16 février 2022 | International, Aérospatial
20 août 2019 | International, Autre défense
A robot as slow as a snail ... on purpose
By: Kelsey D. Atherton
Snails and slugs are so commonplace that we overlook the weirdness of how they move, gliding on a thin film across all sorts of terrain and obstacles. Popular imagination focuses on how slow this movement is, the snail defined by its pace, but it is at least as remarkable that the same mechanism lets a snail climb walls and move along ceilings. The movement is novel enough that there is now a snail-inspired robot, sliding across surfaces on an adhesive membrane, powered by a laser.
The snail robot, produced by a joint research team at the University of Warsaw Poland, together with colleagues from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, created a centimeter-long robot powered by light. The research, published July in Macromolecular Rapid Communications, sheds new insight on how animals move in the wild, and on how small machines could be built to take advantage of that same motion.
Why might military planners or designers be interested in snail-like movement? The ability to scale surfaces and cling to them alone is worth study and possibly future adaptation. There's also the simple efficiency of a creature that maneuvers on a single, durable foot.
“Gastropods' adhesive locomotion has some unique properties: Using a thin layer of mucus, snails and slugs can navigate challenging environments, including glass, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, Teflon), metal surfaces, sand, and (famously) razor blades, with only few super-hydrophobic coatings able to prevent them from crawling up a vertical surface,” write the authors. “The low complexity of a single continuous foot promises advantages in design and fabrication as well as resistance to adverse external conditions and wear, while constant contact with the surface provides a high margin of failure resistance (e.g., slip or detachment).”
Snails can literally move along the edge of the spear unscathed. Surely, there's something in a robot that can do the same.
The small snail robot looks like nothing so much as a discarded stick of gum, and is much smaller. At just a centimeter in length, this is not a platform capable of demonstrating much more than movement. The machine is made of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers, which can change shape when scanned by light. Combined with an artificial mucus later formed of glycerin, the robot is able to move, climb over surfaces, and even up a vertical wall, on a glass ceiling, and over obstacles, while it is powered by a laser.
It does all of this at 1/50th the speed a snail would.
This leaves the implications of such technology in a more distant future. Imagine a sensor that could crawl into position on the side of a building, and then stay there as combat roars around it. Or perhaps the application is as a robot adhesive, crawling charges into place at the remote direction of imperceptible light. Directing a robot into an unexpected position, and having it stay there with adhesive, could be a useful tool for future operations, and one that would be built upon research like this.
The robot may be comically slow now. The pace of the technologies around it is not.
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10 septembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
GE Aerospace to develop digital backbone for Bell’s V-280 Valor
The U.S. Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft competition pitted Bell’s V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft, against Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X.
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19 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
As deadline nears, Senate approves $674 billion defense budget bill
By: Leo Shane III and Joe Gould WASHINGTON — With the fiscal year winding down, Senate lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a multi-agency appropriations deal that would prevent a government shutdown and give the Defense Department its full-year budget on schedule for the first time in a decade. The measure, which provides for more than $606 billion in base defense spending and nearly $68 billion more in overseas contingency funds, is in line with White House requests and spending targets outlined in the annual defense authorization bill approved earlier this summer. “After subjecting America's all-volunteer armed forces to years of belt tightening, this legislation will build on our recent progress in rebuilding the readiness of our military and investing more in the men and women who wear the uniform,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said before the Senate vote. The funding total — approved by a 93-7 vote — amounts to an increase of more than 3 percent for military spending in fiscal 2019, but as important as the boost is the timing of the measure. In recent years, Congress has struggled to pass any appropriations measures before the start of the new fiscal year, relying instead on a series of budget extensions to avoid partial government shutdowns. That has infuriated Pentagon leaders, who have said the fractured appropriations process prevents them from keeping equipment purchases and new program starts on time. If the House finalizes the appropriations measure next week and President Donald Trump signs it into law in the following week (all parties involved have already signaled they expect to do so ), it will mark the first time since 2008 that Congress and the White House have passed their spending plans on time. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., called that “a major victory” for Congress and the military. The measure funds a 2.6 percent pay raise for troops starting next January and a boost in military end strength of 16,400 spread across the active-duty and reserve forces. Operation and maintenance spending totals $243.2 billion of the defense total, and research and development efforts another $96.1 billion. Defense health and military family programs would receive $34.4 billion. The appropriations fund 13 new Navy ships ― including three DDG-51 guided missile destroyers and two Virginia-class submarines ― 93 F-35 aircraft, 58 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, 66 AH-64 Apache helicopters, 13 V-22 aircraft, and $1.5 billion for the upgrade of 135 Abrams tanks. The National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account would also see a $1.3 billion boost from the appropriations plan. In order to avoid political fights over non-defense spending levels, lawmakers agreed to package the military budget bill with the full-year funding for the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education. In addition, the legislation contains a budget extension for a handful of agency budgets lawmakers have not yet finished negotiating. The move will prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month, when the fiscal year ends. Several senators lamented before the vote that all of the appropriations bills have not yet been finalized, but for the first time in years, defense advocates aren't among those complaining. In addition to the full Defense Department appropriations plan, lawmakers last week finalized a spending plan for military construction projects and the Department of Veterans Affairs, covering nearly all aspects of national defense and military personnel spending. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2018/09/18/as-deadline-approaches-senate-advances-674-billion-defense-budget-bill