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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
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Nothing to see here
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.
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
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.
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
This technology is not 'violent' per se, any more than the Internet is 'violence-based' just because the military had a (big) hand in building it.
---
Remember, it's never to late to have a happy childhood!
Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.
Quick question, what qualifies as money for peace?
I ask because someone repeated your exact words to me the other day and none of the things of which I could think on which we do spend money (other than making weapons or moving them and their operators around the globe) qualified as "peace."
Environmentalism, education, health care, foreign aid, etc. Whatever your take on how the current administration is shortchanging these areas for allocation of funds, we still do it--but they don't seem to count for "peace" so I'm wondering what does, exactly?
Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.
That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence. The whole point is that as we get more precise, better informed, and more surgical in how we deal with bad actors, we don't have to use as many heavy duty, indiscriminate weapons. People wail and moan about the collateral damage from doing things like kicking Iraq out of Kuwait... but that conflict saw the debut of our military carefully avoiding older (much more violent) tactics and weapons. If we'd still been using the WWII/Korea/Vietnam style weapons and tactics, we'd have been much more "violent" to accomplish the same required result. Every time we trot out these new tools, we cut down on how heavy handed we have to be, and the bad guys (who read this site, too), are more and more aware of how difficult it is to conduct various murderous affairs.
In this particular case, a tool like this that helps the Coast Guard or Navy take a closer look a ship before sending men and women over in person will absolutely reduce the risk of ambush, suicide attacks, and other problems that have killed our people in the past. Since so many other comments here point out the obvious non-conflict uses for this technology, I won't repeat those (great as they are), but I will close by saying that force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military. As long as there are regimes like North Korea shipping out boatloads of missiles and explosives to places like Syria for sale to malicious third parties, superior military technology on our part will continue to reduce violence and save lives.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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
> Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer
> lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence.
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.
Worked out why most of the people on the planet are against the actions of the US government yet? How about reading `understanding power` or `hegemony or survival` by Chomsky for starters.
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?
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
prefer the modern military of Denmark, Canada etc, not that of the Americans, who spent more on their military than the rest of the world combined.
So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.
Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).
Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks
Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.