RFID Rocks for the U.S. Military

Filed in archive Ubiquitous Computing on June 1, 2005

One of those experimental programs for the U.S. military is all the talk right now on blogs and other websites.

The Financial Times reports that the U.S. military is developing RFID sensors that will be installed in small fake rocks strewn around the battlefield and other areas. The Financial Times article is subscription only, but here is a short snippet from the article:

The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft. The project is being carried out by scientists at North Dakota State University, which has licensed nano-technology processes from Alien Technology, a California-based commercial manufacturer of RFID tags for supermarkets.

It is an example of the increasing desire for the US military to co-operate with civilian industry and academic institutions in the development of battlefield technology that will reduce the risks to soldiers' lives. Greg McCarthy, associate vice president at the university's Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, said: "The military wants better sensing capability. People are being killed because someone's sneaking up on a tent and blowing them up."

A reader sent me the link initially from O'Reilly Radar, the weblog of the CEO of the O'Reilly Network. In his post, Tim O'Reilly muses about the imaginative and futuristic nature of this plan

You can find additional details at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends.

It will be interesting to see if this is ever deployed or whether it remains in the realm of the experimental. Personally it sounds rather unfeasible to me. Too much ground to cover and too cumbersome to carry.