Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

UNLV scientists work on battlefields of the future

As millions of Americans focus their attention on the war in Iraq, a handful of scientists at UNLV are focusing on future battles.

Four Defense Department projects under way at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas promise to make the battlefields of the future safer for soldiers by strengthening equipment, improving visual aids and even creating unmanned machines armed with "artificially intelligent" computers.

"As we all learn more about the current operations over in Iraq, we realize the effect of war," said Stephen Rice, associate vice provost of research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What all of our military projects try to do is provide newer, better technology so that our men and women out there can have better equipment that makes them safer."

UNLV researchers are exploring new materials for armor, ways to make electronics-guided weapons more reliable, creating a "smart" image recognition system that can identify particular targets and a computer system that can simulate human intelligence.

The first such project being researched by Brendan O'Toole, a mechanical engineer associate professor, looks at ways to make armor out of materials that are light enough to transport but strong enough to withstand mortar blasts.

"The research funded by the Army now is designed to help in the battle after next," O'Toole said. "In the future they would like to have lighter combat vehicles that have the same protection of the vehicles in operation now."

O'Toole said researchers are looking at different shapes of armor plates that would best deflect and absorb the shock of a mortar blast.

New material mixes of ceramics, Kevlar (typically used in bulletproof vests) and glass fibers are among the ingredients that could be combined to create durable armor.

At the end of the three-year research project, which was funded in 2002 for $250,000, the hope is researchers will have the right combination of materials and the right shape to create lightweight armor plates that could be fitted onto the bottom or the side of a military vehicle.

O'Toole said UNLV's mechanical engineering department is expecting an even bigger grant of $1.6 million from the Army to find ways to increase the reliability and survivability of electronics-guided weapons such as surface-to-air missiles.

O'Toole said whenever a soldier launches a missile, electronics systems used to give accurate target information can be jarred enough to make them unreliable.

"We will be trying to study how the shock and vibration of the launch in the gun affects the individual electronic components and how we can make them more reliable," O'Toole said.

Two other projects at UNLV focus more on imagery than armor.

Georg Mauer, a mechanical engineer professor, is working with a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno on a three-year $350,000 contract to develop a camera for the Navy that could recognize, process and react to a particular target and then eliminate it.

"This image processing system would essentially mimic the human effort of interpreting information," Mauer said. "It's an enormously complex task."

Even more difficult is a task that physics professor David Shelton has taken on.

Shelton is working on a way to genetically engineer light-sensitive cells that could eventually create a computer with artificial intelligence.

The system would work when a beam of light or photon strikes a light-sensitive cell. When struck by light, the cell would become transparent, to different degrees, much like a computer converts information into binary codes. The cell could retain the information or conduct it much like the neurons in the human brain do.

Ideally, the cells would be placed together to create a network that mimics a human neural network able to make rudimentary decisions based on information that it senses.

"Suppose you have intelligent computers that you could put in your military tank," Shelton said. "Then it could drive around and make decisions instead of a guy. At the very least it could take evasive action when someone shot at it."

Shelton said that unlike the other research projects that have a three-year turnaround time, his would take years to determine if it is even feasible.

Such research projects are the lifeblood of universities, Rice said. U.S. military strength relies on universities to always be ahead of the game and maintain dominance.

"Frankly, without those technologies, advances and superiority in science, we would be in a whole world of hurt," Rice said.

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