A French military bioethics panel has cleared the development of technological upgrades for members of the armed forces. The panel says the French Armed Forces may develop and deploy technological augments in order to preserve the French military’s “operational superiority.”
➡ You love badass military tech. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.
The speed at which new autonomous weapons are being created and improved is impressive but also staggering.
By Kris Osborn
Drone fleets, robotic vehicles, and multi-domain manned-unmanned connectivity are changing the future of warfare.
Spot was apparently being used for reconnaissance.
Pictures of the exercises were shared on Twitter by France’s foremost military school, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. It described the tests as “raising students’ awareness of the challenges of tomorrow,” which include the “robotization of the battlefield.”
A report by French newspaper Ouest-France offers more detail, saying that Spot was one of a number of robots being tested by students from France’s École Militaire Interarmes (Combined Arms School), with the intention of assessing the usefulness of robots on future battlefields.
Boston Dynamics’ vice president of business development Michael Perry told The Verge that the robot had been supplied by a European distributor, Shark Robotics, and that the US firm had not been notified about this particular use. “We’re learning about it as you are,” says Perry. “We’re not clear on the exact scope of this engagement.” The company says it was aware that its robots were being used with the French government, including the military.
FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLIR) announced it has won a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to rapidly develop novel fabrics with embedded catalysts and chemistries that can fight and reduce chemical and biological threats upon contact.
The revolutionary fabrics will be incorporated into protective suits and other equipment such as boots, gloves, and eye protection that can be worn by troops on the battlefield, medical experts, healthcare workers, and more. FLIR received $11.2 million in initial funding for the potential five-year effort worth up to $20.5 million, including options.
The goal of DARPA’s Personalized Protective Biosystems (PPB) program is to reduce the substantial weight and physiological burden of current Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) so soldiers and other specialists can better perform their tasks. PPB will combine novel, lightweight protective materials with new prophylactic medical technologies that mitigate chemical and biological threats at vulnerable tissue barriers, notably the eyes, skin and lungs.
Although universal fault-tolerant quantum computers – with millions of physical quantum bits (or qubits) – may be a decade or two away, quantum computing research continues apace. It has been hypothesized that quantum computers will one day revolutionize information processing across a host of military and civilian applications from pharmaceuticals discovery, to advanced batteries, to machine learning, to cryptography. A key missing element in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum systems, however, is meaningful metrics to quantify how useful or transformative large quantum computers will actually be once they exist.
To provide standards against which to measure quantum computing progress and drive current research toward specific goals, DARPA announced its Quantum Benchmarking program. Its aim is to re-invent key quantum computing metrics, make those metrics testable, and estimate the required quantum and classical resources needed to reach critical performance thresholds.
“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Building a useful quantum computer is really hard, and it’s important to make sure we’re using the right metrics to guide our progress towards that goal. If building a useful quantum computer is like building the first rocket to the moon, we want to make sure we’re not quantifying progress toward that goal by measuring how high our planes can fly.”
Electronic oscillators lie at the heart of virtually all microelectronic systems, generating the clock signals used in digital electronics and the precise frequencies that enable radio frequency (RF) sensors and communications. While an ideal oscillator provides a perfect signal at a single frequency, imperfections degrade the spectral purity of real-world components.
Such impairments, broadly quantified as phase noise, ultimately limit the performance of many military radars and commercial 5G systems. The issue is becoming increasingly burdensome as the airways become more congested and defense needs evolve.