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The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle
Victor Cheng writes "In developments that bring together a variety of technologies including robotics and digital imaging the Wasp Micro Air Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's latest tools currently in testing of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (although I'm thinking its not going to need a carrier to get this one up and flying). The 13 inch Wasp comes equipped with 2 video cameras, GPS and has a myriad of possible applications. Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."
Swatting a 13-inch wasp is unlikely. Scream and run away, or possibly even cower and say "I for one welcome our giant robot wasp overlords"...
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that's stale.
Nothing to see here
"Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action." Punctuation is your friend. Among other things.
If one of these visits the family picnic, you can be damn sure I will swat it. I'm not in the US...
Question is, how close do you have to be to use it? I mean, it's got a whole bunch of applications, though it doesn't look very stealthy, other than it's size. The article(s) say that it's intended for use with ship-to-ship boardings, but nothing mentions it's actual operational range. I mean, if the thing isn't good for atleast 1500 feet (plus having enough power to make it through steel bulkheads if it has to go anyplace but topside), you might as well not use it. Also wonder how long the battery life is on that little gadget. I'm sure the US Navy thinks of them as disposable, so recharability isn't exactly priority, but with an electrical system sucking on power for both flight operations, two cameras, and an RF stream, it's got to have a nice big pair on it.
Next question, where can I get one and how much?
Informatus Technologicus
"Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."
Like hell I'd pay for it. Gov't should be think twice before spying on its citizens. Especially at such a close range!
Digital Sailor
Maybe they've made a special 4 foot long mini-nimitz to go with it? That way you could fit an entire carrier group in your garden pond. How cool would that be?
I do believe you'd get that thing swatted, stomped and whacked with a hammer/shovel/whatever-is-handy for good measure too. And you might be looking at a lawsuit too.
Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
and you'll find this article (http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001084.html) which talks about an even stranger flying vehicle.
Sounds interesting. An "open-source" version of this would be a great article for Make magazine, alongside its one on Kite Aerial Photography.
...ever since seeing Runaway http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/
You have the wrong perspective. Slashdot stories are more like a fine Merlot than leftover potato chips. They don't produce stories with class like this anymore!
Do you like German cars?
"next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic"
If its a 13 inch wasp (just over a foot), then quite frankly if something that size starts buzzing around a family picnic I doubt it would be able to hide from you all that well, and secondly I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to attack a foot-long wasp with a rolled up newspaper or magazine.
If horror films have taught us nothing it's that when freakishly large mutant insects attack (TM) you just run and hope you aren't the extra with no name who's destined to die in the first 20 minutes.
*sigh* Journalists these days...
Search operation at sea. A couple of platoons of these could cover countless square kilometers in a hurry. You'd only need the spotters to monitor the video feed for any found subjects. Half the manpower as you'd skip the need for pilots.
- How recharge batteries in the middle of battlefield?
- What about wind? Make war only when no wind?
- My got - why do they test this on for the NAVY? I'm pretty sure, that range sucks (compared to old, but still usefull device called "radar"). I can imagine this usefull for street fights
..and attach half a pound of TNT to it. A perfect robotic martyr.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Cover propeller with a poison and you'll get a perfect assassin weapon!
It can be operated from a distance, can penetrate through usual air defence and is virtualy invisible.
Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.
With sub 2 hour endurance, the Nimitz will have to be tied up to the pier to make this thing useful.
I think a more viable role for it would be to spy on protesters right here in the good 'ol USA.
As for expensive, my park flyer does the same thing (well, almost) and it was $500.
This is old news and the size of these mini-UAVs (lets be honest about their application) is even smaller than the one in the article, just google it.
blah blah.
Hope it hasn't invited any of it's mates to the picnic.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Let Them lose on the infidels!
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
At 12 pounds I wonder how long time this can be in the air before it needs to be recharged?
Underholdning.info
And now when they miniturize these things to be the size of insects...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
The main challenge is, not surprisingly, the weight. One of the trade-offs we were faced with was wether to do signal processing on the plane (requiring more CPU), or on the ground (requiring more link capacity). Another problem is that, because it is so small, it is very prone to wind, vibrations etc which have to be taken into account when post-processing
Remember, the shotgun is an essential element of the home defense armory.
