Slashdot Mirror
Autonomous Model Glider Flies from 60,000 Feet
saccade writes "A couple
years ago we read about a telemetry laden balloon launched
to 80,000 feet single-handedly built by a laid-off engineer. Here's an even more elaborate
one built at around the same time: A balloon launched model
glider taken to about 60,000
feet that autonomously finds its way home. It had an auto-pilot
and elaborate mission control system. Also impressive is the
extensive testing
done before launch."
I guess I'm just glad that when it "finds its way home" it doesn't define "home" as "the White House Lawn" - and that the laid-off engineer who built it isn't angry with the world.
Well, it is nice to see that people actually employs some time doing pretty impressive things. Not like the guy sitting in a chair hanging at 10000 feet using balloons. ;)
All I have to say is "WOW". And well done.
Carousel is a lie!
Is that what landed in my yard? Contact me to get your lost hi-tech gizmo back.
It can correct its flightpath, but it can't react to obstacles. A cliff would kill it, as would a tree.
What would happen if we dropped something intrinsically warm like a slab of uranium on Titan
Quick! Somebody call the Dept of "HomeSec" on this evildoer, before he makes his "homing glider" plans available to terrerhists like that DIY cruise missile guy tried to. And if they find any Estes model rocket engines in his home (while he's away, of course), I they throw the book at him!
Power to the Peaceful
Well, "only" about two pounds of payload - imagine what a couple of pounds of sentex would do to the surrounding 'landing area' A smart stealth bomb ??? Homeland screwity need to know about this !
But I can't find the link. Anyone that remembers the story Damn. Please anyone help me out here.
you had me at #!
"A couple years ago...built at around the same time..."
This is news how?
Why does this matter?
OTOH, he seems to have had some problems with navigation and obstacles (i.e., the mountain in the way), but I can't see how he can deal with that without using something like EGPWS. Standard GPWS (ground proximity warning systems) use radar and the power needs would be far to high. EGPWS extends this with a digital ground model and a GPS. He has the GPS, but whether he could make and store an model with terrain elevation would be an interesting question.
/.'s a little slow getting the headlines these days?
I think I can see my house...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Research like this bodes well for future exploration of other planets. A glider, or better yet a powered aircraft, can cover more ground in an hour than Spirit and Opportunity have in a year. With the communications delay, it would have to be autonomous.
Landing to conduct experiments would be a one-time deal (unless it can take off again), but such a vehicle could do great recon for future rovers or human explorers, in addition to all sorts of atmospheric experiments.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I built a glider that can find its way home from 60,000 feet in the air too. The only limitation is that "home" has to be directly below it. Apart from that, my glider, which I have named "SpaceBrick One", has a 100% success rate.
I thought that last line said "extensive testing done before Lunch"
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Highway median lines... oh, forget it.
How long until 747's can autoland in an emergency? This is pretty awesome stuff.
Uh, I don't know if you meant this to be intentional, but taking your "Drake's equation" and the last number I remember hearing for the US population:
(0.0001*0.001*0.1*0.5) * (population of US: ~200 million) = 1
I know that you were being cute, but figured some people wouldn't pick up on it.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
This project is pretty impressive by any stretch of the imagination considering its done by amateurs. There are commercial aircraft that don't have automatic obstacle avoidance built into them. And as far as I know, neither do cruise missiles. Modern cruise missiles flight plans are pre-plotted so as to avoid obstacles. I don't know of any inexpensive way to have intelligent onboard obstacle avoidance without a forward looking radar or some combination of optics (and significant onboard processing power) and a laser range finder.
This is the second or third thread in as many days which are really just pointing to something which was on "hack a day" earlier.
This is the kind of garage engineering that starts legends !
Given the site dates back to 2003, it would be really interesting to see what he is/has done recently.
The points on software engineering are also interesting - enough that I'm going to pass this one around the guys at work.
Uh, digitize a topo map for the flight area and then use GPS to navigate the aircraft through the map?
