Lifeboat Foundation

Don’t kill the messanger; I’m just sharing.

Yesterday Trump acknowledged the power of technology to help the USA in his future plans.

In a major foreign policy speech, yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said the U.S. needs to make better use of “3D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare.”

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Hmmm; I guess the government needs to change its mode of operations. I believe that everyone has been saying this for a while now.

Technology companies are moving too fast for governments to keep up, according to a former chief of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Kaigham (Ken) Gabriel was acting director of DARPA and the man behind drone technology and global positioning satellites, as well as the military’s top secret, high-tech operation responsible for inventing the forerunner to the internet, Arpanet.

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“Through Squad X, we want to vastly improve dismounted squad effectiveness in all domains by integrating new and existing technologies into systems that squads can bring with them,” said Maj. Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager. “The squad is the formation with the greatest potential for impact and innovation, while having the lowest barrier to entry for experimentation and system development. The lessons we learn and the technology we create could not only transform dismounted squads’ capabilities, but also eventually help all warfighters more intuitively understand and control their complex mission environments.”

Squad X intends to combine off-the-shelf technologies and new capabilities under development through DARPA’s Squad X Core Technologies (SXCT) program, which was launched specifically to develop novel technologies that Squad X could integrate into user-friendly systems. SXCT shares Squad X’s overarching goal of ensuring that Soldiers and Marines maintain uncontested tactical superiority over potential adversaries by exploring capabilities in four areas: precision engagement, non-kinetic engagement, squad sensing and squad autonomy. In an important step toward that goal, SXCT recently awarded Phase 1 contracts to nine organizations.

The U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have expressed interest in future Squad X capabilities and plan to support the experimentation efforts with testing in simulated operational environments as the program progresses.

Supercomputer facing problems?

In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (10¹⁵ operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start to run into fundamental problems.

When you’re talking about supercomputers, a good place to start is the TOP500 list. Published twice a year, it ranks the world’s fastest machines based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark, which solves a dense system of linear equations using double precision (64 bit) arithmetic.

Looking down the list, you soon run into some numbers that boggle the mind. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), a system deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, is the number one system as of November 2015, a position it’s held since 2013. Running Linpack, it clocks in at 33.86 × 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second (33.86 PFLOPS).

DARPA wants to bring autonomy and agility to military transportation.

Lookout world; could we see WWIII?

A US KC-135 refuelling plane flew with the two F-22 Raptor fighters from Britain to Romania’s Mihail Kogalniceanu air base on the Black Sea.

“The increased size of the 2016 deployment… allows U.S. Forces to assert their presence more widely across the eastern frontier”, said U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Major Sheryll Klinkel.

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A military-grade drone-killing ‘death ray’ that can reportedly destroy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from up to 6 miles away could soon be in use in UK airports following a suspected collision with a passenger jet at Heathrow last Thursday.

The collision, which led to a drone ban over London during US President Barrack Obama’s UK visit, has forced authorities to consider more aggressive countermeasures.

It Looks exactly like Boston Dynamics cancelled Big Dog project, and it is armed with some kind of a Light machine gun. I said that cancelling the Big Dog project was a mistake. We Can’t Allow a robotics gap between the US and Russian/Chinese forces. And, the other side has absolutely no hang ups about arming their robots.

In his twitter page Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the Russian magazine Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defense) has published the first-ever photos of Russia’s advanced biomorphic combat robot.

The alleged advanced biomorphic combat robot of Russia will move like a four legged animal and it will be equipped with a machine gun and guided antitank missiles, as suggested by the photos.

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Satellites operators have been longing for it for decades, and DARPA (once again?) is turning their dream into reality: on March 25, one of America’s most futuristic agency announced it would launch a public-private partnership to provide in-orbit servicing to geosynchronous satellites, both commercial and military.

The program dubbed Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) will be a major breakthrough for the satellite industry world. Since Sputnik’s launch, the biggest weakness of satellites was that, once on orbit, nothing could be done if something went wrong or once the fuel tank ran dry. A rather embarrassing issue when considering how pricey such platforms are. The only maintenance and repair operations performed to date were manned (Hubble telescope, ISS). The agency announced that it would allocate RSGS $500mn over the next few years, supplemented by commercial partner investment.

DARPA’s RSGS is composed of two elements: the arm that will dock and manipulate the satellite, and the space ship carrying it. Regarding the first element, the agency will provide its Front-end Robotics Enabling Near-term Demonstration (FREND) technology. The prototype of the FREND arm was built for the agency by the California-based company Alliance Space Systems. The robotic arm will enable it to dock with satellites and carry out maintenance.

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