Someone please get Gordon Freeman on the phone
Connection closed by foreign host.
From the company which designed it in 2002
They are perfect for boarding a ship from a safe distance. A hostile ship that has been stopped knows you will blow them out of the water if your wasps are attacked. You could land your team on the deck with a chopper in relative saftey.
The most dangerous situations are when opposing forces are within close range of each other, the ability to "see" better in any situation is a distinct advantage.
Wind - Read what Sun Tsu has to say about battlefield weather.
Batteries - Handled by the supply line, if that is broken "feed" of the enemy.
Street fights - It works via preprogrammed GPS points that are probably not acurate enough (not to mention being shot at while you punch in the route coordinates). The video cammera on an assult rifle is a better idea. Could be usefull in a city wide seige, mortars, tanks, and many other longer range weapons at the front line could use a "swarm" to direct fire.
If you read between the lines it appears drones are already widely used in the middle east with varying degrees of "success". Some larger drones are armed and have reportedly been used in "targeted killings". The problem with using helicopters is that there is media everywhere when one is shot down. Nobody cares if an "experimental" drone is shot out of the sky (or swatted at the picnic table).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nobody cares if an "experimental" drone is shot out of the sky (or swatted at the picnic table.
so many answers....
How about it's mother?
(ha-ha)
how about it's inventor?
(especially if it's the end of the DOD due to a lucky shot)
how about it's user?
(imagine, you go military, and get to play with this kinda hardware- hell, that's whattid cause me to sign up- excellent hardware toys- and you lose it, it's like losing a great laptop)
budget freaks
(how do we spend X billion a month there anyway)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action.
Or, like the poster, you might only have time to think only once before swatting becomes expensive. Better to just swat immediately.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It's more like beer. The beer was all gone 2 years ago now all we get is the goopy vegamite at the bottom of the pot.
The same team that built this Wasp built a smaller (!) micro air vehicle a couple of years earlier. This paper describes the design and implementation of the project at a good level of detail -- enough to show the complexity and tradeoffs in design, but not so much to bury the reader in equations and minutia.
What fascinates me about MAVs is that you can do absolute cutting-edge research on a shoestring budget. Many prototypes can be designed, analyzed, built, tested, and thrown away.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
This story reminds me of the robot fly created by Ron Fearing of UC Berkeley and Michael Dickinson of Caltech some years ago. Check it out: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spingar nkoff/flyorama/robofly.html
Now if you were able to have a payload of say a water balloon or an M80 I could see its use in neighborhood warfare.
I seem to remember seeing on a show called, "That's Incredible" many years ago...and I mean many, that there was an army vehicle in development that was called, "The Wasp".
This "Wasp" however, was more along the lines of the old Dick Tracy trashcan flyers. "That's Incredible" even had footage of the vehicle in flight as demonstrated by Army personel. The intent was for rapid removal of injured from the battle field and for recon...mostly recon as I remember.
The details as I recall them are that the pilot stood in this large "trash can" like thing that had room for two personel (standing/limping). It could fly at tree top level at about 60 to 70mph. It was stated that the vehicle used the jet engine from a cruise missle.
The video they showed on the show showed the vehicle lifting vertically, sliding left, right and backwards as well as cruising at treetop level very quickly.
I thought that it was the coolest thing I had seen way back then. Does anyone else happen to remember this?
I hate stories that link to other discussions... I get all confused!
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
...but, all I can remember from your post is, " it's got to have a nice big pair on it. " *mind wandering, with visions of big pairs running through it..*
How are WASPs supposed to get the kids to soccer practice in that?
Isn't it nice how the entire thread in the UAV posting is about how much better non-Americans are than Americans?
"... force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military."
Think about it. The paychecks of the military and secret agencies depend on violence. When there is more violence, there are more promotions and raises and importance.
The U.S. government has been, since the end of the Second World War, an instigator of violence, not a force for less violence.
The outcome of the Iraq war has not been that Iraq is a less violent nation. The outcome has been that the profit from Iraqi oil goes to U.S. companies, and not Iraqis.
The U.S. government encouraged Saddam's violence. For example, see History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.
