Surveillance sensors with powers of discrimination

Surveillance sensors with powers of discrimination

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underwater sensors
underwater sensors

Battery lifespan has always been a limiting factor in the operation of sensors. Military forces have spent decades looking at ways to collect data and information in locations where soldiers cannot be sent. The method of choice has often been the use cheap sensors, which can be left on the battlefield long after the soldiers have gone. Case in point: the 1,500 unattended ground sensors the Pentagon has requested for the hills and battlefields of Afghanistan recently.

The only problem with this method is the short lifespan of sensor batteries. But not anymore: according to Defense One DARPA ( the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has announced yesterday a program called Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operations, or N-ZERO. The program will focus on building a network of sensors with powers of discrimination.

The planned sensors would be able to determine what to pay attention to and when. They will have, according to DARPA, an innate ability to detect specific frequency signatures “such as the presence of a particular vehicle type or radio communications protocol.”

Program manager Troy Olsson explained that the one of the purposes of the program would be to have the ability to ‘wake’ the sensor remotely through the use of a specific signal. N-ZERO will build sensors that draw just 10 nanowatts of power during the device’s “asleep yet aware” phase, as much power as a typical watch battery in storage and about 1,000 times less power than is consumed by typical sensors.

It’s a technology that will play a role in some current and future DARPA programs, such as the Upward Falling Payload program, which seeks to put a network of pods on the ocean floor, sleeping quietly, until they sense a particular threat and release their pods. An example of such a threat could be a submarine. In such a case undersea pods able to detect submarines would cut down on the need to use other submarines to collect data on undersea threats. Land-based sensors that can detect military vehicles moving across a border in places like Iraq (or elsewhere) could be used too. These sensors would perhaps be connected to armed drones, stationed to lie-in-wait until they are needed.

Persistent ground sensing could radically reduce the costs of gathering intelligence including the need for drone patrols or satellite surveillance.