1 avril 2024 | International, Naval
The West has hit Russia with economic sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, making it difficult for the country to procure foreign-made components.
24 avril 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
As France prepares to vote in the presidential election, the outcome, no matter the winner, will have reverberating ramifications on the future of European defense and capability development.
28 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Terrestre
Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments without human guidance or access to GPS. The Subterranean Challenge, or SubT, is testing this kind of cutting-edge technology. Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the contest concluded its second circuit on Wednesday, Feb. 27. Taking first in the competition was CoSTAR, a 12-robot, 60-person team led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (there were also winners declared for a separate, virtual competition). SubT is divided into four circuits spread over three years. With each, teams program their robots to navigate a complex underground course. The first contest, held last August, took place in a mine. For the most recent, called the Urban Circuit, teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma, Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of 20 predetermined objects, earning a point for each find. For the Urban Circuit, CoSTAR earned 16 points; the No. 2 team, with 11 points, was Explorer, led by Carnegie Mellon University. "The goal is to develop software for our robots that lets them decide how to proceed as they face new surprises," said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "These robots are highly autonomous and for the most part make decisions without human intervention." CoSTAR, which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, brought machines that can roll, walk or fly, depending on what they encounter. Along the way, the bots have to map the environment and find objects like a warm mannequin that simulates a disaster survivor or a lost cellphone with a Wi-Fi signal. This particular course, which aims to simulate an urban environment, also included a carbon dioxide leak and a warm air vent. Joining the team for the Urban Circuit was a four-legged robot called Spot, which was provided by Boston Dynamics. "One of the two courses we had to run had multiple levels, so it was great that the Boston Dynamics robots were fantastic on stairs," says Joel Burdick, a Caltech professor and JPL research scientist. He is the leader of the Caltech campus section of the CoSTAR team. As the bots explore, they send back video and digital maps to a single human supervisor, who they remained in radio contact with for the first 100 feet (30 meters) or so of the course. They can extend that range by dropping communications nodes, a kind of wireless repeater. Once out of contact, it's up to each robot to decide whether to proceed or backtrack in order to update the team. Each must also rely on fellow robots to access different levels of the course. For example, a wheeled robot might request a quadrupedal one to climb or descend a flight of stairs. "These courses are very, very challenging, and most of the difficulty lies in communicating with the robots after they've gone out of range," Agha said. "That's critical for NASA: We want to send robots into caves on the Moon or Mars, where they have to explore on their own." Mapping caves on the Moon or Mars could identify good shelters for future astronauts. Moreover, if it exists at all, microbial life has a better chance of survival under the surface of Mars or within the icy seas of planetary moons, like Europa, Enceladus and Titan. NASA wants to search for life in these regions, where robots would be frequently out of contact. The next circuit in the Subterranean Challenge will be set in an undisclosed natural cave network this August. A final circuit that blends tunnels, urban environments and natural caves will take place in August of 2021. Teams competing in that final event have the opportunity to win up to $2 million in funding from DARPA. CoSTAR, includes JPL; Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA; MIT; KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology); Sweden's Lulea University of Technology; and industry partners. News Media Contact Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov 2020-041 https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2020-041&rn=news.xml&rst=7607
28 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By THERESA HITCHENSon April 27, 2020 at 5:02 PM WASHINGTON: With the federal deficit expected to balloon to over $4 trillion in fiscal 2020 due to spending to pump the economy in the face of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, downward pressure on the US defense budget is inevitable, several experts believe. “I think the budget comes down sooner rather than later,” Mackenzie Eaglen, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said bluntly in a webinar today. The best-case scenario is for flat defense budgets for the foreseeable future, but if history is a guide, the smart money is on defense budget cuts, explained Todd Harrison, DoD budget guru at the Center for Strategic and International Security (CSIS). “What has historically happened is, when Congress's fiscal conservatives come out and get serious about reducing the debt, reducing spending defense is almost always part of what they come up with for a solution,” he said. “So, we could be looking at a deficit-driven defense drawdown coming. ... At least history would suggest that that is a real possibility.” Indeed, even as Congress is pulling out all the stops trying to assist DoD and the defense industrial base to weather the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, DoD already is being eyed as the future deficit bill-payer, Eaglen told the webinar. “DoD is at the top of the list,” she said. Eaglen added that, at a more macro-level, the budget crunch could force DoD to re-look the goals of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) with an eye to downsizing. “There's going to be an impact across the board,” she said. “There probably will be a total relook — at even the NDS fundamentals, and what mission is going to have to go — in response to this.” Harrison noted that already DoD has been looking at flat budgets through 2021, which has caused it to have to take some risks as it tries to juggle divesting in high-maintenance legacy systems with investing in future programs while maintaining readiness to handle a possible peer conflict with Russia and/or China. “Just to divest legacy systems and invest in new ones and try to maintain, or slightly grow, force structure, DoD was already saying that it would need three to five percent real growth each year in the defense budget, going forward, just to fully execute that,” he said. This means that DoD leadership is going to face even more difficult decisions in the future, Harrison explained. “Now we're looking at an environment where the budget might be flat at the best case or trending down over time. Something's gonna have to give. And so, if DoD really wants to protect these key modernization programs, not only is it going to have to divest legacy systems, it's going to have to divest them faster, and it's going to have to make some reductions in force structure that's going to incur risk.” More immediately, Harrison said, as Congress moves over the next few months to pass a fourth, or even a fifth, economic stimulus package DoD already is signaling that it hopes to see a number of its “unfunded requirements” stuffed into those bills. “DoD is saying: ‘hey, if you want to fund more things for DoD to help stimulate the economy, and help the defense industry, well, here's a list you already have that you can pick from.” DoD's unfunded priorities list — the annual wish list of programs it would like to fund if only there was more money in the top-line — for 2021 includes a total of $35.9 billion for programs across the military services and the combatant commands. The Pentagon might also petition Congress for greater authority to use operations and maintenance funds appropriated but not spent due to work slowdowns to short up programs facing cost overruns because DoD paid contractors for work supposed to be done, but not actually done, while employees are home-bound due to the pandemic, Harrison said. “DoD has implemented the CARES Act implementation, saying that they would pay for paid leave for employees of defense industry firms that are unable to report to work. And so that cost is covered,” Andrew Hunter, who works on defense industrial base issues at CSIS, explained. “Those folks aren't necessarily going to be laid off; they will be kept on the payroll and paid. And again, that will create some costs down the road to then pay those folks to do the actual work that they're originally scheduled to do.” Most of the nearly $10.5 billion in the CARES Act, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27 to help DoD protect itself from the impacts of the pandemic goes into O&M accounts, according to CSIS. That said, some $1 billion goes to procurement funding, with an eye on health-related equipment. Further, it includes some $1.5 billion in the Defense Working Capital Fund, which allows DoD to make investments in things like depot maintenance, transportation and supply management in the near term and recoup the costs through future year pricing deals. However, the bill grants DoD a good deal of flexibility to move money around — with the exception of banning any funding for Trump's southern border wall construction. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/dod-budget-cuts-likely-as-4-trillion-deficit-looms/