The US military appears to be developing a defence device that involves a cylindrical-shaped device that instantly expands into a wall a soldier could find cover behind.
After much noseying from io9 who sent a request for information to the US Department of Defense, the department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – more commonly known as DARPA – was able to release the information surrounding the device they are calling the Block Access to Deny Entry (BlockADE).
Calling on some of the brightest minds in defensive technology to design the “insta-wall”, DARPA is looking for the device to be able to “construct a barrier without human intervention”, which would suggest the user of the device will simply be able to press a button on the device or on the user’s uniform that will make the BlockADE pop up instantly to a scale described as being in “several orders in magnitude”.
DARPA is also looking for the designer to expand upon existing technologies to work from that would be readily available. In this case, some of the highlighted examples include foams, shape memory alloys, pop-up structures and polymers.
