Self-Healing Minefield

DARPA ^ | Dr. Thomas Atshuler

[thoughtomator]

Overview
The Self-Healing Minefield is an antitank landmine system that does not rely on antipersonnel landmines for dismounted breach protection. Instead the Self-Healing Minefield employs a novel breach response mechanism that can determine both mounted and dismounted enemy assaults on the minefield and respond to maintain obstacle integrity. Contrary to the current mixed minefield systems (Volcano, RAAM/ADAM, and Gator) which require antipersonnel landmines co-located with an antitank minefield to complicate dismounted breaching of the antitank minefield, the Self-Healing Minefield employs intelligent, mobile antitank mines alone to defeat all enemy breaching.

Concept

The Self-Healing Minefield system is designed to achieve an increased resistance to dismounted and mounted breaching by adding a novel dimension to the minefield. Instead of a static complex obstacle, the Self-Healing Minefield is an intelligent, dynamic obstacle that responds to an enemy breaching attempt by physically reorganizing. The Self-Healing Minefield consists of surface scattered antitank mines that can detect an enemy attack of the minefield and respond autonomously, by having a fraction of the mines move to heal the breach. Since the minefield is no longer a static obstacle, an open breach cannot be maintained. The Self-Healing Minefield forces the enemy to attack the minefield and deplete the antitank mines surrounding the breaching lane by either repeated assaults or a wide area breach/clearance. In either case the enemy has increased their exposure to covering fires when compared to the current mixed system minefield. An ongoing modeling effort indicates that a self-healing minefield will provide greatly increased military effectiveness of the obstacle.

Prototype System Performance
In order to achieve the level of robustness necessary to defeat or substantially complicate an enemy breach attempt, the mines within the prototype Self-Healing Minefield will be designed to:

• Autonomously identify and respond to an enemy attack within 10 seconds of a breach attempt or vulnerability in the minefield.
  
• Resist multiple breach attempts.
  

• Be mobile in all environmental conditions and terrain where enemy tanks can operate.
  
• Rapidly assemble a scalable communication network and self-geolocate in 5-15 minutes.
  
• Have a robust mine-to-mine communication resistant to enemy countermeasures.
  

• Provide a compact multi-hopping system.
  
• Be of two sided mobility or single sided mobility with self-righting.
  
• Provide directional control and repeatability.
  
• Have a Non-GPS based geolocation with 1 meter location accuracy.
  

• Maintain or reduce overall volume as compared to currently fielded scatterable antivehicle mines.
  

Technology Focuses
To achieve this level of performance, DARPA is focusing the development of the Self-Healing Minefield on the following enabling subsystems: individual impulse-based mine mobility concepts; low power mine-to-mine communication methods that can determine each mine location; healing algorithms/ behaviors that are robust against a variety of enemy breaching tactics; and a compact warhead that maintains minefield effectiveness given the reduced volume available. This development will culminate in the demonstration of Self-Healing Minefield concepts, in tactical scenarios, including urban terrain and a large scale minefield with at least 50 concept mines operating in a one-half hectare test area.

 

 

[thoughtomator]

Cool military stuff for those interested

[RadioAstronomer]

Interesting.

[familyop]

Wow. That's weird. And I'm becoming obsolete.

[Centurion2000]

Metal storm has a neat area denial system as well.

[DTogo]

Reminds me of this dumb-@ss U.N. TV commercial posted the other day:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1359469/posts

[Wiz]

That sounds really devastating.

[68skylark]

Cool!