Robotic Glider Set To Break Autonomous Flight Records

SoaringIsAwesome writes "Dan Edwards, a student at NC State University, is attempting to break two records by creating an autonomous glider. The project goal is a 142-mile cross country flight and a 25-mile flight (with return) without human intervention. The glider finds thermal updrafts and automatically circles them to gain altitude, much like birds and insects do. Recently, the glider flew in the desert for 4.5 hours, covering 70.5 miles by itself using only air currents to stay aloft. Since the NC State demonstration vehicle does not have a motor, this shows real promise for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that actually have a motor, with possibilities of extending flight duration considerably. Combine daytime soaring with a solar energy system to charge batteries for the night, such as the 84-hour flight by QinetiQ's Zephyr, and you might just get an answer to flying for months on end. With this kind of endurance, the eye in the sky that the city of Lancaster is considering might be even more practical."

Comments

Re:NC is North Carolina, right?

[Brian Gordon]

Do a 2-second search yourself. It's when you're actually navigating from start to destination instead of just sort of flying around in circles and landing where you started.

Surveillance

[TheMeuge]

With this kind of endurance, the eye in the sky that the city of Lancaster is considering might be even more practical.

Are we happy about that? Stazi managed to keep a hundred thousand people under surveillance with just manpower. The inevitability of a technological solution to their inability to perform 24/7 surveillance of 100% of their citizens makes me shudder. As staggering as this is, I am fairly sure that only overwhelming cost is preventing many governments (including UK, AU and US in that order), from implementing such measures, since it's becoming clear that the citizens are willing to give up any privacy and liberty they have left, in order to feel safer, and (at best) reduce their absolute risks by minute amounts.

Re:Surveillance

[Darkeye11547]

Newsflash, the reality is that surveillance technology is susceptible to Moore's Law. It's getting cheaper and better every year. It won't be too long before privacy outside of one's private bunker (and probably inside it too) is a luxury no-one can afford. I already own no less than four cameras, and that's not even counting things that /only/ take pictures. If some company released a product next year, some sort of pendant or pair of glasses that would constantly record to cheap storage media, I would buy it immediately because there are always moments I wish Iwould have caught if I'd only had my camera out at the time. I wouldn't wear it for personal security. I'd wear it to catch youtube moments. Multiply this by the local population, and you've got a de-facto panopticon.

Re:Surveillance

[TheMeuge]

I disagree. I would argue that privacy is absolutely required for liberty in the real world. The two are inextricably linked, because the only rights you have, are ones you can defend. Defending your rights in the face of a segment of society that knows everything about you, while you know nothing about them, is a rather doomed endeavor.

So while people keep talking about their freedoms, they are being deprived of their weapons, and their privacy. And in the absence of either, there can be no liberty.

Re:NC is North Carolina, right?

[goombah99]

Moreover, the thing just kept circling the Data centers where all the thermals were. If you hide in a cool valley you are safe I guess.

Re:NC is North Carolina, right?

[Falconhell]

Cross country in Gliding generally refers to flying outside glide range of the airfield, most often onn a triangular course of a set distance.

Re:Autonomous Soaring

[feufeu]

Wrong guess, i've 5000+hrs in real size ones, no kidding.

The problem basically breaks down into two parts:

1) find a thermal

Standard theory says that thermals are spaced at intervals of about 1.5 times their vertical extension (ground to cloud base or top of blue thermal with no Cu cloud on top) and using all his senses a glider pilot has a fair chance of getting from one to the next without hitting the ground first. If the only available option to find the next thermal is to fly in a straight line and wait until you hit it, it's still working most of the time (that's when thermals are not marked by clouds and i suppose this guy's gizmo can't see them anyway). Taking into consideration the much smaller L/D (distance that it can glide from a given height) of a model i don't know if it still works, but the results in TFA seem to confirm this. I can't see that he uses another way of finding the thermal

2) use the thermal = climb

I'd think that given the small turning radius of a model glider and the large radius of a thermal not too near the ground there is no need to center the thermal nearer to the core in order to get some altitude. This might not apply to microthermals near the ground and is not very effective of course. The development (read the papers on the website) tries to deal with this problem by modeling the thermal from measurements of vertical speed and maneuvering the glider nearer to it's core in order to climb faster / at all. BTW that's what >50% of soaring a glider is all about and it's something that involves lots of senses, hence my first comment.

Collisions?

[Martin Hellman]

As a pilot who has occasionally had to dodge birds and stray helium balloons, what worries me is the small, but non-zero chance that such an autonomous glider could collide with a manned (or womanned) aircraft. FAA Advisory Circular 91-57 recommends that model aircraft fly no higher than 400' and take other precautions not to interfere with full-scale aircraft. Given the length of his flights, I strongly suspect he is flying well above that.