A.I. Helicopter?

CowboyRobot writes "Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization just launched the Mantis, a 'low-cost, intelligent small helicopter'. SMH reports that 'Within a decade armies of tiny helicopter drones will monitor traffic, inspect buildings for maintenance problems, map bushfires, look for faults in powerlines, and join search-and-rescue missions.' This is much larger than the Seiko flying robot reported last month, but the Mantis should be truly autonomous."

Comments

Finding faulty powerlines

[ObviousGuy]

Searching for missing hikers
Surveying wildfires
Surveying the houses of known government enemies
Surveying the homes of suspected government enemies
Surveying your home

What happens when it crashes.

[ericspinder]

The first could be on the market in three years.

Ok, what happens when these things lose their bearing and crashes into (say a) daycare, or someone's house. Under close supervision they might prove to be safe, but just to get a jump on things I would suggest reinforcing our tin foil hats with kevlar. Basicly it is just one more step until we see what I really want, a car that drives itself.

Hardly covert

[ChrisPaget]

You've evidently never flown an R/C helicopter. I fly a 30-size and that looks like a 60-size (about 30% bigger than mine in terms of weight and rotor diameter), and they make a LOT of noise. If this thing was anywhere near, you'd know about it - the engines are two-stroke, operating at around 20,000 RPM. And that's without the sound of the blades (also pretty significant).

Add to that the fact that these things shake. A lot. You can't hope for a clear image from far enough away to not hear it. I've mounted a digital camera on my heli before, and used the remote to take pictures of stuff from the air. With a UKP500 digital camera at its fastest shutter speed, all I got were some vague blurs - you can just about make out me holding the controls and my housemate with the camera remote - and that was from about 20 feet away.

Noisy as hell, shakey as hell, useless for covert surveillance. And anything that's not covert can be shot down...

Re:Hardly covert

[Jerf]

"Existing small helicopters are loud" does not directly imply "all small helicopters must be loud"; that's an unwarrented conclusion. If you dump more money into it I would expect you can nearly eliminate the engine noise. The R/C helicopter ethuisiast is not likely to want to pay what this would cost, though.

Same goes for the other characteristics you cite. Not all small helicopters necessarily must be shakey, nor does shakiness necessarily imply "useless for surveillance" (you can still take fast snapshots with expensive cameras (digital or analog), and with adequate computer assistance you may still get human-usable video; jitter correction technology has been in consumer-grade camcorders for a while).

"Low cost" is a relative term, after all; a surveillance grade helicopter would make your R/C helicopter look like a toy by cost comparision, and the pictures in the article certainly aren't it, but it might still be low cost as compared to human surveillance.

On the other hand, a certain amount of blade noise is unavoidable, but possibly controllable.

I'm not saying you're wrong, maybe it is impossible, I'm saying that the evidence you cited doesn't warrent the conclusions you make.