unmanned aeriel vehicle

Researchers at Oklahoma State University are working with DARPA to deliver a sophisticated, unmanned aircraft small enough to fit into a soldier's pocket, reports the Daily O'Collegian

Monster Pentagon contractors Boeing and SAIC jointly announced today that two of their latest offerings for the future robot armies of America have entered military testing early. The machines in question are a relatively dull lightweight groundcrawler job and a frankly splendid ducted-fan flying Dalek.

The U.S. Air Force believes that its next generation fighter will not have a pilot on board. As is customary, development of the next generation fighter gets underway just as the latest ("fifth generation") F-22 is entering service. Thus, two years after the F-15 entered service in 1979, planning got under way to develop the F-22.

The report dubs such techniques "ubiquitous observation and recording." The goal: surveillance of tens of thousands of square kilometers for targets as small as a single person.

Such broad surveillance could come from relays of unmanned aerial vehicles, some flying at high altitudes for weeks at a time, underpinned by space-based surveillance systems.