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Enabling Battlespace Persistent Surveillance: The Form, Function, and Future of Smart Dust
Abstract
In 2025, the military's need for persistent surveillance applications will extend beyond current airborne platforms such as Global Hawk and Predator. The future of 2025 contains potential enemies with a material and information focus capable of conducting regular and irregular warfare on foreign lands as well as the continental United States. The U.S. military must invest its energy and money today into researching enabling technologies such as nanotechnology, wireless networks, and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). Nanotechnology reduces today's technology to the molecular level. Wireless networks can link people, computers, and sensors beyond the borders of nations without the need for costly hardware-intensive infrastructure. Finally, MEMS have the capability to act as independent or networked sensors. Fused together, these technologies can produce a network of nanosized particles -- Smart Dust -- that can be distributed over the battlefield to measure, collect, and disseminate information, Smart Dust will transform persistent surveillance for the warfighter. The U.S. military should lead the research and development of these enabling technologies so that Smart Dust will be a viable application by 2025.
... Dickson [17] mentioned that US military must spend energy and money today for the research work on technologies (like micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)) for development of the surveillance applications such as Smart Dust for the future. Smart dust can help in border surveillance against terrorism [3,17,18]. ...
... Dickson [17] mentioned that US military must spend energy and money today for the research work on technologies (like micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)) for development of the surveillance applications such as Smart Dust for the future. Smart dust can help in border surveillance against terrorism [3,17,18]. In near future, clouds of several tiny sensors will be moved in the air [3]. ...
Due to the popularity of IoT, applications related to IoT have gained focus. In this paper, we have proposed a Smart Dust based Smart Judiciary System. We have also discussed the merits and demerits of the proposed system. And have also illustrated the risks and challenges related to Smart Dust. We have also briefly highlighted some of the emerging domains of IoT.
... Smart dust, which dates to the 1990s, consists of miniature microelectronic particles, as small as 20 microns by 2020, which are fashioned from nano-components, and which can be sprayed, scattered, implanted, or inhaled, forming wireless networks capable of transmitting information, "about anything nearly anywhere" (such as temperature, location, light, movement, sound and so-on), to a cloud or other base for processing. [79,80] In a paper from the US Air War College, Center for Strategy and Technology titled, 'Enabling Battlespace Persistent Surveillance: The Form, Function, and Future of Smart Dust', the technology's ability to enable "dispersal of a wireless sensor network on the actual bodies" of adversaries is described, with the capability to provide "vital tactical information, such as location and numbers, to support counterinsurgency operations". The paper adds that, "Smart Dust offers a low observable ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] asset providing detailed information on insurgents and the US populace [italics added]". ...
Since government must be involved in the accumulation of capital to legitimate its activities, and since humans are, in the eyes of government, key resources, government must therefore be involved in activities that manage, control and increase the efficiency of these resources whilst at the same time fostering the spread of business. As we have outlined throughout Parts 1 and 2, history shows evidence of how the transhumanist movement has gained a foothold in society through government and business activities, in accordance with high-level military-intelligence forecasting and scenario planning, and how the global program may be viewed and understood as the only rational response to increasingly outdated humans who, save for the gift of high-tech bio/nano brain-chip upgrades, cannot compete against the machines. These kinds of sentiments, wrong as they are, are reflected in language output, which represents the centre of our thinking. Part 3, thus, introduces aspects of cognitive science as a way of examining more closely how centres of power conceptualise human beings and their environments as containers to be managed and controlled by authorities, and how these conceptualisations appear in language, in policy, and in practice. We make the case that behind the theatre of government, electoral politics and manufactured global crises, transhumanist battle-plans have been consistently enacted in policy and in governance, such that "democratic processes" do little more than provide civilian cover for military operations.
... These nanosensors are easily suspended in the air for hours and can be powered by the sun. Smart dust can transmit data such as temperature, pressure, humidity, amount of chemicals in the air up to 20 km and provide conditions for continuous air pollution control in a specific area (Dickson 2007, Fischer, Agarwal et al. 2009). ...
With the increase of cars, air pollution has also increased significantly. Nanotechnology can play an important role in controlling and reducing air pollution from cars by creating intelligent systems such as diagnostic nanosensors, nanocatalysts to absorb and excrete pollutant gases and add nanomaterials to fuel.
... These nanosensors remain suspended in the air easily for hours, and they can provide their energy from the sun. Smart dust can transmit data such as temperature, pressure, humidity, the amount of chemicals in the air up to 20 km, and provide conditions to control air pollution continuously in a particular area [38,39]. ...
As a result of world population growth, consumption of energy and materials is increasing, leading to environmental consequences. Some of these consequences include increased production of solid waste, increased air pollution caused by vehicles and industrial plants, contamination of surface and groundwater. Nanotechnology has the potential of improving the environment through direct application of nanomaterials for detecting, preventing, and removing pollutants and indirect application of them by using better industrial design process and production of products compatible with the environment. Nanoparticles show higher reactivity due to their small size and high surface. While this characteristic has various benefits and applications, it may have risks for the safety of employees and the environment, such as stay suspended in the air for a long time, possibility of accumulation in the environment, easy absorption, and damage to various organs of the body. This review has investigated the applications of nanotechnology in waste management, controlling and reducing air pollution, water treatment, and nanomaterials safety.
