DSIAC collects and publishes articles related to our technical focus areas on the web to share with the DoD community.
“The ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) side will get a lot smarter. With the next generation, you will see UAVs that are faster, more maneuverable and maybe stealthy. You will see them accompanying fighters with extra weapons, EW (electronic warfare), countermeasures and even lasers on board,” Air Force Chief Scientist Greg Zacharias told Scout Warrior in
Rocket Crafters, Inc. (RCI) announced today a U.S. patent was granted to co-founder, President & CTO Ronald Jones for a method for designing and fabricating flawless, high-performance, safer handling fuel grains for hybrid rocket engines using additive manufacturing technology (also known as 3D printing).
ANKARA, Turkey — Military electronics specialist Aselsan, Turkey’s largest defense company, is developing two different types of surveillance and reconnaissance balloons — also called mini-zeppelins — to mainly be used along the country’s southeastern borders with Iraq and Syria. The balloons are expected to function like Lockheed Martin’s Persistent Threat Detection System, a tethered aerostat-based
The traffic-management system supports UAS civilian applications that operate at lower altitudes. NASA has developed a traffic management system for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) to maintain safe and efficient UAS operations. This novel technology enables the growth in civilian applications of UAS operations at lower altitudes by developing a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system. There
Now in water testing: an unmanned surface boat designed to launch from the littoral combat ship to assist with the location and destruction of undersea mines. But according to the boat’s creators at Textron Systems, the technology may have a much broader range of uses in the future. The system in question is the common
Members of the USASMDC/ARSTRAT Technical Center”s Air and Missile Defense Directorate participated in the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, or JIDO, UAS Hard-Kill Challenge at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, from Feb. 27 to March 3. During the challenge, the Mobile Expeditionary High Energy Laser 2.0, or MEHEL 2.0, demonstrated its counter-unmanned aircraft system, or
A new flow battery from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. Losing only one percent of its capacity per 1000 cycles, the non-toxic, non-corrosive device offers the potential to significantly decrease the costs of production. “Lithium ion batteries don’t
Inspecting the condition of dykes and other sea defence structures is typically a task for robots, working in a team and in a highly autonomous way. But if they move around across the dykes, perform tests and communicate the results for six hours a day, they use a lot of energy. Introducing charging stations are
Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) think they are on the path to giving aircraft a way to avoid potentially hazardous icing conditions from a safe distance. Clouds composed of supercooled liquid can cause aircraft to ice over quickly because the liquid water droplets are below the freezing point and will freeze after
The US Army is investigating how one of its drones took an unplanned 623-mile excursion and ended up stuck in a tree two states away. The Shadow RQ-7 drone was launched by soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade of the 7th Infantry Division during a training mission in Arizona at 17:16 local time. It was
Drones are designed to fly, but crashes are a fact of life, whether because of external forces or pilot error. Some commercial drones employ techniques like propeller guards to at least protect the drone, or humans nearby, but they’re not exactly effective all the time. More industrially-inclined drones even have “cages” that protect them but
Soldiers view live-stream full-motion video from unmanned aerial vehicles via a smartphone. They access 3D digital maps to send precision target coordinates. Soldiers are relying on these advanced technologies to improve lethality and maintain battlefield dominance. These are among the improvements that will be embedded in future fire-support capabilities. The Army has started testing four