I can see why the Army or Marines (on the ground) could benefit from something like this, but what is this going to show the XO of a surface combatant that a helicoptor or other sensors otherwise couldn't? And, if I'm commanding the Nimitz Battle Group, I'd much rather send in a F/A-18.
Bush Lies On the Record.
The brave efforts of the past will never be repeated!
Then: "Torpedo Eight has been wiped out, sir!"
Now: "Torpedo Eight is stuck in a tree, sir!"
tone
tone
If I'm thinking of swatting something 13 inches long, I won't think twice about swatting it; I'll think twice about what caliber/gauge to use.
I wonder if the used the steam catapult to launch these things. That would be cool.
since the end of the Second World War
After the Second World War was the Cold War. This was a conflict, sometimes "hot," over, essentially, the future of civilization. It involved the more democratic west facing down oppressive, totalitarian communism, and succeeding. The US military is now, as a function of the US population and economy, much, much smaller than it was while being built up to stare down the Soviets and their attempts to make the rest of the world operate under the thumb of their happy, prosperous socialist wonderland.
The paychecks of the military and secret agencies depend on violence
As do the paychecks of police officers, prison cooks, many psychologists, and so on. Just like firefighters "depend" on fires (both those set maliciously and those set by accident). Check in with the people in the region recently hit by the Indian Ocean tsumani, by the way. The only infrastructure with the capacity to get relief to many of those poor people was that of the US military. Ships, aircraft, trained personnel, and of course thousands of tons of supplies and equipment were there almost immediately, courtesy of the US military. Actions like that don't square with your version of things. Just like yesterday's selection of a new Iraqi president (from the part of the country that was used to getting slaughtered by Saddam) doesn't quite smell the same as some mythical US imperialism. You're also conveniently avoiding, as you talk about violence in that country, the concept of who is causing it. Well financed (mostly by Iran, via Syria) foreign terrorists trying desparately to avoid the inevitable democracy (and resulting peace) that is taking hold in Iraq. Why are you not complaining about them, the people who are actually bent on killing civilians and preventing things like free speech, elections, and an open society?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The flaming posts between the Americans and the Europeans (and Canadians and Aussies), are actually more amusing than the article.
One thing a carrier battle group is good for is to easily go to a place where nobody has any legitimate business being, cordon off a huge area, and handily destroy anybody who refuses to stay out. At sea there's *no* cover (optical or radar) above the surface, and zero collateral damage if you have to get seriously nasty.
That's not all. If your test vehicle flies off and crashes, it sinks, winding up where only governments can get at it, and you probably have a recovery vehicle attached to scoop it up before anyone else does. You can position and reposition armored obstacles as needed for testing and have plenty of complex objects to find and photograph -- you don't have to build anything.
Wait a minute.... Didn't they already deploy these in "The Simpsons: Hit and Run"? I seem to recall punching & kicking nearly all of them out of existence.
A 13" paper plane will have no chance of returning alive if it isn't taking off from a stationary carrier in calm see and no wind. It will have a very short range and speed. Bottom line: will it ever be able to see what a powerful set of binoculars wouldn't be able to see from the carrier anyways? And also, what't the point of having the stealth of a 13" paper plane, when just a few kilometers away is a ginormous aircraft carrier?
Just questions...
Cameras for looking front, and back?
How about Up, Down, Left, and Right?
This way, the operator can concentrate on flying the aircraft, not banking for a 'better angle'.
...to carry enough explosives onboard to blow itself to unrecognizable smithereens for when it falls into enemy hands so that they cannot easily duplicate the technology or attempt to recover any decryption keys from its electronics components.
I'm surprised this would be considered for open water applications. seems that little motor would be hardly enough power to get through a stiff wind without exhausting its power supply. I guess thats why it is considered a field "test", but I think the best suited application would probably for scouting just ahead of ground forces in an urban, mountain or forest environment.
Then again, maybe that little engine puts out such a buzzing that you can here it for miles unless you have the cover from the sound of waves and wind.
The obvious early adopters of a tool like this would be Delta Force, because so much of their work involves forced entry. If such a vehicle existed, they'd put it through its paces before it trickled down to Special Forces and SEAL operators, and finally down to regular light infantry forces.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you're in (or ever visit) the Bay Area, they have the prototype of the vehicle you're talking about at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos.
