Can Predator UAV's See Inside Buildings?

Display from an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Nowhere To Hide -- Slate

Killer drones that can see through walls.

For the last couple of days, in the Human Nature blog, I've been looking into a breakthrough cryptically reported in Iraq and Afghanistan: the ability of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles to identify and track human targets "even when they are inside buildings." Several recently reported technologies might account for it, but Slate reader fozzy suggests looking for the answer in a military research field called STTW, usually translated as "sense-through-the-wall." Has this ability been extended to a distance that allows it to be used by aerial drones?

Fozzy cites a March 2008 Army technical report on the latest progress in STTW radar methods. (Warning: Most of the documents I'm linking to here are PDFs, and some take a long time to open.) With a few more clicks, I pulled up an April 2008 report from the same research team. Both reports focus on "detecting and identifying humans enclosed in building structures." "Through-the-wall sensing is currently a topic of great interest to defense agencies both in the U.S. and abroad," says the April report. "The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been active in all these fields of investigation, approaching these issues both through hardware design and radar measurements and through computer simulation of various STTW scenarios."

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My Comment: A good article for explaining what may be up there in the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan.