Robots clear bombs the

wireless way

Dr Jun Jo controls his robots with his mobile phone (Image: Griffith University)

A robot controlled by wireless technology could be used to control bomb disposal and security reconnaissance vehicles, its Australian creator says.

Dr Jun Jo, a senior lecturer at Griffith University, created the prototype of a ‘bomb removal car’ with postgraduate students.

The robotic car is controlled by Bluetooth wireless networking technology, which potentially allows an operator to stay at a safe distance while sending the vehicle into a hazardous situation.

A video camera mounted onto the front of the robot streams images back to the operator.

The operator can then direct the robot to a particular location, identify a suspicious package and scoop it up with an in-built shovel.

“Through a camera I can see what the robot sees and with Bluetooth I can control it within 100 metres,” says Jo.

At 20 centimetres long, the robotic vehicle is about the size of a child’s model car.

“It looks like a toy at this stage, but I want to build a larger one,” he says.

Linking technology

Bluetooth networking is commonly used to link computers and mobiles to peripheral devices. But Jo says there are also many potential applications for Bluetooth and robotics, not just in dangerous situations.

“I am looking at applications in both the security industry and in entertainment,” says Jo, who also runs the university’s robotics and games research laboratory.

“Robotics and games share many qualities in their control methods and algorithms,” he says. “I feel in the near future there will be more
applications for robots in the games industry.”

Robotic football, for example, is a concept that enthusiasts already explore using teams of four-legged players: Sony Aibo robot dogs.

Meanwhile, mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson is exploring using Bluetooth applications for fun, such as a tiny toy car that can be controlled easily by mobile phone.

Recently the company also unveiled a remote-controlled digital camera on wheels called ROB-1. The camera can be steered from a mobile and sends a video stream back to handset, so the owner can decide what pictures to shoot.

Problems with video

There are limitations to the quality of video people can expect from Bluetooth, says Jo.

“One of the drawbacks of Bluetooth is that it is a medium transmission speed. It’s not bad for five frames per second, which would allow you to work out where an object is.”

Jo’s prototype is based on Bluetooth for now, but could be adapted to other current or future networking standards.

“At the moment Bluetooth is one of the most advanced mobile networking technologies, but others will come in time and they could be easily added to such a system,” he says.

The robotic car could be expanded to work with Australia’s 3G or GPRS mobile data networks, which he says could make control possible from distant locations.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009

Flying robots may be the new

terrorists

Flying robots, like this fictional robotic dragonfly, could bypass radar to deliver explosives or bioweapons, experts say (Image: iStockphoto)

It may sound like science fiction, but flying robots could make suicide bombers and hijackers redundant, experts say.

The technology for remote-controlled light aircraft is now highly advanced, widely available, and experts say virtually unstoppable.

Models with a wingspan of 5 metres, capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms, remain undetectable by radar.

And thanks to satellite positioning systems, they can now be programmed to hit targets some distance away within a few metres of their target.

Security services the world over have been considering the problem for several years, but no one has yet come up with a solution.

“We are observing an increasing threat from such things as remote-controlled aircraft used as small flying bombs against soft targets,” the head of the Canadian secret services, Michel Gauthier, said at a conference in Calgary recently.

According to Gauthier, “ultra-light aircraft, powered hang gliders or powered paragliders have also been purchased by terrorist groups to circumvent ground-based countermeasures”.

Defence on alert

On 1 May the US website Defensetech published an article by military technology specialist David Hambling, entitled “Terrorists’ unmanned air force”.

“While billions have been spent on ballistic missile defense, little attention has been given to the more imminent threat posed by unmanned air vehicles in the hands of terrorists or rogue states,” writes Hambling.

Armed militant groups have already tried to use unmanned aircraft, according to a number of studies by institutions including the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, and the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies in Moscow.

In August 2002, for example, the Colombian military reported finding nine small remote-controlled planes at a base it had taken from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

On 11 April 2005 the Lebanese Shiite militia group, Hezbollah, flew a pilotless drone over Israeli territory, on what it called a surveillance mission.

The Israeli military confirmed this and responded by flying warplanes over southern Lebanon.

Easy to buy or make

Remote-control planes are not hard to get hold of, according to Jean-Christian Delessert, who runs a specialist model aeroplane shop near Geneva.

“Putting together a large-scale model is not difficult. All you need is a few materials and a decent electronics technician,” he says.

In his view, “if terrorists get hold of that, it will be impossible to do anything about it. We did some tests with a friend who works at a military radar base: they never detected us … If the radar picks anything up, it thinks it is a flock of birds and automatically wipes it.”

Japanese company Yamaha, meanwhile, has produced a 95 kilogram robot helicopter that is 3.6 metres long and has a 256 cc engine.

It flies close to the ground at about 20 kilometres per hour and is already on the market.

Bruce Simpson, an engineer from New Zealand, managed to produce an even more dangerous contraption in his own garage: a mini-cruise missile.

He made it out of readily available materials at a cost of less than US$5000 (about A$6500).

According to Simpson’s website, the New Zealand authorities forced him to shut down the project, though only once he had already finished making the missile, under pressure from the US.

Take them seriously

Dr Eugene Miasnikov, of the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies in Moscow, says these kinds of threats must be taken more seriously.

“To many people UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] may seem too exotic, demanding substantial efforts and cost compared with the methods terrorists frequently use,” he says.

“But science and technology is developing so fast that we often fail to recognise how much the world has changed.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009

Banned toiletries could make

bomb

Friday, 11 August 2006 Maggie Fox
Reuters

Bomb-making ingredients could be hidden in small bottles and carried on planes. Alternatively, toiletries themselves could be used to make explosives (Image: iStockphoto)

Hair gels and lotions may have been banned from carry-on luggage as they could be assembled on board a plane to make a bomb, a US criminologist says.

Professor Alfred Blumstein from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped write a government report on threats to airlines from explosives, was speaking after UK police say they had foiled a plot to blow up aircraft flying to the US.

This prompted authorities to ban liquids, including drinks, hair gels and lotions, from carry-on baggage.

“My hunch is that the reason they are prohibiting this stuff is that it does obviously have the potential of being assembled on board so that it doesn’t look like a bomb going through the x-ray machine,” says Blumstein.

Such mundane items as nail polish remover, disinfectants and hair colouring contain chemicals that can be combined to make an explosion and are not detectable by “sniffing” machines, which detect plastic explosives but are not used with all baggage.

Explosive ingredients can be concealed in bottles or other innocent-looking containers that would pass through x-ray machines.

That does not mean they are easy to make into bombs, cautioned Dr Neal Langerman, a San Diego consultant who is former chair of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Health and Safety.

“Many of the ingredients like acetone are household chemicals,” Langerman says.

But some kind of expertise is usually needed to buy peroxide that is concentrated enough to work in an explosive, he says.

Bombers who attacked London Underground trains and a bus in July 2005 used homemade peroxide-based explosives carried in backpacks.

On-board explosives

People have tried several times to use such easily concealed explosives on aircraft.

UK-born Richard Reid was tackled by passengers in December 2001 while trying to detonate explosives stuffed in his shoes in an aircraft lavatory.

In 1994, Islamic fundamentalists set off liquid explosives on a Japan-bound Philippine Airlines plane, killing a Japanese passenger and injuring 10 others.

Dr Mark Ensalaco, an international terrorism expert at the University of Dayton in Ohio, says Thursday’s foiled operation appears to be identical to the Japan attack.

I stress identical with the explosives in liquids

Sourced and published by Henry Sap[iecha 13th MAY 2009

Airport sniffer dogs safe from

un-employment

The terrorism alert caused chaos at Heathrow Airport last week. But could new security technology prevent a repeat performance? (Image: Reuters/Toby Melville)

News Analysis No matter how sophisticated airport security technology becomes, it will probably never remove the need for sniffer dogs and bag searches, experts say.

The alleged foiled terrorist plot that affected flights between the UK and US last week has led to calls for newer, smarter security technology.

Devices on the horizon include insect-based sensors, wallpaper that sniffs out explosives as you walk past and smart closed-circuit TV that can pick a suspect out from a crowd or tell if you’ve left a bomb under a seat.

