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Micro Air Vehicles
Offwhite98 writes "Over at The Gainesville Sun they are running an article about really small planes used to watch all kinds of stuff. I am sure the common applications for these devices are pretty clear, but if you could use these for a lot of fun. Use 10 of them as flying candid cameras at a wedding or a party and you I am sure you will get interesting results." A little bigger than the Spy Fly but probably much more robust.
"The planes are operated by remote control and range in cost from about $700 to as much as a couple of thousand dollars depending on the type of video equipment used. "
... i would like to see someone shoot down 100 of these after they were droped out the window of a b52.
don't i remeber reading the air force where spending 100's of millions on uav's
Cruise TT
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
While this is a very cool technology, and quite the advancement, I wonder how practical it is. Like large aircraft, it has many limitations on movement: forward or... forward. Take his football kickoff example: it would follow the kickoff, and then would loose the ball in the time it takes to circle around the other way.
Wouldn't this have been more useful if it were based off a more maneuverable platform such as a helicopter?
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
...the nanotech devices which are so light they don't need to fly, just float with flagellum for guidance mechanisms.
Gotta read "Diamond Age" again soon, it was a good read.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
PLIF .
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I actually attend class in the same building at University of FL as the micro-planes people. I attended a demonstration which was way cool.
They've developed an algorithm that can scan the horizon and auto-determine the horizon. In a side-by-side comparison between a human pilot and computer, the human could make you very sick. The vidoe jumps as the plan flys very erratically. With the computer algorithm, the plane flies smooth.
Another note, they use a PC to do the processing. The demo guy actually has an Apple laptop and runs all the video in quicktime. The PC processes the avi quicktime video, and returns the flight control info to the micro-flight airplane.
Another not, they are funded heavily by the DOD.
Another problem is fuel. The micro-planes only have enough fuel for a few times around a football field, and their range is similarly limited.
Finally, the coolest video they have is where the plane tracks a moving vehicle, and follows behind it.
Torsten
Ya know folks... Just because something isn't very useful to the common public, doesn't necessarily mean that it is entirely useless.
I'm sure there are TONS of commercial/industrial uses that can't be predicted just yet...
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
robots.net frequently has articles on Micro Air Vehicles and Micromechanical Flying Insect robots. The Berkley MFI Project Overview is another good place to get more info.
A segment on Discovery Magazine, aired on the Discovery channel recently, covered these MAVs and showed some guy who'd fitted several of his model airplanes with cameras.
As someone who's also done this I can tell you that it's still important to have the vehicle in direct visual line of site if you want to be sure and get it back.
When looking at the world through a remote video camera without the benefit of an artificial horizon and other instrumentation, it's very easy to get a small model into a spin or spiral from which it is difficult to recover. Being able to directly see the model from the ground is the only safe way to ensure you can regain control in such situations.
The problem is one of orientation -- once you lose view of the horizon through the camera it becomes very difficult to tell what your plane is doing -- thus very difficult to feed in the proper control corrections.
If it weren't a breach of copyright I'd post the DivX video I made of that Discovery broadcast -- it was really quite interesting.
A tremendously slimmed down Cypher... although these little guys probably won't lob grenades at you.. Wasn't there something like this in Perfect Dark?
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Ok, people are talking about these not being suitable for much because they can't hover or, have too large turning circles. Also, i see people are complaining about the cost and the battery life. Heres my idea.
Humming-birds have wings and can hover. They also have the ability to fly for extended periods, and when they get tired they can perch on the nearest ledge. Obvously, technology is not at the stage where this could be easily implemented into a Humming-bird sized package, and cheaply. However, Humming-birds themselves are relatively plentiful. What if, you attached a minature camera and transmitter to.. a Humming-bird? "But you cant control it!!" i hear you say. What if, you attached electrodes in such away that you could control, or atleast influence the flight. The bird would still keep priority control for dodging obsticles and landing when tired, but you would be able to control the basic directional element, and the direction of the camera. If you employed a flock of Humming-birds you could maintain a good deal of coverage for any event. Also, Humming-birds come with AI and basic flight control systems built in reducing the need for on-board electronics witch in turn reduces weight. For example, the bird has a built in gyroscope and can automatically 'right itself and maintain level flight.
The battery life of the camera could also be extended by attaching the power and/or data cables to the bird and having them trail behind, this would also prevent the bird from going out-of-range.
The millitary applications for this are also good - since no-one would look twice at a Humming-bird on a battle feild, they could be fitted with explosive devices to create humming-suicide-bombers (although the payload would be small).
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OK, now I know what's been nagging at me... in Raymond Z. Gallun wrote a story which appeared in "Astounding Stories" in August, 1936, and which I read as a kid in Groff Conklin's anthology, "Science Fiction Thinking Machines."
... was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length... it dipped in its flight and its quart-lensed eyes took in the scene below.... Excited shouts and cries were detectable to the sensitive, microphonic ears of The Scarab...."
"The Scarab
It flies miles, into the room where the Bad Guys are broadcasting an extortion request: they will kill a million citizens unless "all available radium in the country is brought to our laboratory."
"The mind that controlled the Scarab had seen and heard enough. Now it decided that the moment in which to act had come. With a whir the Scarab shot from the concealing shadows of the corner where it had hidden itself." It injects an anesthetic; the Bad Guy loses consciousness; the nation is saved.
The brilliant, crippled, wheelchair-confined detective explains "A fella can't just sit around, you know. And so I got to thinking that if I had a little radio-controlled robot to do my crook-chasing for me--well, anyway, I wrote a letter to our good friend Dr. Clyde Allison, explaining my situation... after a while the Scarab and all the controls that deliver it were delivered here.... "
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Imagine the tabloids getting ahold of these things. Already stars have people climbing fences and using telephoto lenses.
Now, just pop a drone in the air and overfly the target. How about flying up to the window of a high rise building?
Add a microphone, instead of video camera, for a twist.
Once they get these babies to HOVER, they will be fantastic. Not that they aren't now.
Imagine automatically dispatching a micro drone to check out a disturbance/noise from the safety of security central? Your camera can't see behind the tree? Fly around it.
Add a little radar and do some 3D terrain mapping...
ad infinitum
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
then Imagine Saddam swatting a pesky misquito not realizing that it cost 10 million dollars to manufacture.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, conceivably anyway....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What about automatic pilots, though? For example, the AeroVironment Black Widow, which is a six-inch aircraft, has "altitude hold, airspeed hold, heading hold, and yaw damping" (from the PDF available on their site).
With bigger r/c vehicles, total autonomous flight was achieved a long time ago, even for helicopters, which are much more difficult to stabilize than planes. This can allow an operator to simply guide rather than actually pilot a vehicle, with greatly reduced chance of error.
This already exists in commercial technology: there's an r/c helicopter, made by Honda iirc, used for applications like cropspraying and aerial photography. An operator can fly these with minimal training, because stabilization is automatic.