By Clay Dillow Posted 04.09.2012 at 1:21 pm 6 Comments

Fire Scout, Now Hunting Pirates U.S. Navy

It’s tough being a pirate these days. Facing off with Navy SEALs and missile cruisers on their home turf of the high seas is tough enough for small-arms wielding pirates in diminutive watercraft. Now, the Navy is bringing in the robots. The Office of Naval Research has plans to imbue its Fire Scout unmanned, ship-launched helicopters with electronic brains capable of identifying the small boats generally used by pirates.

Computer vision of this kind is generally pretty difficult, as object recognition is a really tough computational task. But the pirate-hunting Fire Scout will have an additional piece of technology on its side: LIDAR . This “laser radar” technology bounces laser pulses off of surrounding objects to quickly and accurately render a 3-D image of its environment, even at a distance.

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Tags

Technology, Clay Dillow, aviation, fire scout, military, navy, piracy, somali pirates
These Fire Scouts will be equipped with a database of watercraft profiles for boats commonly used by pirates in places like the Horn of Africa, where Somali pirates have been increasingly brazen in their attacks on commercial ships. After creating a LIDAR rendering of a boat on the water below, the Fire Scouts will quickly cross reference the parameters of its 3-D image against those in its database. If it determines that the boat in question is a potential piracy threat, it will notify its human operators.

That means Fire Scouts could be deployed in heavily trafficked waters and autonomously keep a lookout for anything suspicious. And, as we’ve seen the Fire Scout weaponized before, it could presumably even be used to interdict if the need arose. That’s not really the purview of the current ONR initiative, but we’ll go ahead and say it since that’s what everyone’s thinking. First tests will take place off the California coast this summer.

[LiveScience]

6 Comments

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Robot
04/09/12 at 2:19 pm

Robots RULE! Now once Skynet later becomes active....

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

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kfreels
04/09/12 at 3:47 pm

This is neat, but too easy to defeat. One only needs to find a way to make the shape of a boat appear outside the profile that they are looking for. This reminds me of the reverse of some things that went on during the cold war where mockups of tanks and other weapons would be set out to mislead people looking at satellite images.

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beantown179
04/09/12 at 5:22 pm

@krfreels - a fishing like boat with 2 people is a fishing boat. A fishing like boat with 5 people is probably not a fishing boat. I would imagine this is what it will be doing - check heat signatures and all that.

First it points out the pirates...then...it kills the pirates.

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Robot
04/09/12 at 8:17 pm

The boat with all the automatic rifles and machine guns may be a clue. It is not exactly fishing gear!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

Link to this comment
solarflare
04/09/12 at 8:46 pm

yeah hunt down every single one of those assholes, they're just one of many kinds of scum on this planet kill em all

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matsci1
04/12/12 at 6:16 am

I dont know about you guys but I am sick and tired of hearing how the „Somalia Pirates“ are threatening legal commerce on the open seas. Also from what the article talks about the “increasingly Brazen Behavior” Hey WTF…This is 2012 not the 1600´s. This kind of behavior should not be tolerated. Back in my army days I was a driver on an M-1 tank and I would gladly give these criminals a taste of its 105mm cannon (the original M-1 had the 105mm M-65 rifled cannon but today they have 120mm smooth bore cannons). ..with a dose of the 7.62 mm coax machine gun for good measure!
My question is why in the 21 century is this s**t olerated? With what I know about military technology we do not have to put up with such behavior. We know where their bases are and we can neutralize this threat without a problem.
So I say to the people that are in charge of these resources…start taking charge of this situation and get your tail out from between your legs.
Mike


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