Blvd. 4000. Orlando. Florida (USA). Antenna-coupled optical detectors, also named as optical antennas, are being developed as detection devices with micro-and nano-scale features for their use in the millimetre, infrared, and visible spectral range. They are optical components that couple the electromagnetic radiation in the visible and infrared wavelengths in the same way that radioelectric antennas do at the corresponding wavelengths. Optical antennas show polarization dependence, tuneability, and rapid time of response. They also cann be cosndiered as point detectors and directionally sensitive elements. So far, these detectors have been operated in the mid-infrared with positive results in the visible. The measurement and characterization of optical antennas requires the use of an experimental set-up with nanometric resolution. On the other hand, a computational simulation of the interaction between the material structures and the incoming electromagnetic radiation is needed to explore alternative designs of practical devices. In this contribution we will present the concept of optical and infrared antennas, and some experimental results of their performance, along with the experimental set-up arranged for their characterization in the visible.
Smart Dust is comprised of a vast number of ultra-small fully autonomous computing and communication devices, with very restricted
energy and computing capabilities, that co-operate to accomplish a large sensing task. Smart Dust can be very useful in practice
i.e. in the local detection of a remote crucial event and the propagation of data reporting its realization to a control center.
In this work, we have implemented and experimentally evaluated four protocols (PFR, LTP and two variations of LTP which we here introduce) for local detection and propagation in smart dust networks, under new, more general and realistic
modelling assumptions. We comparatively study, by using extensive experiments, their behavior highlighting their relative
advantages and disadvantages. All protocols are very successful. In the setting we considered here, PFR seems to be faster while the LTP based protocols are more energy efficient.
The focus of surveillance missions is to acquire and verify information about enemy capabilities and positions of hostile targets. Such missions often involve a high element of risk for human personnel and require a high degree of stealthiness. Hence, the ability to deploy unmanned surveillance missions, by using wireless sensor networks, is of great practical importance for the military. Because of the energy constraints of sensor devices, such systems necessitate an energy-aware design to ensure the longevity of surveillance missions. Solutions proposed recently for this type of system show promising results through simulations. However, the simplified assumptions they make about the system in the simulator often do not hold well in practice and energy consumption is narrowly accounted for within a single protocol. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a running system for energy-efficient surveillance. The system allows a group of cooperating sensor devices to detect and track the positions of moving vehicles in an energy-efficient and stealthy manner. We can trade off energy-awareness and surveillance performance by adaptively adjusting the sensitivity of the system. We evaluate the performance on a network of 70 MICA2 motes equipped with dual-axis magnetometers. Our results show that our surveillance strategy is adaptable and achieves a significant extension of network lifetime. Finally, we share lessons learned in building such a complete running system.
The Smart Dust project is probing microfabrication technology's
limitations to determine whether an autonomous sensing, computing, and
communication system can be packed into a cubic millimeter mote (a small
particle or speck) to form the basis of integrated, massively
distributed sensor networks. Although we've chosen a somewhat arbitrary
size for our sensor systems, exploring microfabrication technology's
limitations is our fundamental goal. Because of its discrete size,
substantial functionality, connectivity, and anticipated low cost, Smart
Dust will facilitate innovative methods of interacting with the
environment, providing more information from more places less
intrusively
To properly evaluate the utility of a proposed technology, especially one developed for military purposes, one must also understand the context in which the developer will employ that technology. This is because the enemy is always trying to counter one's capabilities and render them ineffective. In addition, the military never operates freely -- certain political considerations always govern (and restrain) the use of military force. As a result, when trying to determine the technologies in which the U.S. Air Force should invest, the context in which they will be employed becomes paramount. To that end, this paper develops four scenarios surrounding state actor threats in the year 2025. The "Wishful Thinking" scenario describes a state whose military is materials-based and who fights the U.S. military in a large-scale, force-on-force conflict. The "Information Immobilization" adversary also will attempt to fight the United States on the regular battlefield, but will do so using information-based systems to counter U.S. Air Force capabilities. The "David and Goliath" scenario postulates a threat in which a materials-based military attempts to fight the United States using irregular tactics. And, finally, The "Phantom Menace" state is one whose information-based forces will take on the United States in an irregular manner. The analysis indicates that the "Phantom Menace" scenario provides the highest potential for a state actor to inflict catastrophic damage to the United States. However, experience has shown that, to be properly prepared for any future contingency, the U.S. Air Force cannot focus its acquisition efforts solely on meeting the requirements of any one or two scenarios. The best return on investment will come from developing capabilities that provide an advantage across the entire threat spectrum.
The objective of our intelligent language systems work is to conduct basic research in the areas of language understanding, common-sense inference, and knowledge representation. For specifically, we are interested in:(1) Producing better user interfaces.(2) Enabling the automatic processing of natural language text by computer. (3) Building autonomous planning agents that can operate in complex environments.
