Military Motion Camouflage
Posted: 2003-06-26 12:48pm
The latest New Scientist highlights the research by the MoD and DERA into utilising recent findings into motion camouflage.
Basically, the principle was pioneered by dragon and hoverflies when sneaking up to prey stealthily or in dogfights with one another. The idea is that the attacker remains in a set position relative to the background to the observer or prey all the time which, although the attacker seems to be stationary, allows the attacker to get close and kill the target with surprise.
The concept has worked on humans using flight simulators where such SAMs were used against modern planes which had to shoot down the incoming missile before they too were hit. This simple exercise was to show how much harder it is to notice and then hit a motion camouflaged missile compared to straight forward SAMs.
DERA hopes to use this idea to make missiles that, rather than predicting where the enemy plane would be like a RADAR guided missile or just following it like an IR missile, these would stay in a relatively stationary position to evade the enemy sensors.
http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~aja/motion_cam.html
I couldn't find the article from New Scientist online, but this URL gives a good insight.
Basically, the principle was pioneered by dragon and hoverflies when sneaking up to prey stealthily or in dogfights with one another. The idea is that the attacker remains in a set position relative to the background to the observer or prey all the time which, although the attacker seems to be stationary, allows the attacker to get close and kill the target with surprise.
The concept has worked on humans using flight simulators where such SAMs were used against modern planes which had to shoot down the incoming missile before they too were hit. This simple exercise was to show how much harder it is to notice and then hit a motion camouflaged missile compared to straight forward SAMs.
DERA hopes to use this idea to make missiles that, rather than predicting where the enemy plane would be like a RADAR guided missile or just following it like an IR missile, these would stay in a relatively stationary position to evade the enemy sensors.
http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~aja/motion_cam.html
I couldn't find the article from New Scientist online, but this URL gives a good insight.
