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Toward Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Technology
coondoggie writes with a NetworkWorld piece that begins, "Researchers at Purdue will soon experiment with an unmanned aircraft that pretty much flies itself with little human intervention. The aircraft will use a combination of global-positioning system technology and a guidance system called AttoPilot ... to guide the aerial vehicle to predetermined points. Researchers can be stationed off-site to monitor the aircraft and control its movements remotely. AttoPilot was installed in the aircraft early this year, and testing will begin in the spring, researchers said."
I dunno. One of the things I quite like about playing video games is that nobody actually dies.
Yeah, but can they land it in the Hudson?
Hi because I go to a university so I can buy any off the shelf RC aircraft autopilot, throw it in a prebuilt airplane, throw it in the air and get school credits!
Here's another brand of autopilot.
http://www.u-nav.com/
Here's a ton of videos of it being used in
http://www.u-nav.com/gallery.html
I'm a high school dropout who is perfectly capable of doing this. Yawwwn. Try doing something I can't do, like contributing code to an OSS autopilot package.
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
I'm sorry mods, slash... I just felt this story was too stupid for myself, therefore it must have been too stupid for the general /./pub Please do not mistake my cynical writing as flames. This story should be modded as
-1 unimpressive
I believe that it would be more than niche applications. There are many areas in aviation where UAV's would be a boon.
For example, UAV's could be used for fire suppression applications - Whenever there are forest fires (or even the threat of), UAV's could be prepositioned and in the air in a matter of minutes.
Crop Dusting - UAV's could perform this function with better precision, for longer hours.
Post/Parcel delivery
Search and Rescue
All these applications are prone to pilot fatigue and are dangerous commercial applications - I am sure there are many, many more applications where UAV's would make more sense and improve aviation safety.
An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
The crux wasn't landing in the river, it was deciding to land in the river. Even if remote pilots were on standby to "jump in" and take over in emergencies, there was no time to gain situational awareness.
Granted, in the long run, computers might have more general intelligence than people and be more trustworthy in making these multi-faceted decisions, but I think that will be a long time coming.
An autonomous vehicle doesn't need to do absolutely everything autonomously. It simply CAN fly its mission autonomously.
That means, you can have it signal you when it thinks something interesting is happening, or when it's in an interesting area, and you can start paying attention to it.
I don't think that makes these vehicles any less "autonomous".
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Here is a pilot complaining about the 'modern airplanes almost fly themselves' myth. (You'll need to wait for some ads before the page loads.) And here he talks about the sort of training which produces people able to land a crippled plane on a river instead of a skyscraper.
The military have autonomous planes, but this isn't really relevant to airliners. The military will (if it has to) accept a crash every thousand flights. The airline industry won't accept a crash every million.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
If you listen really carefully, you can hear the sound of Jeff Bezos rubbing his hands together!