:o)
They don't have a lot of detail about the cancellation of the program, (and I haven't been up there in a while) but if I remember correctly, there were stability problems. The vehicle was pretty much verticle so there were balance problems. Since these things were built in the 60's and 70's, there was no (or limited) computerized stability control.
For those interested, Hiller has quite a few interesting displays of similar "dead-end" projects and cool displays of various areospace technologies. I thought tha tthe cut-away jet engines were especially nifty.
And for amusement, there's a Bell helicopter with an old PC with "flight simulator" software attached to the controls.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
hahahaha "That's Incredible", with Jon Davidson and whoever else... one of my earliest TV memories, from the late 70's to about '82 ;) That show also had spooky footage (and first-person accounts) of ghosts and UFO's and whatnot, at times (sort of an earlier "Unsolved Mysteries"), which spawned a lifelong interest in the paranormal.
I vaguely vaguely remember that episode (I was probably around 7-8 years old)
As usual, anything that took place in the B.G. era ("Before Google") is difficult to find information on.
I recall a story on something similar a few years back. A University of Florida MAV research project that had little carbon fiber versions of these, with an integrated video camera. The camera feed went into a land based computer which did image processing, calculating the location of the horizon, therefore giving the computer an effective artificial horizon to work with. With this data, the computer sent rc signals back to the plane, basically providing it with wing leveling capabilities. Researchers could provide bank, pitch and power inputs, and the wing leveler would respond appropriately.
It was a very cool project, and they had lots of video demos...unfortunately it just seemed to drop off the face of the earth. My thoughts were that it had been coopted by the military for something like this.
Anyway, here's the original URL. If anyone has any followup info on this story, speak up!
http://aeroweb.aero.ufl.edu/microav
flying around your picnic table you've got more troubles than a simple swatting will solve.
Imagine an autonomous beowolf cluster of these.
It would bring an entirely new level to the
quality of trap/skeet shotgun competition.
I, for one, can hardly wait...
" you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."
A 13" White Anglo-Saxon Prodestant with two video cameras and a GPS device? I agree, you're just asking for trouble coming at that with a fly swatter.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Hardly what I would call "micro". "Mini" possibly. Maybe even "small". If the thing was .013 inches, then I might call it "micro".
Most of the comments were people arguing the merits of the metric system vs. English units, with a lot of nation bashing thrown in. ROFL! The article is hosted on an Australian site, and one commenter facetiously and humorously said something to the effect of "Everything I know about Australia I learned from Mad Max."
More on point, this kind of plane would be great fun for the hobbyist. I want one!
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Sounds like a City 17 flying camera! =)
More than 2 1/2 years old *sigh*
The OLD story
"...a 2 billion dollar ship, always blows up to save a $200 airplane." Murphy's Law
...mythical US imperialism...
Be careful. I don't care how many nice things you've done, when you start running into countries and killing people who are seemingly unrelated to the current crisis(Recall that Iraq had no direct link to 9/11, that Bush originally tried to justify war waaaay back by saying that Osama may have fled there, and that there are nations in the reigon which DO have a direct link to the 9/11 terror attacks which are now considered allies in this war on terror), you open yourself to critisism. Don't fall into the trap of dismissing such critisism too quickly. You are not your country, and your government has done things that you would certainly not approve of.
Why are you not complaining about them...
Because they're the bad guys. Moreover, they aren't "one of us" here in the civilized world.
It's been a long time.
Sorry...
Years ago (I believe it was back in 1997), I read about the prototype of this military product. It had an almost identical design, and was controlled much like one would control an RC plane. It had one camera, and the primary goal was surveillance. It sounds to me like they've improved the technology somewhat since then, and done some miniaturizing.
I wish I had kept the information on it... the research I did was for a high school paper on government technology. Sadly, those days have long past, and I've long since formatted all of it away. Kind of wish I'd kept it now.
-Vendal Thornheart
How has Dan Brown's Decep.tion Point not been mentioned.
