Military & Defense

These are the most exciting technologies the US military is building right now

Paul Szoldra

2016-05-18T21:03:16Z

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been tasked with building breakthrough technologies for the US military since 1958, and plenty were on full display at the Pentagon last week.

Tech Insider went to DARPA's "Demo Day" on May 11 where more than 60 projects were shown to reporters, senior military leaders, and government contractors. We saw everything from underwater drones that autonomously search for enemy submarines to a game-changing prosthetic hand that looks like it's straight out of "Terminator 2."

There was a ton for us to see in the Pentagon's courtyard, but these are the ones we thought were most interesting.

Many of the staples of modern technology we take for granted have roots at DARPA, the military's research and development arm.

Things like GPS, many of the components of basic computing such as the mouse and graphical user interface, and the Internet, all originated with DARPA projects.

Source: TI

Which is why it's particularly exciting to see what DARPA is working on next, and wonder which project will eventually move from the military to civilian use.

ships us PACOM — U.S. Navy ships are underway as part of a group sail with the John C. Stennis Strike Group. Flickr/US PACOM

One such project that has obvious application for both military and civilians is the modular prosthetic limb, a revolutionary device for wounded service members.

Source: DARPA

It's a prosthetic that gives you "near natural control, very much like your own arm," Dr. Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA's biological technologies office, told TI.

DARPA prosthetic arm

DARPA's bio-tech office is also building brain implants that could one day restore the memories of troops affected by traumatic brain injuries.

Dr Justin Sanchez DARPA — Dr. Justin Sanchez, Director of DARPA's Biological Technologies Office. Corey Protin/Tech Insider

"If you had a traumatic brain injury and lost the ability to form and recall memories, if you had a medical device that could help you with that it can be transformative," Sanchez said.

Sanchez said his team's initial findings on human subjects show that scientists can capture and understand signals from your brain, and they've learned that a little electrical jolt can sometimes help with memory formation.

"It's a really interesting future ahead of us," he said.

The planned brain implant would be a game-changer for millions of Americans who suffer from memory loss.

Elderly with teen — A teenager helps an elderly woman use a computer Getty

Another project that caught our attention was HACMS, which enticed Pentagon visitors to learn about the technology effort to "hack-proof" computer systems.

air force computer hacker networks — Senior Airman Tyler Price, information technology specialist and cyber systems operator, at Ebbing Air National Guard Base, Fort Smith, Ark., troubleshoots a laptop Oct. 26, 2015. Price was awarded the Airman of the Quarter award Sept. 30. U.S. Air National Guard/Senior Airman Cody Martin

The goal of HACMS, or High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, is to build software that will make it extremely hard for hackers to break into things like drones or military command and control networks.

"I don't think there is any digital system that is perfectly secure, and I don't think our platform is perfectly secure, but we've certainly demonstrated that we've removed significant classes of cyber vulnerabilities," Dr. Raymond Richards, program manager, told TI.

DARPA invited ethical hackers to try everything they could to hack a system with HACMS on it, and they were stopped at every turn. This technology is already in use in civilian applications, like securing medical devices, and is available for anyone via Github.

"We gave our platforms to a penetration testing team, they hacked into the baseline, unmodified platform, and showed a number of ways they could hack into them," Richards said.

But with the modified HACMS platform, the team couldn't break in at all. "We've removed a large class of cyber vulnerabilities from these platforms."

Source: Github

The research agency is also working on high-resolution night vision cameras that shares the feed with everyone — so a commander can see exactly what his or her soldiers are seeing.

And the low-cost thermal imager program aims to deliver body-heat sensing optics that are 10 times cheaper than they are now. That means every soldier may one day have an unprecedented view of the battlefield at night, in insanely high-definition.

infrared body heat thermal scope

One project troops are sure to love is Virtual Eye, which DARPA developed in partnership with Nvidia. With just a couple of cameras and a tablet, soldiers can "digitally map" a room before they kick in the door.

Source: TI

War torn cities are incredibly dangerous, since soldiers never know what could be lurking around the corner. But Virtual Eye could save lives by showing troops exactly what they may encounter.

virtualeye darpa

"You can throw a couple of cameras in there," Trung Tran, DARPA program manager, told Tech Insider. "And from the cameras we can create a complete 3D world."

Using the VirtualEye view, a soldier can "walk" around a room and explore inside, looking under the couch, behind a column, or see what the inside of the door looks like. The two cameras work together to put together one cohesive virtual map.

"I can do all this without having a soldier endanger himself," Tran said. "Especially when you have adversaries like ISIS who are trying to set booby traps to, in fact, harm the soldiers when they come in just to do the room clearing."

But why walk in the door when you can climb onto the roof? DARPA's "Z-Man" concept is trying to turn ordinary troops into Spidermen that can climb up walls.

