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$10M For Unmanned Aircraft That Can Perch Like a Bird
coondoggie writes "Unmanned aircraft maker AeroVironment got an additional $5.4 million to further develop a diminutive aircraft that can fly into tight spaces undetected, perch and send live surveillance information to its handlers. Last Fall, AeroVironment, got $4.6 million initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the Stealthy, Persistent, Perch and Stare Air Vehicle System (SP2S), which is being built on the company's one-pound, 29-inch wingspan battery-powered Wasp unmanned system."
at what point does the US military stop looking like a human defense force and start looking looking like alien invaders from a robot planet?
How we know is more important than what we know.
That actually has the potential to be a rather awkward issue, in the mid to long term, with small drones of this and similar flavors.
Sooner or later, we'll want these things to do more than watch and report. Trouble is, ordinary kinetic weapons don't scale down all that well to applications where size and weight are at a real premium(gun small enough to fit in your pocket, sure, gun small enough to fit in a one pound aircraft with reasonable endurance, not so much). The only mechanisms that do scale down are toxins and pathogens, which are what pretty much all dangerous animals of that scale and smaller use.
This is, of course, a problem; because chemical and biological weapons are almost certainly not a road we want to go down(even if you don't see using them as a problem, not disturbing the general norm of not using them is likely a good idea if only for your own sake); but they'll be the only thing that fits onboard, so it'll be that or nothing. I'm not overly confident that we'll choose wisely.