OK, then. My last comment on this, and thanks for your indulgence, and for pushing me to be clearer on a couple of points.
believe that the use of substantial force in the world is an acceptable means of achieving peace, and I believe that using force in such a way is a dangerous and ultimately futile way to try to achieve peace, causing more people to rise up and try to attack you than not.
I just can't see any way that anything less than substantial force would have rolled back imperial Japan's brutal march across the Pacific basin, Nazi Germany's attempt at owning Europe (and Africa, and so on), etc. "Dangerous," yes - but completely unavoidable. Likewise with guys like Saddam - he would have had absolutely no reason to leave Kuwait (and for that matter, not to make Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and everything else that was on his shopping list) without something literally, physically forcing the issue. Sanctions, as we saw, were actually a laughing matter to him, his sons, Iraq's well-fed Republican Guard, and the rest of the Baathists.
You believe that using dictators to wage proxy wars, or supporting dictators in general, is acceptable because the end of destroying a greater enemy is more important than the means, I believe that supporting a tyrant when he's your freind only to destroy him when it's convenient is the most direct manifestation of hypocrisy there is, and that as the civilized good guys, we should hold our behaviour to higher standards than the bad guys we oppose.
I never said Saddam was our "friend," any more than Stalin was. The proxy war was already being waged by the communists, just like it was in Vietnam or Korea. If the choices are: do nothing at all (and let millions of people come under the influence of, and through subjugation, prop up for a little longer the hollow shell of totalitarian communism), bypass all proxies and directly engage the actual culprits (and truly risk the end of the world as the Soviets' last gasp becomes nuclear instead of death-by-cumbling credibility and no-more-client-states-to-loot), or lastly (and what actually happened), put up every roadblock possible to stop the expansion of that doomed bit of tyranny, even it means holding your nose while two local bullies smack each other around. I don't mean to trivialize the taint that comes from wading through those swamps - I mean only to differentiate the ideal solution (somehow persuading the top dogs in the USSR to... what? change their minds about how or whether to feed the failing engine of their rather villainous "revolution"?) from the solutions that were driven by the actual events and cultures in play.
To rule out the option of force under any circumstances is no different at the international scale than it is at the local scale, in ruling out, say, the option for police to physically restrain a guy that mugs little old ladies on the same street corner every afternoon. Stopping a criminal through force, even if it means that his fellow gang members "rise up" in a show of defiance and commit more crimes (actually, this does happen, even in my own neighborhood), doesn't mean that little old ladies should simply be left to being victims. Not that Kuwait was a little old lady, but the analogy holds. At some point, the people that are willing to use force to simply take what they want, or impose a cruelly oppressive regime (a la the Taliban, etc) on unwilling and unrepresented people simply cannot be talked out of expanding what (for them) works. What works for them has to stop working, and depriving them of the tools of their violence, physically if necessary, is sometimes the only choice (other than allowing them to continue). This is exactly what transpired in the Balkans, and every month that NATO cajoled, pleaded, talked sanctions, and did every other non-physical thing to cease those hostilities, thousands more innocent people died, often just for being from one ethnic group or another. We removed the weapons from the picture (physically, through very focused and directed violence), and are not seeing Serbs, Croats, and their neighbors "rise up" in anger against the NATO countries. Because what we did, rather than being futile, worked, where everything else failed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's not the people you're attacking who I'm worried about provoking -- once force is initiated, you follow through, simple as that. The people who I see as rising up are people caught in the crossfire. Imagine coming home to find your family dead, your house bombed to rubble along with half your neighbourhood, and you know who dropped the bomb.
Will you honestly blame the dictator/terrorist/drug dealer who lived two doors down? Will you blame the tank which was sitting in the park? It doesn't take an irrational train of thought to blame the bomb, and the people who dropped the bomb.
Even liberated countries, after WWII, often resented liberating countries(the US included) because of looting and pillaging done by allied soldiers(which, much like abu ghraib, was unavoidable because of the nature of war). In some countries, the resentment remains to this day.
This is the cycle I speak of, where you can kill every person who would do us harm and all you'd accomplish is get more people who want to hate us or simply want to kill us. Hell -- you could nuke the middle east, turn it into a glass parking lot, and there'd be more people gunning for us than ever before.
That's the way I look at things, at least.
It's been a long time.