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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."
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You probably don't need a lot of spotters if you have the right video recognition software. A human can only watch so may screens at once, while software does not have this problem.
Spotters will only have to watch video-fragments that the sofware recognizes as being potential hits.
This could speed up and reduce cost of those search-actions a lot.
I wouldn't say none goes to peace, but indeed, a large ammount goes to war.
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.
Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.
You're confusing tools and technology with the policies that put them to work. I think those policies are largely correct, but that's a different discussion. Once a policy decision has been made (say, to step in an help end the ethnic clensing of thousands of people in the Balkans), the newer tools and tactics of the US military achieved exactly what I'm talking about: effective use against the intended targets, and a great decrease in the side effects. If we had not spent so much money on developing those tools and training our people in their use, we'd still be having to use the approaches used in WWII. In fact, the US has so raised the threshold for expectations of minimal collateral damage as we do things like help disable the militants in Serbia and Croatia, that any slip-up of any kind is now seen as horrible. Any unintended loss of life is horrible - but we're able now to disable bad guys (even those who set up shop in mosques and schools) with a previously inconceivable surgical skill. This is different, of course, than, say, blowing up trainloads of commuters in Spain, or burning partiers alive in Bali nightclubs. But the same tools that allow us to keep equipment working in the combat field also allowed us to ferry supplies and support into the recent tsunami-damaged area well before any other sort of major relief could have helped there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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