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."

Comments

Re:Niche operation perhaps...

[pnevin]

I dunno. One of the things I quite like about playing video games is that nobody actually dies.

Re:Ring Ring!

[Shipud]

Yeah, but can they land it in the Hudson?

This isn't so awesome, I could do it.

[t0qer]

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

Re:Niche operation perhaps...

[jander]

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.