DetectionEmploying plants as discreet, self-sustaining sensors to warn of security threats
Few military requirements are as enduring as the need for timely, accurate information. To meet this demand, the Department of Defense invests heavily in the development of powerful electronic and mechanical sensors, and in the manpower to maintain and operate those sensors. DARPA notes that nature, the master of complexity, offers potential solutions, and that the agency new Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program looks to seemingly simple plants as the next generation of intelligence gatherers. The program will pursue technologies to engineer robust, plant-based sensors that are self-sustaining in their environment and can be remotely monitored using existing hardware.
One of these might be the next hazard detector // Source: yahoo.com
Few military requirements are as enduring as the need for timely, accurate information.
To meet this demand, the Department of Defense invests heavily in the development of powerful electronic and mechanical sensors, and in the manpower to maintain and operate those sensors. DARPA says that it has been involved on the research side of the equation since the agency’s earliest days, developing technologies such as the VELA satellites and seismographs to ensure Soviet compliance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today, nearly sixty years later, the need for information is no less urgent, but the national security landscape has grown far more complex and the challenges of monitoring distributed activity far more complicated. The military’s traditional sensors are not always optimal for the task.
Fortunately, nature, the master of complexity, offers potential solutions. DARPA’s new Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program looks to seemingly simple plants as the next generation of intelligence gatherers. The program will pursue technologies to engineer robust, plant-based sensors that are self-sustaining in their environment and can be remotely monitored using existing hardware.
DARPA says its vision for APT is to harness plants’ natural mechanisms for sensing and responding to environmental stimuli and extend them to detect the presence of certain chemicals, pathogens, radiation, and even electromagnetic signals. APT aims to modify the genomes of plants in order to program in these specific types of sensing and trigger discreet response mechanisms in the presence of relevant stimuli, and do so in a way that does not compromise the plants’ ability to thrive. If the program is successful, it will deliver a new sensing platform that is energy independent, robust, stealthy, and easily distributed. Such sensors could find application outside of the military too, making it possible, for instance, for communities to safely identify landmines or unexploded ordinance leftover from past conflicts or testing grounds.
