And 23 civilians die in part because of limitations of the sensors. But engineers are working to create new sensors that can see more, in greater detail, than ever before. Deptula today weve developed sensors that can watch with an allseeing eye and see an area about the size of a small city all at one time. Yiannis antoniades this is the next generation of surveillance. For the first time we actually have permission from the government to show the basic capabilities. It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist. Narrator engineer Yiannis Antoniades designed the new sensor, known as argus. With 1. 8 billion pixels, its the worlds highest resolution camera. Argus fits inside this pod that attaches to the belly of a uav. But because much of the work is classified, we cant see the sensor itself. Antoniades because we are not allowed to expose some of the pieces that make up the sensors so you get to look at pretty plastic curtains. Narrator also known as wide area persistent stare, argus is the equivalent of having up to 100 predators look at an area the size of a mediumsized city at once. This image was taken 17,500 feet above quantico, virginia and covers 15 square miles. This whole image is at a very, very fine resolution so if we wanted to know what is going on in any spot along this image, say near this building, at this intersection we can generate a moving image that shows whats going on in the area. Narrator simply by touching the screen, antoniades has opened up a window showing a detailed area while still maintaining the broader context. Antoniades and everything that is a moving object is being automatically tracked. The colored boxes represent that the computer has recognized the moving objects. You can see individuals crossing the street, you can see individuals walking in parking lots. Theres actually enough resolution to be able to see the people waving their arms or walking around, what kind of clothes they wear. And you could pick the location of where you produce these images anywhere in the entire field of view. Narrator antoniades can open up to 65 windows at once and can see objects as small as six inches on the ground. Antoniades from even 17,500 feet, the white thing that you see flying around is a bird. Narrator argus streams live to the ground and also stores everything a million terabytes of video a day, which is the equivalent of 5,000 hours of highdefinition footage. Antoniades so you can go back and say i would like to see what happened at this particular location three days, two hours, four minutes ago, and it would actually show you exactly what happened as if you were watching it live. Narrator to create the worlds highest definition camera, antoniades needed to design a new imaging chip but darpa, the projects funder, wanted to move fast and keep costs down, so he borrowed technology that most people have in their pockets. Antoniades inside this cell phone we find a tiny little camera. So if you were to take off the majority of it youd be left with an imaging chip. If you were to take 368 of these and make a big mosaic out of them and start shooting images now you have argus. Narrator unlike the predator camera that limits field of view, argus melds together video from each of its 368 chips to create a 1. 8 billion pixel video stream. This makes it possible to zoom in and still see tremendous detail. Whether argus has been deployed in the field is classified. Antoniades im not at liberty to discuss plans with the government. But if we had our choice we would like argus to be over the same area 24 hours a day seven days a week. Thats not very easily achievable with manned platforms. This is where uavs come in and theyre absolutely the perfect platform. Narrator argus may be mounted on an armed uav like the predator, a longrange platform like the giant global hawk or a development craft called the solar eagle that may someday stay aloft for years at a time. Cummings the u. S. Air force right now has the ability to archive every single video that comes off of every single uav. Were moving to an increasingly Electronic Society where our movements are going to be tracked. Narrator while technologies like argus are expanding the reconnaissance power of uavs, Unmanned Aircraft remain vulnerable in other ways. The air forces large drones still crash more often than manned planes. The 100 million global hawk is nearly three times more likely to crash than the u2 it was designed to replace. Even if theres no pilot to lose, when a drone goes down it can still be a problem. Deptula it doesnt take a thermonuclear brain surgeon to figure out that if you are operating a highly advanced, technologically capable system that youd prefer not for it to fall into adversary hands. Narrator in 2011, an american spy drone the rq170 sentinel, was lost over iran. There was a problem with the aircraft, and it landed in an area it shouldnt have landed in and thats about all im going to say. Narrator the iranians claimed they hacked into the drones control system and took over the craft. And in theory it is possible to take over any computerized system. Singer you could never call up maverick, in his f14, in the movie top gun, and say, maverick. Talk to me, goose. Singer recode all american jets as russian jets. Tom cruise would have laughed his weird cackle and said, no way, man. With a computer, you can do that either jam it, or even more so coopt its operations. And its a whole new era in war. It opens up a lot of new possibilities and, of course, huge new dangers to think about. Narrator why the sentinel went down remains classified. But experts point out that drones often crash for very basic reasons. Uavs sometimes arent that smart, their selfdiagnosis isnt all that smart and by the time they have a problem, its too late. You lose a link, lose power, and youre gone. Narrator control can be lost for a number of reasons. When reaper pilot chad simply banks too sharply he loses the satellite link. Chad uhoh. Narrator the picture freezes, and hes momentarily flying blind. Chad that was me turning. system beeps narrator he quickly levels the craft and restores the link. Chad i was turning aggressively and it had trouble keeping up the satellite link. Deptula there is a degree of vulnerability involved with remotely piloted aircraft