-off location, land on a structure, capture video and then return to the starting point.

While some teams were able to reach the observation area, none were able to land on the structure and complete the mission. Since no team completed the fly-off event, the $100,000 prize was not awarded, and a design will not be manufactured for further testing in a military exercise as originally envisaged by the folks at DARPA.

If the failure of the so-called UAVForge project has proved one thing, it is that developing such a small unmanned air vehicle (UAV) is clearly beyond the role of so-called citizen scientists.

Might I dare to suggest, then, that if such persistent, beyond-line-of-sight, perch and stare surveillance systems are still of importance to DARPA, they may be better off calling upon one of the usual large military contractors to help them out.

That, however, is certain to cost a lot more than $100,000 in prize money, I'll wager.

Interested in reading more about UAVs? Then why not check out these recent news stories from Vision Systems Design?

1. UAV captures 3-D images of buildings
 Engineers at the University of Granada (Granada, Spain) are using UAVs to help them produce 3-D models of historical buildings.

2. UAVs help utilities bring back the power
Researchers at New Mexico State University (NMSU; Las Cruces, NM, USA) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI; Palo Alto, CA, USA) recently completed tests that concluded that unmanned aircraft can be safely and effectively used to assess power grid damage following a storm or natural disaster.

3. Small UAV uses hyperspectral imager
Headwall Photonics' (Fitchburg, MA, USA) Micro-Hyperspec imaging sensor is being successfully deployed onboard small commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to help agriculturalists monitor vegetation over wide areas.

4. Robot vision helps guide UAV for crop spraying
Australian researchers are developing a flying robot as small as a dinner plate and a fleet of eco-friendly robotic farmhands that could help cut down the amount of herbicide sprayed on crops.

5. Cameras take flight on UAVs to help soldiers spot suspicious activity
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developed by a team of engineers from Middlesex University (London, UK) could help soldiers to spot hidden dangers during military operations.

Us and them

Last month, an RQ-170 Sentinel UAV nicknamed the "Beast of Kandahar" fell into the hands of the Iranians after the United States Department of Defense lost control of it while it was flying through Iranian airspace.

Needless to say, the high-tech piece of Lockheed Martin gear was immediately put on display by the Iranians, who claimed to have brought the unmanned reconnaissance vehicle down to earth by sophisticated electronic counter-warfare measures.

Whether they did, or whether the landing was simply due to a malfunction of a system onboard the aircraft itself, the whole affair proved very embarrassing for the US Government, which formally requested that the aircraft be returned to its rightful owners.

The Iranians, however, didn't see things quite the same way. Instead they issued a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council stating that the incident was tantamount to an act of hostility against their country in contravention of international law.

The whole affair raises an important issue about the deployment of such unmanned aircraft -- notably, that there do not appear to be any hard and fast rules that govern when such UAVs can be flown over a country given the fact that the government of that country has not granted permission for such operations to take place.

To rectify this dilemma, perhaps it's now time that an international body drew up a set of guidelines for what is -- and is not -- deemed to be the acceptable use of such systems and for what purposes.

Such an idealistic notion, however, is unlikely to find much favor at the present time, especially with countries that feel that they have the right to fly such aircraft over whatever country's airspace they like in the interest of their own national security.

But such guidelines won't seem so idealistic in the future, I'm sure, when countries such as Iran reverse-engineer the downed unmanned aerial technology and then feel that they have equal rights to perform reciprocal measures on the countries that have been snooping on them for years. That's if they have the know-how to do it.

It's a bug's life (revisited)

Remotely operated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with wireless video and still cameras can be used in a variety of applications, from assisting the military and law enforcement agencies in surveillance duties, to inspecting large remote structures such as pipelines and electric transmission lines.

Typically, however, such vehicles are quite sizable, bulky beasts due to the fact that they must carry a power source as well as large cameras. And that can limit the sorts of applications that they can effectively handle.

Now however, it would appear that researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering have come up with an interesting idea that might one day see vehicles as small as insects carrying out such duties in confined spaces.

And that’s because the vehicles that they are proposing to "build" are, in fact, real insects that could be fitted out with the necessary technology to turn them into mobile reconnaissance devices.

The work is at an early stage of development at the moment of course. To date, professor Khalil Najafi, the chair of electrical and computer engineering, and doctoral student Erkan Aktakka are figuring out ways to "harvest" energy from either the body heat or movement of the insects as a means to power the cameras, microphones, and other sensors and communications equipment that they might carry.

As interesting as it all sounds, there are obviously bigger engineering challenges ahead than just conquering the energy harvesting issue. One obvious problem is how the researchers will eventually control the insects once they have been fitted out with their energy harvesting devices and appropriate vision systems.

Then again, they may not need to. If a plague of such insects were dropped in Biblical proportions upon a rogue state for clandestine monitoring purposes by our armed forces, the chances that one of them would reveal some useful information would be pretty high.

The religious and political consequences of letting loose high-tech pestilent biotechnology on such countries, however, might be so profound that the little fliers never get off the ground.

Editor's note: The research work at the university was funded by the Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under grant No. N66001-07-1-2006.

Hummingbird with video camera

A new surveillance device may be arriving at your bird feeder soon. Yesterday, AeroVironment (Monrovia, CA), announced that it had got its Nano Hummingbird to precisely hover and fly forward, fast. Weighing two thirds of an ounce, including batteries and video cameras, the prototype was built as part of the DARPA Nano Air Vehicle program.

The final concept demonstrator is capable of climbing and descending vertically, flying sideways left and right, flying forward and backward, as well as rotating clockwise and counter-clockwise, under remote control. During the demonstration the Nano Hummingbird flew in and out of a building through a normal-size doorway.



The hand-made prototype aircraft has a wingspan of 16 cm (6.5 inches) and can fitted with a removable body fairing, which is shaped to have the appearance of a hummingbird. The company, which makes a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military, says the Nano is larger and heavier than an average hummingbird, but is smaller and lighter than the largest hummingbird currently found in nature.

Vision Systems Design is publishing a market report on vision for such UAVs and other service robots. For more information, click here.