But Martin Cebis, whose company will present its all-in-one chemical sensing and surveillance system at an international military technology conference in the US next week, says would-be terrorists will probably always be one step ahead of technology.

“Ultimately you’re dealing with human ingenuity [and] you’re fighting a moving target and need to be able to adapt,” says Cebis, chief executive officer of Western Australia’s Embedded Technologies.

“I think you’ll still need searching and those kinds of things to occur.”

Cebis is also among a number of speakers who will brief security advisors and researchers in Canberra on the latest developments today.

Chemical sensing

One of the emerging areas of security, particularly in light of the alleged plot to carry liquid explosives onto planes, is in chemical sensing.

Associate Professor Adam McCluskey of the University of Newcastle is an Australian researcher developing chemical sensors based on drug design technology.

The sensors are can be “screen printed” onto fabrics, paper, plastics and even wallpaper.

“It’s basically a synthetic antibody,” he says.

“We’re applying drug design technology to generate polymeric scaffolds that specifically recognise the shape and electronics of the targeted molecule.”

The technique has been used to identify cocaine and heroin and is being developed to pick up chemicals like TNT and triacetone triperoxide, the chemical used in last year’s London Underground bombings.

“Instead of metal detectors we would have a bank of these sensors sucking the vapours off as you walk through,” he says.

He says while sniffer dogs will still be able to go places electronic noses can’t, sensing technology will be better able to detect specific substances.

Dr Michael Borgas, is an atmospheric scientist at CSIRO, which is developing an electronic nose to detect chemicals.

He says the future of airport chemical sensing lies in miniaturised devices.

Researchers at CSIRO are also looking to insects like fruit flies for inspiration.

“If you can understand how insects sense and act upon various volatile chemicals you’d hopefully be able to mimic that with electronic devices,” he says.

“What you want is a hand-held device that can suck in tiny bits of air and detect the molecules that are in that air. In airports you’d just stick it in a [passenger's] bag.”

Smart surveillance

Cebis says it will take more than high-tech chemical sensors, no matter how sensitive and discriminating they are.

“It’s fine to have sensors all over the place but you’ve got to be able to make intelligent decisions,” he says.

“The research challenge is to make cheap, sensitive, ubiquitous sensors coupled with smart surveillance technology.”

Cebis says closed-circuit TV will eventually be replaced by “smart” digital video technology that uses biometric identification and motion recognition to hone in on specific individuals and behaviour.

“They look at a scene and if there’s no motion they don’t film anything,” he says.

“Or a person may wander into a scene, deposit something and then move away. The fact that something was moving and now isn’t [will be picked up].”

Ting Shan of National ICT Australia (NICTA) will outline advances in face recognition technology at a security technology conference in Canberra next week.

Shan says new face recognition algorithms have been developed by NICTA and University of Queensland that aren’t befuddled by lighting, expression or angle of the face.

“It can synthesise a realistic frontal face image,” he says.

Impact of a new security environment

Borgas says while the events in the UK have highlighted advances in security technology, he doubts they will be implemented overnight.

McCluskey hopes it will give governments an impetus to provide the research and development funds to allow some of the more promising ideas to bear fruit.

“Sometimes it takes an event of this nature to provide a significantly high profile and the government willing to take a chance on the technology,” he says.

Cebis say all the technology in the world will never completely replace the most humble of checks.

“But whether they need to be as intrusive and time consuming as they currently are depends on the technology,” he says.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009

Imax 3-D camera to film Hubble mission

WASHINGTON (UPI) — The U.S. space agency says it will join the Imax Corp. and Warner Bros. Pictures to film the upcoming Hubble Space Telescope mission in 3-D.

The Imax cameras will be used to document what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration calls one of its most complex space shuttle operations — the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The cameras will launch aboard space shuttle Atlantis, which is scheduled to lift off May 11,” NASA said. “Astronauts will use the cameras to film five spacewalks needed to repair and upgrade Hubble.

Officials said the footage will be used in the movie “Hubble 3D” that is scheduled for release in the spring of 2010.