that have a command link where theyre actually operated by operators that you can overcome by having a human in the cockpit. Pilot dark star, dark star. Mcdonough if for some reason i all of a sudden hear an increase in airspeed, i start to feel a roll and im not intending for that to happen well, something is going wrong and i need to make sure that i am doing what i need to be doing. Narrator unlike manned planes, drones depend on control links that can be lost or potentially as may have happened with the sentinel, even taken over by the enemy. But what if a craft could operate on its own free of any links, and even make its own decisions . In a lab at the university of pennsylvania, vijay kumar is funded in part by the military to create autonomous drones that dont need external links and, like us, can sense their environment. What you see on this robot are these two chips here which are essentially rate gyroscopes. These play the same role as the semicircular canals in the human body located near the ears, which essentially tell us orientation. So the rate gyroscopes that are on board can actually measure these angular velocities at thousands of times a second. This chip here is the accelerometer and this allows the robot to sense accelerations in the lateral direction so these are analogs to the otolith organs that measure acceleration in the human head. Narrator when a human pilot feels an unexpected change in acceleration, he knows to adjust the aircraft. Kumar the robots do exactly the same thing. Narrator the sensors adjust the craft by changing the relative velocities of the rotors and allow the drones to follow a leader with precision. Kumar a fundamental problem in coordinating multiple robots is the ability to maintain formations. What a robot has to do is determine where its neighbors are and figure out what the relative position is and then monitor the relative separation very carefully. You only need to tell one robot how to move and the other robots essentially maintain formation by just keeping a specified relative distance. In the figure 8, they come within inches of each other so they have to combat aerodynamic effects from their neighbors and they have to have very, very precise control. And all that is done autonomously. Narrator the precision of the robots allows them to do some things more quickly and accurately than human pilots can, like predict the movement and the shape of an object and adjust accordingly. Kumar in terms of acrobatics i think itll be hard to beat what a robot can do. The neuromuscular system in the human body, there may be delays of the order of 80 milliseconds or 200 milliseconds before you actually take an action in response to what you see. Well, robots have this unfair advantage. They can do these computations hundreds of times a second. So your delays are of the order of a millisecond, and perhaps even less. Narrator in the lab, the drones communicate with a central computer that uses motion capture an optical system that tracks silver reflective markers on the robots and tells them where they are at all times. But soon it may be possible to cut the cord. And theyve already developed another autonomous drone that can go anywhere on its own. The holy grail is to do all of this without any kind of external sensing, without gps and in principle, we can do it. These bigger robots actually rely on observations of external features to tell them where they are in the environment. Narrator this drone carries a laser range finder that determines distance to obstacles and a depth camera that reveals 3d information about the surroundings. Kumar they carry on board the processing power, the sensors that are necessary to look at the environment to reason about the environment. So they can take their relative location and the location of the features to build a threedimensional map. Id like to see this technology being used for humanitarian purposes. Imagine there is a 911 call from the building. I think we will soon have the technology that enables, lets say, 20 uavs to just swoop through the building and within a minute find out who is in each room and then communicate that to firefighters who are waiting outside. But any technology that you develop, there are always people who are going to use it in ways that the designer never intended them to be used. Narrator and the key components of Drone Technology are already available to virtually anyone. Man go over there. Man i got into the hobby about four years ago. It started out as a toy for my dogs to chase. Im pretty obsessed with the hobby. I am currently single, have been for 30 years. No kids, i just live here with my three dogs and i get to spend nearly every night and every weekend working on these things. Narrator corey brixen of orange county, california is one of tens of thousands of drone hobbyists across the country. Brixen the basic quadcopter is about 500, which is the frame the motors the speed controllers, the electronics that you need. This is actually the gps sensor and thats sending the signals out to the satellites. The cameras, as small as they are theyre highdefinition footage. Narrator like the predator, coreys quadrotor has a programmable autopilot that uses gps to navigate. He can set locations altitude and speed so the craft can fly autonomously. Corey flies for fun, but drones small and large are increasingly used domestically for more serious purposes. The Border Patrol searches for Illegal Migrants with predators. Police departments are turning to smaller drones for reconnaissance and thousands of individuals use them for their own sometimes political, ends. We dont consider ourselves to be Animal Rights activists. Were investigators. Some of our targets are pigeon shooters in pennsylvania. So we had the copter up filming whats going on. There were a couple of shots and its slowly losing altitude, and then it takes one more shot and its down in the trees. You can hear the shooters start cheering and laughing and all that kind of thing. What they didnt know is that we had more. laughs narrator this incident is the first known shootdown of a domestic drone. But it may not be the last. The spread of drones has raised concerns about privacy and even led one senator to propose legislation limiting domestic use. Rand paul i think anybody that