Parallel parking a car is hard enough for most of us; just imagine trying to back the 686-ft, 22,000-ton HMS Illustrious into a stall at Plymouth Harbor. Officers at Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) in Dartmouth, England don’t have to. A newly upgraded training simulator teaches them to command the Royal Navy’s biggest boats without ever getting their feet wet. More »
While grand-scale robotics programs like DARPA’s Big Dog project may spark our sci-fi fancy, they’re still years away from the front lines. This half-pint unmanned ground vehicle, however, will immediately start saving lives by acting as a Special Forces scout. More »
The Israeli Air Force has been utilizing UAVs ever since the IAI Scout first flew during the 1982 Lebanon War. Over the last 30 years, Israel’s rickety Reagan-era drones have been steadily upgraded into a world-class unmanned aerial fleet. And last Sunday, the IAF unveiled the newest upgrade to its Heron 1 (Shoval) drone, radar capable of identifying targets 300km away. More »
When scouting enemy positions, our forces rarely have the luxury of a proper airstrip—or even a fairway—with which to land an unmanned aircraft. That’s why California’s AeroVironment corporation has designed a drone that lands just about anywhere—water hazards and sand traps be damned. More »
Conventional natural gas turbines suffer from a hefty performance tradeoff: they can either burn fewer BTUs per hour, or they can rapidly adjust their output to meet changing energy demands. The new FlexEfficiency gas turbine from GE, however, promises to do both while making renewable energy even cheaper. More »
Kamikaze attacks can utterly devastate an enemy’s morale but come at a steep price—namely, the pilot’s life. But what if there is no pilot? What if it’s just a kamikaze drone aimed straight at the heart of North Korean military targets? More »
Used to be that if you were aboard a sunken submarine, your best hope for rescue was to grow a set of gills—fast. Now, however, the US Navy can reach and extract sailors who are in over their heads with this deep-diving 16-passenger ROV. More »
Wind farms simply aren’t reliable sources of steady power, which is why many rely on enormous battery systems to store excess current for times when the wind isn’t gusting enough to meet our energy demands. Problem is—the production of these batteries is itself a drain on resources. So what if, instead of lithium and metal hydride batteries, wind farms could just store energy using the same air that spins the propellers? More »
It’s been 114 years since HG Wells first described the nefarious “Heat Ray” in The War of the Worlds. And finally—finally—the US military is on the cusp of deploying a mobile high energy weapon of its very own. Luckily, ours is designed to fry incoming artillery and mortar threats, not the whole of a freshly-conquered civilization. More »
Sometimes a fire is too dangerous for the fire department. Whether it’s the risk of an explosion, work on a surface that could collapse, or the presence of hazardous chemicals, a firefighter is always vulnerable. Now, when conditions pose too great a risk for a human, we can enlist a tank. A robot tank. The Howe and Howe T2-Thermite. More »
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