At America’s Biggest Drone Show, the Focus Shifts Toward Domestic Skies

If you want to know what the future looks like, sit down and have a talk with Roy Minson. He's the senior vice president and general manager of unmanned aircraft systems at Aerovironment, the manufacturer of nearly 85 percent of the Department of Defense's unmanned aircraft fleet--not the Reapers and Predators that so often make headlines, but small aerial systems that make up the vast majority of the DoD's 7,000 strong unmanned aircraft fleet. That is to say, business with the defense sector is good at Aerovironment. But today Minson is talking almost exclusively about non-military applications for the company's hardware--him, and just about everybody else at the nation's largest robotic systems show.

That's partially because I'm peppering him with questions about civilian drone applications, but our conversation was bound to wander in this direction. The DoD certainly isn't going anywhere, but defense spending cuts hang over this place like the sword of Damocles. The term for next year's mandated defense spending cuts, "sequestration," can be overheard around the exhibit hall here at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's annual North American trade show like some kind of new and derogatory slang.

But even as Congress prepares to twist the Pentagon's money spigot down to a trickle, it tossed the unmanned systems industry a bone earlier this year by mandating that the Federal Aviation Administration integrate unmanned aircraft--first small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), but eventually larger ones as well--into the domestic airspace by 2015. First responders can already obtain clearance to operate small drones. And as a result, the tenor of the whole conversation here has shifted.

What will America's drone-enhanced future look like?Defense is still the overarching theme at AUVSI, but people are talking a whole lot as well about local law enforcement, public safety, site security, forestry, pipeline inspection, mining operations, infrastructure safety, border security, oil and gas exploration, farming, and countless other potential applications for unmanned systems here at home. The civilian market for domestic drones is opening up, and a high-tech industry in need of a customer is stepping into what was previously a void--at least in the United States.

"We're looking forward to addressing the civilian and public safety sectors," Minson says, echoing what I've heard from just about every executive, engineer, or PR rep I've sat down with for the past few days. Minson describes the range of ways Aerovironment's small UAS have served in non-military roles outside the U.S.--tracking animals for wildlife agencies, guiding ice breakers in the Arctic, monitoring for airborne radiation in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster--and how feedback from those roles has informed the company's thinking on non-military applications.

It's a common thread here. A range of companies I spoke with--most of them defense companies in the popular consciousness--have been exploring applications beyond the military in countries that, by industry standards, aren's as woefully behind the curve on unmanned systems regulations as the United States. Names like Rockwell Collins, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Honeywell, as well as a hundred more smaller firms you likely haven't heard of (yet).

Entire states (or their top aerospace universities) have shown up--Ohio, North Dakota--to throw their support behind the industry and demonstrate their desire (often in the form of educational and economic incentives) to grow the unmanned systems sectors within their borders. I sat down with the state of Oklahoma's Lt. Governor Todd Lamb and its Secretary of Science and Technology Stephen McKeever for a quick conversation about the role of government in this new economic and regulatory environment. The takeaway: This technology will augment everything that Oklahoma does best, from its strong oil and gas production industry to agriculture to its many pre-existing aerospace interests, which can then export the technology around the country and world. An investment in UAS technologies is an investment in every other industry in the state itself, as well as in an emerging economic sector stretching far beyond its borders in which it hopes to become a leader.

So what will America's drone-enhanced future look like? The personalization of the UAS--the niche unmanned system--is coming, Minson says. But it's coming later. We'll first see unmanned systems doing what comes most naturally to them: public safety and law enforcement mission that are easy lateral translations for technologies built for military operations. The mission profile of a first responder drone--enhancing situational awareness, locating targets in a chaotic environment, streaming data from places too dangerous for human presence--is almost exactly that of most military UAS (Hellfire missiles not included).

Look no further than Procerus, a drone recently acquired by Lockheed Martin when it bought the company of the same name in January, at about the same time Congress ordered the FAA to get busy opening American skies to UAS. Lockheed demonstrated the rapidly-deployable, surveillance-oriented quadrotor all week at AUVSI, but it did so with an emphasis not on Marines in Afghanistan but on police officers and emergency crews here at home. Similarly, over at the Aerovironment booth, the camera-equipped Qube quadrotor has the word "POLICE" stenciled on the side and is marketed toward local law enforcement. These UAS are not destined for Afghanistan, but for the trunks of police cars and firefighting vehicles.

On the show floor, we saw submersible robots aimed at everything from harbor security to oceanographic science, surface maritime robots augmented with fully automatic weapons but also simply with cameras, beacons, and scientific instruments. There was at least one aerial drone fitted with a drill for coring ice samples in frozen areas, presumably for oil and gas exploration as well as for climatological and atmospheric science missions in polar regions. One fairly simple unmanned helicopter was fitted with fairly simple crop spraying equipment, the kind you could find at Tractor Supply, converting it swiftly into a crop-dusting drone. By merging two mature and relatively unexciting technologies we got something that could be huge for farmers.

The point being that at a trade show that has been ruled by its almost singular military customer for decades, diversification is spiking. The unmanned systems world is seriously branching out. There are still a lot of challenges to be met, especially with integrating remotely piloted and semi-autonomous or autonomous aerial systems into an airspace already cluttered with manned aircraft, but you might be surprised how hard--and in some cases for how long--some of the most highly respected names in aviation and robotics have been working on solving these problems, just waiting for the day the airspace finally opens up. Top people at avionics-maker Rockwell Collins' UAS group told me how confident they are that we can safely put large unmanned aircraft and manned aircraft into shared airspace in a reasonable time frame without rewriting the book on aviation. They've been at this for years. We are not starting from scratch.