Fucking wanker.
It's a feature, or "soft news" if you prefer. Nothing crucial, but still of interest. Common in news sites when real news is slim.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
USE IT
A couple years ago we read about a telemetry laden balloon launched to 80,000 feet single-handedly built by a laid-off engineer. Here's an even more elaborate one built at around the same time: A balloon launched model glider taken to about 60,000 feet that autonomously finds its way home. It had an auto-pilot and elaborate mission control system. Also impressive is the extensive testing done before launch.
It can be so hard to get slashdotters to congratulate and honor people/entities/organizations who are doing neat things. For an amateur effort this is very impressive. You guys outdid yourselves. It shows how advanced we are when autonomous gliders are being created in backyards. Way to go!
Dude, don't be so negative.
It's news to some of us because we haven't seen it before.
It matters because we like to see smart people doing smart things.
These people were creative and determined, maybe that will inspire others to to try cool things, as well.
Oops.
Very impressive.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
How about a solar-painted blimp with some batteries in the gondola, and a big target for the glider's recharge plug? Add some WiFi, send up a flock to make a mesh, and the Internet "cloud" need never go down.
--
make install -not war
yeah I have whacky ideas from time to time.
This one involves using baloons carrying something like a stinger missile for use against strategic bombers. It would have a very small radar crossection and just drift until it sensed a bomber and then strike it from above and behind.
Sort of like mining the jetstreams.
Its about time strategic bombers had a decent (and comparatively cheap) countermeasure. (Personally I can't think of a more despicable means of waging war... except flying airliners into buildings).
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I was fascinated by this site when I first found it a few years ago. Unfortunately I failed to bookmark it at the time, and several attempt via Google failed. Thanks for digging it up for me!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Why do I even read /. anymore? I get half the stories several days earlier from Hack a Day.
Do you see what I did there?
The two stories mentioned in the article were the source for inspiration for me that caused me to start building a wheeled robot that I had been thinking about for a long time. I read the baloon story on Slashdot and then searched for more similar stuff online and I found the glider article. That was about a year ago - maybe a year and a half.
:)
n sai1.jp g
Today, the robot (which I call Bonsai) is ready. The goal for it was to be able to do a couple of fairly basic things that would allow it to be a platform for later ideas that could be built on the base work. The things it had to do were:
It had to be able to know where it was in the world, how it was oriented and moving in the world, and to be able to use that information to figure out how to drive to get from point A to point B (possibly through a complex path).
It had to be able to be manually controlled in addition to the automatic control.
It had to have a good remote control software complete with moving map, full telemetry of all functions on the robot, and the ability to command every function of the robot remotely.
It had to have a camera, and the remote control software had to be able to see the image from that camera real-time (or as close to real-time as possible).
It had to have a wireless communications link.
It would have to be able to operate at least 60 minutes.
It had to have a solid vehicle base that had to be able to operate for at least 60 minutes and be able to operate precisely and reliably.
The vehicle base would have to be able to carry the load of the computer, batteries, as well as a sizeble amount of additional electronics and equipment in the future.
The whole thing would have to look decent.
It took about a year to design and build, but it was very fun and in the end, it turned out to be fairly easy and nowhere near as expensive as I imagined it would be. Projects like that are a great way to learn new stuff about electronics and I highly recommend it to anyone who has been thinking about something like this. In the end, all the goals of the project were met, and I now have a really fun toy!
The URL below is a picture of the robot in its final form:
http://www.saunalahti.fi/macpeep/bonsai/bo
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/misc/ATIVCRX.ht ml
Note the weird installer. It gave me the creeps but it worked.
What kind of baller has the time, money, skill, and support to do something like this? When you think about how much of an investment that project is, it would have been impressive even if it took him years to get it working the way he wanted it. And he did all of this for fun! Just because it could be done! Also, I have to give him props for making such a detailed documentation of his work and putting it on the web rather keeping it to himself.