The Atlantis’ crew has been trained to operate the cameras, one of which will be mounted outside the crew cabin in the shuttle’s cargo bay to capture images of the historic final servicing mission. The commander and pilot will double as filmmakers as two teams of spacewalking astronauts “perform some of the most challenging work ever undertaken in space as they replace and refurbish many of the telescope’s precision instruments,” the space agency said.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 11th May 2009

April 16, 1972

Apollo 16 departs for moon

Delphi’s Thermal Face

Recognition

As convenient as facial recognition sounds, it faces a few hurdles: Glasses, facial hair and even lighting changes can throw off software’s ability to identify a user. To crack that problem, Riad Hammoud, a research with Kokomo, Ind.-based Delphi Electronics and Safety, is working on facial identification technology that goes beneath the skin. Using infrared cameras and thermal scans, Hammoud’s prototypes identify faces using their bone and vein structures, deleting the effects of lighting or obstructions.

Delphi, which works with automakers including Pontiac and Chevrolet, may soon bring that authentication method to cars.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 16th April 2009

How To Save The Biodiesel

Industry

Government dithering and high commodity prices make for a tough environment.

BURLINGAME, Calif.–Can the biodiesel industry be saved? It’s remotely possible–but not unless the government steps in to jump-start the besieged market.

Biodiesel, a low-carbon fuel usually made with soy, palm or canola oil, first grabbed the spotlight a few years ago. That was when Congress started promoting the green fuel as a replacement for traditional diesel. Private-equity firms started pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Seattle’s Imperium Renewables and Green Earth Fuels, of Houston, hoping to get in on the ground floor of a nascent market.

Federal government mandates and tax breaks, driven by the broader goal of fighting pollution and cutting reliance on foreign oil, were supposed to create a mass market, even though biodiesel was often more expensive than regular diesel fuel.

It hasn’t happened. Starting in mid-2007, prices of the canola and soy oils used to make biodiesel soared. That pushed up the cost of the green fuel and wounded producers’ bottom lines. With oil peaking at $147 a barrel last summer, biodiesel still made economic sense for some customers, since regular diesel prices climbed to an average $4.77 a gallon. Biodiesel didn’t look bad by comparison.

But then petroleum prices tanked. That widened the price gap and made the green option uneconomical for even the most die-hard environmentalists. Commodity prices have since come down, but not enough to bridge the gap. The recession has damped demand for energy overall and made it nearly impossible for fledgling clean-fuel ventures, including biodiesel makers, to get credit to expand.

“The market conditions are very, very tough right now,” says Joe Jobe, head of the National Biodiesel Board in Jefferson City, Mo. Of the nation’s 176 biodiesel operators, “it’s very difficult to say how many of them are still operating.”

The industry’s woes illustrate the hazards of building a business around the prices of two volatile, and often unrelated, commodities–in this case, raw vegetable oil and petroleum. They also show that not all green fuels are created equal. Lots of environmentalists have hopped off the biodiesel bandwagon, charging that increased demand for commodities like palm oil will lead to deforestation and, in turn, even more greenhouse-gas emissions from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 16th April 2009

Sugar-Based Biofuels

BIO FUEL - SUGAR BASED

Madison, Wis.,-based Virent Energy Systems has a low-temperature, low-pressure, catalytic process for turning carbohydrates (sugars) into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. Its 70 employees now make a gallon or so daily. Targeting gasoline as its first fuel, Virent hopes within five years to raise that production to 10 million to 15 million gallons annually. Virent has pulled in more than $30 million in venture funding and has strategic relationships with the likes of Cargill, Honda Motor and Royal Dutch Shell.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 31 st March 2009

Improved Lithium Ion Batteries

LARGE FORMAT LITHIUM IRON BATTERIES

Lithium ion batteries were commercially introduced in 1991 for consumer electronics. The automotive and defense industries also look promising for these powerful rechargeable batteries. A123Systems makes lithium ion batteries suitable for both autos and heavy duty vehicles. The company is working with General Motors to produce batteries for the Saturn Vue and the Chevrolet Volt, both plug-in hybrids.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 31st March 2009