It makes sense that the military wants to have eyes in the sky for surveillance, but when you’re that far away from your target, it can be pretty tough to really see what you want to see. You need more pixels, gigapixels perhaps, and in the case of the US Army, they’ve opted for 1.8 of them.

The A160 Hummingbird was recently unveiled with a new imaging system. Remember that 1.8 gigapixels is 100x more detail than what you’d get with your 18MP digital camera, and it’s usually only with multiple shots that we regular folk can stitch together a gigapixel photo. The kicker is that this hovering aircraft can send back real-time video streams at 10 frames a second too.

When hovering at an altitude of 20,000 feet, the camera has a field of view of almost 65 square miles. The army can then simultaneously track up to 65 targets within this field of view without having to decide which target is the priority. “If you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, ‘Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four,’” said program manager Brian Leninger. “They can say: ‘I will follow all of them, simultaneously and automatically.’”

The drones use the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) first deployed last year. The first generation drones were manufactured by Boeing, but the military is holding a “full and open” competition for the second generation contract.

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I really like R/C helicopters from a hobbyist’s perspective, but you can see how useful they’d be for more practical purposes too. Drones are used all the time in a military context and now one sheriff’s office in Texas is getting its own drone copter, complete with the ability to get weaponized.

The Shadowhawk helicopter has been acquired by the Sheriff’s office in Montgomery County in Texas. They say that it is being used as a safety asset, equipped with a remote video camera, infrared heat-seeking, and onboard GPS. It can be used to monitor situations where a human presence might not be the best idea.

The 50-pound UAV is built by Vanguard Defense Industries and while it is capable of carrying weapons, the Sheriff says that they have no plans to equip it with pellet guns, bean bags, or frickin’ laser beams tasers. Instead, the application is more toward tracking down criminals or assisting SWAT teams. What do you think of the concerns in relation to Big Brother-esque ramifications?

Check out the local news coverage for a video.

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The Navy is still confused about the situation, not knowing what caused the disconnect, and why the drone did not return. Commander Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, told the NYT “When they lose contact with the Fire Scout, there’s a program that’s supposed to have it immediately return to the airfield to land safely. That did not happen as planned.”

As a result, all 6 Fire Scout drones have been grounded. The Navy did eventually regain control of the drone somewhere in D.C. half-hour and 23 miles later, but that’s enough to take a serious look at the so called “software glitch” that caused it. Let’s just hope these things aren’t carrying live ammunition.

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