To use this technology to "bomb" a target one would require a much larger payload capability than the design currently has, if ones intention were to do any serious destruction. This would require a much bigger glider. A larger, slow moving target would be easily detected by todays radars.
I wish Americans still had the freedom to experiment with such technology. Unfortunately, American freedoms have become severely curtailed for the political benefits they provide to the Republican Party. Notions of expanding freedom and democracy are now only to be used in muslim countries. Oh how far and how fast we have fallen.
If you had read the article, you would have noticed that the "hills" are exactly were the prototype last landed and was never seen again. Remember by definition, all safe places become military targets since they provide the potential for enemy sanctuary. All such places must be sought out and destroyed, of course with all attendant no-bid contracts in force.
Don't worry though, insiders report that the US government has dispatched a covert operations team to Canada to recover the lost apparatus, so that the builder can be prosecuted for developing terrorist technology. We shall have it in our hands shortly, and with it our excuse to launch a pre-emptive strike against Canada.
Unlikely. All the hot air emanating from the landing point would have deflected it into your neighbors yard.
"Oh how far and how fast we have fallen"
acceleration = 10 m/s^2 (approx.)
time = t (in seconds);
How fast: t * 10M/s^2 = 10t m/s (approx.)?
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
The terrorists didn't suddenly start coming over the border after 9/11 you dolt. Homeland security was an issue with the US border guards in that area long before it was a buzzword. Their plane was retrieved 20 miles from the ferry where the Millenium Bomber was intercepted by US customs with a trunk full of explosives headed towards Seattle.
From 60,000 feet, could it then fly from the US to Europe, across the atlantic ocean? What is the distance such a plane can cover?
747's (and most other triple autopilot aircraft) have been able to autoland for 30 years.
Actually, the first autoland in commercial service was in July 1965, by a HS 121 Trident, almost 40 years ago. Autoland was one of the great British developments in aviation.
See the slide, "Brief History of Category 3" in this presentation.
HS 121 on Wikipedia.
Kevin Horton
Surely the biggest thing to worry about here is that they'll miss. Hitting the whitehouse won't harm anybody that matters
Art is a pretty amazingly nerdy guy. That site is about the impressive but ill-fated "Mark I" glider.
In the time since the site was put together he's built a remotely-piloted submarine and has been working on Mark II, which will probably feature a much better camera system, a modular "mission bay" and most importantly considering the way Mark I left this world, some awareness of the height of the terrain in the flight area.
Most likely he'll manually enter landmarks like the mountain that likely put paid to Mark I, but if anyone knows of any conveniently and freely accessible topographical data, especially of the us Northwest and Western Canada, please let me know and I'll pass it along to Art.
Someone call Homeland Security!
What is the shortest sig that cannot be expressed in fewer than 20 words?
There is nothing in the design of this thing that says it has to be small. Scaling up the size is a matter of making things bigger and getting more balloons and helium to lift it.
The innovation is in the electronics and control software that lets this thing fly itself back. Actual glider design (large enough to carry half a platoon of soldiers) is a well understood science that goes back before WWII.
What would make attacking a target like the *White* House tough is the batteries of anti-aircraft missiles installed on the *White* House roof, although an engineless (no heat-seekers) glider made of organic (no radar-guided) materials might be a nasty package to try and stop.
Of course, they may have laser guided missiles up there protecting Dubya as well, but if the soldiers illuminate aircraft with a laser pointer, they might get busted by Homeland Security!
While this technique would probably be hard to pull off against protected targets like the White House and such, it would be a considerable threat against assemblies and ceremonies. Being able to stand off and get away would be very useful for terrorists. Even a 10 mile separation and a 30 minute interval between initiating the attack and its execution would be a huge advantage.
Imagine what Timothy McVeigh would have been able to do with a couple of these with a 100 pound payload. I'm surprised the Pro-Lifers aren't using these against Abortion Clinics already.
I hate living in Interesting Times.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
You are barely even 23 hours behind the last moron who said the same thing, which leads me to question: do you need a hobby?