DARPA solicits bids for LANdroids

It is not by accident that we offer regular covergae of two government agencies: The Pentagon’s DARPA, and DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate. In both agencies you find dedicated people who enjoy thinking outside the box and around corners, and who do not mind failure (Rolf Dietrich, director of Homeworks, which is part of HSARPA — DHS’s counterpart of DARPA — even says that he is “paid to fail”: Of course, he is not literally paid to fail, but rather paid to dare and take risks in deciding what research programs to fund).

So here is the latest intriguing project from DARPA: A scheme to develop LANdroids — small crawling radio-relay robots the size of a deck of cards. The idea is that the smallish, cheap, expendable droids would be scattered about by U.S. troops on foot or by first responders as they converge on a disaster scene. The droids would then link up to form a wireless voice/data network which could cover every corner of urban non-line-of-sight environments. The net thus created would use multiple pathways for resilience, and would be able to heal itself in the event of individual droids going down.

The Register’s Lewis Page writes that radio communication tends to be unreliable for foot soldiers in urban warfare or for first responders, especially indoors. DARPA envisions that, in the future, troops or police storming a building, underground bunker complex, or caves may well drop LANdroids as they walk or run about, in the process creating an instant WiFi network.

In its bid solicitation, DARPA says: “The LANdroid robots, which will consist of a radio, robotic platform, battery, and small processor, will be expendable. Dismounted warfighters must be able to drop and go — benefiting from the infrastructure while it is in place but not being required to move back into harm’s way to retrieve the robots…the target is to demonstrate a platform that would have a final production cost of $100 per LANdroid at modest volumes (e.g., 1,000 units).”

The solicitiation says that the mobile access points must be able to move across “typical indoor urban environments (e.g., concrete, asphalt, carpet)” at half a meter a second or better. “Stair climbing capabilities are not required as warfighters will often provide the coarsegrained movement — though novel ideas are welcome,” DARPA says.

The LANdroid net is expected to be self-healing, shifting its individual nodes to eliminate blackspots caused by a LANdroid going offline. DARPA also admits that “it is expected that power will be a challenging design requirement.” LANdroid will look for light, cheap, throwaway batteries, but there is a design question here: The more power the small robots use to move about to achieve better reception, the less power it will have to transmit at higher power.

Another difficulty: Designed to operate indoors, the the LANdroids will likely not have a clear idea of their own location because satellite navigation indoors is spotty at best. Other than signal strength, all the little robots will have to go on is “a basic set of sensors (e.g., bump, drop, direction, movement)…as compliant with the cost and dimensional constraints of the platform as possible,” DARPA says.

As is the case with other DARPA project, this is an intriguing challenge. Stay tuned.