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Category: military – Page 130

The 50-ton Voyager was developed by Boeing’s PhantomWorks division, which is devoted to advanced new technologies, succeeding a series of smaller Echo Seeker and Echo Ranger UUVs. The 15.5-meter long Echo Voyager has a range of nearly 7500 miles. It has also deployed at sea up to three months in a test, and theoretically could last as long as six months.

Supposedly, Voyager also can dive as deep as 3350 meters—while few military submarines are (officially) certified for dives below 500 meters.

And it isn’t the only robot submarine in the works.

By Sebastien Roblin

Here’s What You Need to Know: The U.S. Navy has an ambitious vision for future warfare.

At a military parade celebrating its 70th anniversary, the People’s Republic of China unveiled, amongst many other exotic weapons, two HSU-001 submarines—the world’s first large diameter autonomous submarines to enter military service.

Continue reading “The Orca: This Autonomous Submarine Will Fight the Wars of the Future” | >

The Russian military will soon be equipped with autonomous war robots capable of acting independently on the battlefield, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has said, adding that Moscow has launched mass production of such machines.

“These are not just some experimental prototypes but robots that can really be shown in sci-fi movies since they can fight on their own,” the minister told the Russian Zvezda broadcaster during the ‘New Knowledge’ forum, on Friday. Held in several Russian cities from May 20 to May 22, the forum is a series of educational events featuring top specialists in a variety of fields.

“A major effort” has been made to develop “the weapons of the future,” Shoigu said, referring to war robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). The bots, which are said to be capable of independently accessing a combat situation, are part of the new state-of-the-art arsenal that the Russian military is currently focused on.

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Last month, the United States Air Force successfully test flew an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called Skyborg, operating on an autonomous hardware/software suite, for the very first time.

The military aims for this UAV to fuel collaboration among manned and . For its first test run, the Skyborg suite flew aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 Mako air vehicle in the first step of what’s known as the Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experimentation Campaign.

By and large, the US Air Force Research Laboratory seeks a UAV solution that can carry out all of the functions of a manned aerial vehicle but also with the option of manned operation.

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Engineering A Safer World For Humans With Self Driving Cars, Drones, and Robots — Dr. Missy Cummings PhD, Professor, Duke University, Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, Duke Engineering.

Dr. Mary “Missy” Cummings, is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the Pratt School of Engineering, at Duke University, the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences, and is the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics.

Dr. Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.

Dr… Cummings was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots earning the rank of lieutenant and serving as naval officer and military pilot from 1988–1999.

Dr. Cummings research interests include human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-systems engineering, public policy implications of unmanned vehicles, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Continue reading “Dr. Missy Cummings, Ph.D — Professor, Duke University — Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory” | >

Elon Musk believes it is a waste of resources.

The Air Force has announced a new study into the tactical aviation requirements of future aircraft, dubbed TacAir. In the process of doing so, Air Force chief of staff General Charles Q. Brown finally admitted what’s been obvious for years: The F-35 program has failed to achieve its goals. There is, at this point, little reason to believe it will ever succeed.

According to Brown, the USAF doesn’t just need the NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance) fighter, a sixth-generation aircraft — it also needs a new, “5th-generation minus / 4.5th-generation aircraft.” Brown acknowledged some recent issues with the F-35 and suggested one potential solution was to fly the plane less often.

“I want to moderate how much we’re using those aircraft,” the general said. “You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our high end, we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight… We don’t want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later.”

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Scientists working at Canada’s highest-security infectious-disease laboratory have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers to study and conduct experiments on deadly pathogens.

Seven scientists in the special pathogens unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg and Chinese military researchers have conducted experiments and co-authored six studies on infectious diseases such as Ebola, Lassa fever and Rift Valley fever. The publication dates of the studies range from early 2016 to early 2020.

The Globe and Mail has also learned that one of the Chinese researchers, Feihu Yan, from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences, worked for a period of time at the Winnipeg lab, a Level 4 facility equipped to handle some of the world’s deadliest diseases. This researcher is credited as a co-author on all six of the papers. However, on two of them, he is listed as being affiliated with both the Winnipeg lab and the military medical academy.

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Large swaths of U.S. military land are covered with munitions components, including the explosive chemical RDX. This molecule is toxic to people and can cause cancer. It also doesn’t naturally break down and can contaminate groundwater. Now researchers have genetically engineered a grass commonly used to fight soil erosion so that it can remove RDX from the soil, according to a new paper published May 3 in Nature Biotechnology.

A team, which includes researchers from the University of Washington, demonstrated that over the course of three years, a genetically engineered switchgrass could break down an explosive chemical in…

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