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ARGUS,
which would be attached to some kind of unmanned UAV (such as the Predator) and
flown at an altitude of around 20,000 feet, can observe an area of 25 square
kilometers (10sqmi) at any one time. If ARGUS was hovering over New York City,
it could observe half of Manhattan. Two ARGUS-equipped drones, and the USZ
could keep an eye on the entirety of Manhattan, 24/7.
The
end result, as you can see in the (awesome) video above, is a mosaic that can
be arbitrarily zoomed. In the video, a BAE engineer zooms in from 17,500 feet
to show a man standing in a parking lot doing some exercises. A white speck is
a bird flying around. You can’t quite make out facial features or license
plates (phew), but I wonder if that would be possible if ARGUS was used at a
lower altitude (during a riot, say).
ARGUS’s
insane resolution is only half of the story, though. It isn’t all that hard to
strap a bunch of sensors together, after all. The hard bit, according to the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is the processing of all that
image data. 1.8 billion pixels, at 12 fps, generates on the order of 600
gigabits per second. This equates to around 6 petabytes — or 6,000 terabytes —
of video data per day. From what we can gather, some of the processing is done
within ARGUS (or the drone that carries it), but most of the processing is done
on the ground, in near-real-time, using a beefy supercomputer. We’re not
entirely sure how such massive amounts of data are transmitted wirelessly,
unless DARPA is waiting for its 100Gbps wireless tech to come to fruition.
The
software, called Persistics after the concept of persistent ISR — intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance — is tasked with identifying objects on the
ground, and then tracking them indefinitely. As you can see in the video,
Persistics draws a colored box around humans, cars, and other objects of
interest. These objects are then tracked by the software — and as you can
imagine, tracking thousands of moving objects across a 10-square-mile zone is a
fairly intensive task. The end user can view up to 65 tracking windows at one
time.
The
ARGUS system in its entirety produces one million terabytes per day — all of
which is stored by the Army for future use. We’re a bit skeptical about PBS’s
crazy figure (a million terabytes is an exabyte), but in theory most of that
data is actually meta data — the coordinates and other identifying features of
the thousands (millions?) of objects being tracked by ARGUS.
The
original goal was to deploy ARGUS in Afghanistan, but that never came to pass.
It isn’t entirely clear what ARGUS’s future is; it was meant to be mounted on
Boeing’s high-altitude A160 Hummingbird helicopter (pictured right), but the
chopper has since been scrapped. If ARGUS is to be deployed, it will most
likely be strapped to the underbelly of a Predator drone. Where it will be
used, however, with the war in Afghanistan apparently winding down, is another
question entirely. Its efficacy in a military setting would be unsurpassed, but
it’s easy to imagine how ARGUS could be used here at home in the US, too.
Via ExtremeTech
(Mildly Edited by PCF Web desk)
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