Necessity will mother invention in this space, and that's the most exciting thing. At AUVSI 2012, we see a lot of vehicles--platforms that can carry payloads robotically, or autonomously in many cases. Most companies are keeping their payloads modular so they and their customers can customize them as they find new applications. Those applications are all around us, and they extend far beyond power line inspection, public safety, and site security. The most interesting robot at AUVSI this year is the one nobody has built yet. "Everyone is going to want something different," Minson says. "The most interesting things are the things we can't think of yet."

Hello, Higgs Boson: LHC’s New Particle Looks Like the Real Thing

"We have discovered a new particle," CERN director general Rolf Heuer said Wednesday morning. "A boson. Most probably a Higgs boson." Even the most anticipated news in science does not come without some caveats.

Still, all signs point to a discovery today, arguably one of the most important findings in modern physics. The inscrutable Higgs boson, carrier of mass and final puzzle piece of physics' prevailing theory, may have finally been found. Now comes the fun part - depending on what it looks like, this saga may be just beginning. [UPDATED]

Two experiments at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, built to study the fundamental particles and forces underlying physical reality, separately found evidence for the new particle. Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments reported a 5-sigma statistical confidence level - essentially a 100 percent certainty that a new particle exists. We first saw tantalizing signs of this last fall, but since then the LHC has collided many more particles to see what comes out. Wednesday's news is the result of 2011 and 2012 data, although the 2012 data is still being crunched.

The Higgs boson weighs what theoretical predictions say it should, according to both ATLAS and CMS. It's about 125-126 gigaelectronvolts, or about 130 times heavier than a proton. The LHC was able to find it by speeding protons at incredibly high energies through its vast series of tubes, and smashing them together. Mass and energy are the same thing, so when the protons have very high energies, they're very large. They blow apart when they collide, and physicists look for smaller constituent particles in the shrapnel. That's where they see the Higgs boson.

"This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson, and it's the heaviest boson ever found," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela. Lots of work is still needed to verify that it is the storied Higgs, however. Despite the cautious statements, the news was clearly cause for celebration at CERN and at physics laboratories in the US. "As a layman, I would say I think we have it," Heuer told the crowd Wednesday morning. "Would you agree?" A roar of applause went up in response.

Without the Higgs boson, physicists have no way to explain how the universe - stars, galaxies, us - can exist. The boson is a particle, like a quark or an electron, but this is really a component of a force field known as the Higgs field. It's like a universal stickiness that all things feel. A photon is a good analogy, says Paul Padley, a particle physicist at Rice University. It's a light particle, but it also carries the electromagnetic force. The Higgs boson is a similar force carrier. According to theory, every other particle, every little quark and lepton, interacts with this sticky field; this interaction gives them their mass. Mass allows the particles to interact with each other, combining into atoms and molecules and stars and us.

"The reason why we care about it is if the Higgs boson doesn't exist, then we have absolutely no physical understanding of why we exist," Padley said. "You can't explain the universe."

Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, now 83, theorized the eponymous particle decades ago, to explain this mass confusion. He sat in the front row for CERN's symposium Wednesday, and his eyes welled with tears, according to Reuters: "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime," he told his fellow scientists.

Two separate verifications at five sigma is a stronger signal than some physicists were expecting. Last year, the ATLAS team saw signs of a Higgs particle weighing 125 to 126 GeV, at a confidence level of 3.6σ. The CMS team saw potential around 124 GeV, with a confidence level of 2.6σ.

Using two different experiments is a way to verify the results, said Dan Green, a physicist at Fermilab and a member of the CMS team. The ATLAS and CMS detectors use different cooling mechanisms and detection methods to study particles, so each detector has different errors. If they both see something, that dramatically decreases the likelihood that it's a fluke.

The ATLAS and CMS teams each kept their results confidential until Wednesday, reducing the potential for cross-contamination or unintentional bias. Physicists involved in both collaborations said this made for some awkward conversations.

"It's very weird. I was at CERN last week, sitting and having lunch with friends I have on the ATLAS experiment, and we would not talk about the hunt for the Higgs boson, so we don't poison our minds," Padley said. "Instead, you talk about how great the accelerator is performing, or speculate about what dark matter is. You solve the world's economic problems, maybe. You just move to other things."

Now that it's been found - ahem, probably, very likely, seems to have been found - there's still a lot to be done. As Heuer said, now physicists have to find out which kind of Higgs boson this is. Does it behave according to the Standard Model of particles and forces, or not? What are its properties? These questions may in some ways be even more interesting. "It's the beginning of a long journey to investigate all the properties of this interesting particle," Heuer said.

Padley compared the next steps to a crime scene. Imagine someone goes missing, and a massive search begins. A few months later, a body is found in a lake, and it fits the description of the missing person.

"At that point, the police are going to be very careful. They're going to say, 'Before we decide who this is, we're going to do DNA testing,'" he said. "So once a particle is found that is consistent with being the Higgs, there is still a lot of work to be done, studying it and making sure it is in fact the Higgs boson we know and love from our theory."

There are plenty of theoretical questions to address. The Higgs may have four cousin particles, said Tom LeCompte, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and a member of the ATLAS team. On a scale of "Higgsiness," this particle may be 100 percent Higgsy, or it may be less, he said. Physicists need to figure out whether it does everything it's supposed to, or if there really are four versions. Maybe there are versions with an electrical charge, or versions that weigh more or less. Maybe it is a scalar particle - a very weird thing indeed, with no charge or spin. It would be the first scalar fundamental particle.

"This is why everybody is not only excited about the discovery, but everybody is excited about the prospect this discovery opens for physics," Heuer said.

So, stay tuned for a summer of more interesting results.