"We like to think Spiderman is going to become like Z-Man," said Dr. John A. Main, program manager in the Defense Sciences Office.

Main said DARPA looked to geckos and how they climb walls so they could see if those same techniques could someday be used by humans. They've made a lot of progress, building out individual climbing devices that work on metal, smooth glass, and fiberglass.

In something like the Bin Laden raid, Navy SEALs could have gone to the top of the three-story building in Abbottabad and worked their way down, giving them an even greater element of surprise.

"Particularly in an urban scenario where the high ground is on top of buildings, climbing is a very, very important capability," Main said.

Perhaps before soldiers get to the battlefield, they'll be walking with "Warrior Web," which DARPA says reduces fatigue and will eventually look similar to a diver's wet suit.

Designed for troops hiking with 80 to 100 pound packs, the Warrior Web suit gives soldiers a boost as they walk and makes them less tired.

"As you plant your foot, the motor will pull a cable along your hamstring," Patrick Murphy, a researcher at Harvard's Wyss Institute, told Tech Insider. "That will augment what your hip is doing as you walk."

Warrior Web is still in the early stages of research and development, but so far soldiers who have tested it have given DARPA mostly positive feedback.

"The system does a good job of adapting to individual timing," Murphy said.

DARPA has a way better version of Google Translate, with its Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) system, which allows real-time conversation between English and Arabic.

The demo was on a big screen so everyone could see, but in the field it can be boiled down to app form, on an Android device.

An English-speaking soldier would hit a button, say a phrase in English, and then the device speaker repeats the phrase in Arabic. The Arabic speaker can then do the same thing — greatly reducing the time it takes for conversations to get translated.

A device like this would also help troops who may not have a translator on hand. Right now, BOLT only does Iraqi Arabic, but the program manager told TI the technology can eventually be converted for other languages.

It's not all "gee whiz" technology and gizmos. DARPA is a military agency, and they do research and testing on weapons too, like a missile that can go five times the speed of sound.

missile weapon handlers f18 — Weapon handlers carry an air to air missile from a F/A-18F Super Hornet of Strike Fighter Squadron onboard the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, in the Gulf August 12, 2014. Hamad Mohammed/Reuters

The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept builds on DARPA's previous X-51 "WaveRider," an experimental unmanned aircraft that reached Mach 5 (3,806 mph) in 2013.

The HAWC would "enable transformational changes in responsive, long-range, strike capabilities against time-critical or heavily defended targets," according to DARPA.

In other words, a missile traveling that fast would be very hard for an enemy to defend against, and they'd have little time to do anything about it anyway.

Russia, China, and India are all trying to develop hypersonic weapons, according to The National Interest.

The Air Force is slowly embracing unmanned "drone" aircraft. But the Navy is going to see those changes as well, since DARPA's maritime efforts focus heavily on autonomous ships.

This is the "Sea Hunter," an anti-submarine warfare continuous trail unmanned vessel. Currently in sea trials, the ACTUV searches for enemy subs and then tracks them — without any sailors onboard or controlling it remotely.

DARPA has a host of other unmanned systems designed to stop submarines as well. One system is designed to sit on the ocean floor with passive sonar tracking, while another called SHARK is basically a drone submarine.

Shelby Sullivan DARPA SHARK program — Shelby Sullivan, DARPA program manager Corey Protin/Tech Insider

SHARK, or Submarine Hold at RisK, is an unmanned underwater vehicle with active sonar onboard. Like the "Sea Hunter" above the water, the SHARK is designed to track enemy subs, only it can go even deeper below the surface.

"It's unique in its capabilities that it is fully autonomous," said Program Manager Shelby Sullivan. "The device drives around and figures out how to search the area without an operator running it."

Sullivan said the SHARK could be used to protect places where the Navy operates and "sanitize" areas of enemy subs, or act as a barrier that would detect subs and then alert other ships around it.

And if no ships are in an area, DARPA hopes its "upward falling payload" concept will give the US military a sense of what's going on by delivering drones from sea floors around the world.

"The idea is to predeploy them," Dr. Jeffrey Krolik, program manager, told TI. "To put them there long in advance, and then trigger them when you need them."

The basic concept is to sink small tubes to the ocean bottom that can withstand the extreme pressures. Inside will be a payload — a drone or something else (Krolik says there is no plan for weaponry) — that can sit on the bottom for about five years, virtually impossible to detect.

"It would be hard," he said. "It would be really hard to detect something on the ocean bottom, 6,000 meters. I mean, just look at how difficult it has been to find wreckage of aircraft and so forth."

Once deployed, at any time it can be activated either through acoustic communications or by undersea cable, and it will then just rise to the surface and pop open.

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