can use a device to peer into your activities even if its from the air outside your window or the air above your property i think there is a right to privacy. And im all for making sure that, you know, all these drones dont come back from afghanistan and iraq and get put to a purpose here that isnt consistent with our constitutional bearings. The worry is that in two to three years well have 30,000 drones crisscrossing the sky, accumulating all this information. Its a game changer, but its not just an american revolution. There are more than 55 other countries right now that are building, buying or using military robotics particularly in the air. Narrator iran recently announced it has its own armed drone with a range of over a thousand miles. Its not known whether any of the technology was adopted from the lost u. S. Sentinel. But in the drones arms race, the u. S. Is constantly developing new technologies, like a small flying camera with a twist called switchblade. The switchblade will launch out of this tube and the wings, the tail, the propeller will all spring open; thats why its called switchblade. And so when the operator finds the target by looking into the viewing screen, he will then send a command to the switchblade that will enable the switchblade to basically hone in on that target and detonate its explosive charge upon contact. Its a tool that our customers are very excited about and its a tool we think will protect our forces and help save innocent lives. Narrator switchblades already been deployed. And a killer drone that may someday replace a manned fighter is on the horizon. Its really about a decade ago some folks got together and they said, what if we want to put Unmanned Aircraft on an Aircraft Carrier . How do we do that . Narrator this x47b prototype is the worlds first tailless fightersized drone. But its still a year or two away from its first goal to take off and land on an Aircraft Carrier. Matt funk were maturing the Technology Required to take this unmanned vehicle to land on the flight deck autonomously. Were focusing on the mechanics of landing the aircraft where you have a predetermined position that youre targeting to and the aircraft can react very quickly to changes in that environment to put itself on that preplanned position. The system has a lot of sensors, a lot of instrumentation on it so it knows how all of its subsystems are behaving, it knows how its engine and all of its control surfaces are performing at any time. Itll turn where we expect it to turn itll come back when we expect it to come back and itll land on the runway that we planned. Narrator drones are no longer just eyes in the sky and someday uavs like the x47b may be involved in sophisticated attacks alongside manned jets. Its the idea of the mix the team working together. Thats probably the future. We wont see every plane on the Aircraft Carrier be one of these. So right now, the vision is, oh, well just have one or two but when they get them and maybe they prove more useful then it may be well, we dont want one or two, we want a squadron. Its a lot like if you look at the first use of mechanized forces. Originally it was lots of horses and just couple of trucks and tanks, and you saw things change and change and change over time. Well probably see the same thing happen with robotics. Narrator as drones like the x47b mature, theyll become more autonomous likely conducting bombing runs then more complicated airtoair operations. Even as policymakers debate the rules of engagement for Drones Technology is moving forward toward a time when drones might operate with intelligence that more closely resembles our own. But for now, they cant do what a pilot can. Funk when you get an aircraft like this over hostile territory, youll have potential targets or threats that will pop up unplanned. So what we havent done yet is develop the technology that would then react to those unplanned targets or threats. Thank you very much for coming to pax river today. Eremenko i think uavs of the future will certainly be able to exhibit increased levels of autonomy. But i think if you were to ask most autonomy researchers, or most ai researchers about whether the rise of the machines type scenario is a real concern, their response would be, we should be so lucky. In fact, if we could get little slivers of that kind of adaptive and cognitive capability into systems, that would be a very significant breakthrough over where we stand today. Mcdonough ive flown about 2,000 hours and the missions that ive flown seldom go as planned. Theres a lot of pieces that you cannot plan for. Karem nothing can replace the human being in a tactical environment saying what to do next and why not this and why not that. Karem an airbus 320 with 150 passengers goes into a flock of canadian geese and needing to land. Karem i cant do it im going on the hudson. You want to be in a robotic 320 in that situation, or do you want sullenberger to land you . Because you cant anticipate everything. Narrator this ability to respond to the unknown may be the final hurdle if drones are ever to fully replace manned planes and start making decisions on their own. Karem i think were far, but let me say i am the last guy who says impossible. Narrator as human ambition drives Innovation Forward the only thing thats certain is that the predator and other drones of today are nothing compared with whats to come. Ultimately darpas mission is the creation and prevention of strategic surprise, so if we are successful, we will all be surprised. Chad historically you look at when the Wright Brothers first flew in 1903. A hundred years later, we are actively flying remotely piloted aircraft. So were kind of on the ground floor now. Theres nowhere to go but up. They called him lucky lindy. Then the ultimate tragedy struck. Man these are hardcore guys, daring enough to kidnap the lindbergh baby and risk the death penalty. But was justice served . Two people, three people. For sure, it is not one person. And what can modern forensics reveal . Man a computer can do a lot more than a document examiner can do. Who killed lindberghs baby . Next time on nova. Major funding for nova is provided by supporting nova and promoting public understanding of science. And by the corporation for public broadcasting. And by contributio