By Roland Piquepaille
Historically, 'friendly fire', or the act to shoot at members of your own camp, accounts for more than 10 percent of wartime casualties. Now, engineers from Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) have created a radar tag sensor to eliminate 'friendly fire' and avoid fratricides. These sensors can be attached to military vehicles and recognized as 'friendly' by an attacking aircraft. The U.S. Army will test these sensors this fall. If the results of the tests are as successful as envision the Sandia team, these radar tags might be carried by every soldier in the future.Sandia researcher Lars Wells and a team of lab engineers have completed numerous tests and identified partners and potential customers for the sensor, which will be tested by the U.S. Army this fall. The researchers have shown the sensor can work with multiple radars and multiple aircraft, Wells said.
Here is a photograph of Lars Wells showing a prototype of the radar tag sensor (Credit: Randy Montoya, SNL).
Here is how it works.
The sensor, dubbed by the Army as "Athena" -- protector of the troops -- is not a radio transmitter that broadcasts a signal for the aircraft to receive. Instead, the sensor creates synthetic radar echoes, so that the radar picks up the sensor signal in the same way it picks up radar echoes from tanks, trucks, or other objects.
In general, the radar transmits a pulse of energy then looks for the reflections of that energy from objects on the ground. The tag sees the radar's transmitted pulse and sends it back to the radar, except it adds a little bit of data to the reflection (or echo).
As the radar picks up (or receives) reflections from the ground, it recognizes the tag's unique data signal and places an icon on the pilot's screen to alert him. The project has good system integration between tag and radar, Wells said, which is key to making it usable.
These tags will be tested this fall. If the results are successful, how much will they cost? There is no answer in the news release. But Sandia wants to keep costs as low as possible by making the tag work easily with existing systems.
"The aim of affordability is a big factor of the project," said Sandia researcher Mike Murphy. "By adding tagging to existing radars, we don't need to build new equipment for the aircraft."
And what's next?
Wells said a future path of the project is to include tags on every soldier.
With several thousands of soldiers on a single battlefield, I'm wondering if this system can work, and in real time. Any comments?
Source: Sandia National Laboratories news release, March 10, 2004
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