10 | NewScientist | 3 November 2018NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Chris BaraniukIT IS the biggest NATO exercise
since the end of the cold war, and
it features self-driving vehicles
and 3D printers. The exercise,
named Trident Juncture 18,
started last week in Norway and
will go on for about a month.
Around 50,000 people are
taking part, along with 10,
land vehicles and more than 200
aircraft and marine vessels. There
are also a boat and a land vehicle
that can manoeuvre all on theirown, robots that grab stored items
for personnel and 3D printers
that pump out spare parts.
The autonomous boat,
called Odin, is able to tow a
minesweeping device. As it
crosses a naval minefield, the
device beams acoustic and
magnetic signals into the water
to detonate nearby mines. The
boat can also deploy underwater
autonomous vehicles to make
closer inspections. Such a system
would entirely remove humans
from the mine-clearing process.During Trident Juncture,
Odin will be monitored from 500
kilometres away with the help of
a high-speed radio connection.
NATO is also testing a self-
driving land vehicle that carries
a remote-controlled gun. The
vehicle can select an appropriate
route to take once an operator
has chosen its destination. In the
exercise, its weapon will be loaded
with blanks, not live ammunition.
The gun has a visual sensor that
will be used to test the vehicle’s
surveillance capabilities.
“We’re thinking we can use it
for defence in Norway,” says Kim
Mathiassen at the Norwegian
Defence Research Establishment.“Border control is one possible
application.” The project to create
the vehicle initially followed a
desire to automate aspects of
reconnaissance and surveillance.
New technology also features
in the form of 3D printing, as a
facility developed by Norwegian
manufacturing firm Fieldmade
will be tried out. It looks like a
large shipping container, but
houses 3D printers that can
churn out spare parts for vehicles
on demand.
For Trident Juncture, it will
print plastic parts, not metal
ones, but it is possible for such
parts to replace metal ones in
some vehicles, depending on how
much load they must bear. The
operators of the facility will also
link up with a similar system
used by the US Marine Corps, to
see how easily the two teams can
share designs.
Finally, Norwegian firm
AutoStore is bringing an
equipment storage and retrieval
system to the exercise. It features
a unit packed with compartments
in which tools or spare parts are
kept. Small robots whizz around
and pick out whatever is needed.
But there is a potential catch
with this sort of technology, says
Justin Bronk at the Royal United
Services Institute in London.
“The logistics chain is one of the
most vulnerable to cyberattack,”
he says. “Automation there could
make that worse.” ■NATO tests battle
tech of the future
FFI
“ The work could improve
the design of experiments
at places like the Large
Hadron Collider”CURIOUSER and curiouser! Particle
physicists have the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
to thank for helping to simplify
their calculations.
Lewis Carroll, the 19th-century
children’s author, was the pen name
of mathematician Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson. Now, Marcel Golz at the
Humboldt University of Berlin inLewis Carroll’s
equation helps
physicists
Germany has built on Dodgson’s
work to help simplify the complex
equations that arise when trying
to calculate what happens when
particles interact (arxiv.org/
abs/1810.06220).
The hope is that it could result
in speedier and more accurate
computations, allowing physicists at
places like the Large Hadron Collider
near Geneva, Switzerland, to improve
the design of their experiments.
Working out the probabilities
of different particle interactions
is commonly done using Feynman
diagrams, named after the Nobelprize-winning physicist Richard
Feynman. One early way of deriving
equations from these diagrams
is known as the parametric
representation, but it has lost favour
owing to its apparent complexity.
To mathematicians, however,
patterns in the resulting equations
suggest it might be possible to
dramatically simplify them.
Golz’s work makes use of theDodgson identity, a mathematical
equivalence that Dodgson noted in
an 1866 paper, to perform this exact
sort of simplification.
While much of the connecting
mathematics was previously done
by Francis Brown at the University
of Oxford, who tutored Golz, the
intellectual lineage can be traced
all the way back to Dodgson.
“It’s kind of a nice curiosity,” says
Golz. “A nice conversation starter.”
“I can say with confidence that
these parametric techniques, applied
to the right problems, are game-
changing,” says Brown. Gilead Amit ■The autonomous vessel Odin
can tow a minesweeping device