U.S. Navy Warns Pirates They Can't Hide From Its Smart Robocopters
Posted on April 9, 2012
The U.S. Navy is warning pirates they cannot hide from its robotic helicopters, called Fire Scout. The robot helicopters, are carrying the Multi-Mode Sensor Seeker (MMSS), a mix of high-definition cameras, mid-wave infrared sensors and laser-radar (LADAR) technology. The tiny Fire Scout choppers can be operated from control stations aboard Navy ships. The technology will be tested this summer.
Ken Heeke, program officer in ONR's Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department, says, "Sailors who control robotic systems can become overloaded with data, often sifting through hours of streaming video searching for a single ship. The automatic target recognition software gives Fire Scout the ability to distinguish target boats in congested coastal waters using LADAR, and it sends that information to human operators, who can then analyze those vessels in a 3-D picture."
The Navy also says Fire Scout has target recognition algorithms to exploit the 3-D data collected by the LADAR, utilizing a long-range, high-res, eye-safe laser.
Dean Cook, principal investigator for the MMSS program at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD), says, "Infrared and visible cameras produce 2-D pictures, and objects in them can be difficult to automatically identify. With LADAR data, each pixel corresponds to a 3-D point in space, so the automatic target recognition algorithm can calculate the dimensions of an object and compare them to those in a database."