Victory first requires deciphering enemy acronyms (DEAs)

Slogans, buzzwords, and acronyms, are essentials of any complex system - denoting a rich culture amongst its cognoscenti - and the military are no slouches in the jargon game.

US Army think-tanks have escalated themselves to leaders of the pack in this skill. In so doing, the common soldier, the human, becomes so abstractly defined as to be indistinguishable from a deployed bipedal field unit, umm, biorobot, err.., cyborg - heck, let the experts speak:

All Soldiers in the Modular Force are part of the Soldier as a System (SaaS) overarching requirement encompassing everything the Soldier wears, carries, and consumes to include unit radios, crew-served weapons, and unit-specific equipment in the execution of tasks and duties.

All Soldiers systems will be treated as an integrated System of Systems (SoS). The Future Combat Systems (FCS) Soldier, as defined by Soldier as a System (SaaS), meets the need to improve the current capability of all Soldiers, regardless of Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), to perform Army Common Tasks and functions more efficiently and effectively.

The "FCS" itself is a glorious acronym-rich obfuscation (ARO) describing a refined system of destruction and killing (RSDK) - preferably of carbon-based units (CBUs), but their techno-lackeys (TLs) can be taken down if robo-jacking (RoJ) proves cost-ineffective (-$).

The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) network allows the FCS Family-of-Systems (FoS) to operate as a cohesive system-of-systems where the whole of its capabilities is greater than the sum of its parts.

As the key to the Army’s transformation, the network, and its logistics and Embedded Training (ET) systems, enable the Future Force to employ revolutionary operational and organizational concepts. The network enables Soldiers to perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels as defined by the FCS Operational Requirements Document (ORD).

Link to milbot central. PS: Don’t forget to download the wargame. And if you are wondering what on Earth the US Army is up to, try this article on ‘dumbing down the army.’

Child’s Dream Comes True

Robot musculature is the obvious alternative to mechanical actuators.

No amount of clockwork-sophistication will protect one’s personal mechabot from the smear and stigma attached to being ‘kinetically challenged." Such kenisic taunts will send early model personal assistants (PAbots) into premature and possibly permanent CPU denial (blue screen).

Aside from biological muscles or motors, pistons and levers, Electroactive Polymers (’EAP’s in the trade) are a hot line of research which is pursuing two directions based on the activation: electronic (driven by electric field) and ionic (mobility of ions).

Electronic polymers like electrostrictive, electrostatic, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric demand high field potentials close to their dielectric breakdown, while ionic EAPs like gels, polymer-metal composites, conductive polymers, and carbon nanotubes - though low-voltage media - must maintain wetness.

Not a problem, the latter, for we wetbots but a downer for the lab scientist. Enter promising breakthrough, for lightweight bots, at least.

Inha University in South Korea has demonstrated cellulose - lightweight, inexpensive, low power requirements - made electrically active by dissolving paper pulp, forming it into sheets, and coating it with a layer of gold as an electrode, ‘actuates’ with considerable promise for lightweight robotic forms, either crawling or wing-flapping critters.

Some areas of the cellulose film are highly ordered, while in other areas, the cellulose strands are tangled like spaghetti. The movement of ions through the paper — and the movement of cellulose strands themselves, which have negative and positively charged ends — causes the paper to bend in response to an electrical current. The bending is driven by the ordered regions, but free space in disordered regions allows ions to flow more freely and adds to the paper’s ability to deform.

Professor Jaehwan Kim, with Zoubeida Ounaies at Texas AMU, are working to strengthen "smart" cellulose with carbon nanotubes employing their high electrical conductivity and strength. The aim is films of cellulose strands intimately tangled with carbon nanotubes will exert more force than pure cellulose films.

Says Jaehwan Kim, associate professor at the university, EAPs "offer capabilities that are currently considered science fiction. EAP are able to offer a range of performance and characteristics that may not be reproduced or replicated by other technologies."

The attention-grabbing headline "microwave-powered flapping wing" ultra-lightweight, low power, flexible, damage tolerant, noiseless, and agile ‘robots’ has swamped the equally startling and inspired potential others:
- tactile interface and active tactile display device for reading by the blind;
- inflatable space structures, inflatable antenna experiment, ultra-light weight solar arrays and large telescopes;
- biologically inspired and insect-like robots, in agriculture and ecology, toys and animatronics for entertainment industry;
- biological muscle augmentation, miniature in-vivo robots for diagnostics and microsurgery, active bandage and anti-G suits;
- noise control of aircraft cabins, automobiles, ships, buildings, and smart wall papers;
- MEMS, micropumps, valves.

Nothing new under the sun, I always say. Vis this ancient (yet to be dated - guessing circa 1910-20) hygroscopic cellophane magic fish:

Video blank or not playing? You either have JavaScript turned of or, more likely, an older version of Macromedia’s Flash Player. Click here to get the latest Flash player.

[The inscription on the Cadbury's fish reads: "Place the fish on the palm of your hand & it comes to life" ]

ATR and Honda successfully demonstrated a brain-machine interface to manipulate robots using human brain activity, by decoding MRI-based neural decoding, hence without surgical implants.

Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (“ATR”) and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (“HRI”) have collaboratively developed a new “Brain Machine Interface” (“BMI”) with the apparent ultimate goal of manipulating robots by Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs), much as humans are manipulated in today’s society.

A World Honda news release cites "a highly acclaimed article titled Decoding the perceptual and subjective contents of the human brain by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a researcher at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, which recently appeared in a leading science journal, Nature Neuroscience.

"For this study, Dr. Kamitani was named by Scientific American magazine as Research Leader, with his collaborator Dr. Frank Tong at Vanderbilt University, within the 2005 Scientific American 50 – the magazine’s prestigious annual list that recognizes outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology. HRI and ATR have developed the article’s theory into a system for real-time brain activity decoding and robotic control.

"This research reveals that MRI-based neural decoding can allow a robot hand to mimic the subject’s finger movements (“paper-rock-scissors”) by tracking the hemodynamic responses in the brain. Although there is an approximate 7-second time lag between the subject’s movement and the robot’s mimicking movement, the researchers succeeded in gaining a decoding accuracy of 85%."

The article boasts "No Surgery Required - In conventional BMI research efforts led by U.S. neuroscientists, invasive technologies, including electrode array implants, have been used. If advanced non-invasive BMI becomes available, users will be free from the physical burden of a surgical procedure."

No, just a coupla million bucks worth of Magnetic Resonance Imaging hardware in your shoulder bag. [I know, early days yet, proof of concept, yada]

Honda’s name is prevalent in robotics news. Their strategy is blatant - to flog Asimos. "Would you like to upsize your Integra with an Asimo chauffeur for just $100K sir - or $2 million for the MRI helmet?"

I would, and alway do, love to wax philosophical but neither space nor brain power permit, so I shall gently nudge you over to Luciano Floridi for some.