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Making a Real Batcopter, With Parts From the Hardware Store
garymortimer writes with an excerpt from a story loaded with eye-popping pictures and video on how to create — with some bamboo and mesh lashed on — a UAV to fly through and learn from swarms of bats in rural Texas. "Brazilian Free-tailed bats (also called Tadarida) come together in the millions in caves all over Texas, leaving every night in swarms so big they can be detected by doppler radar. Somehow, they manage to fly through this dense self-clutter without major collisions, and so our goal is to better understand this behavior. For the AIRFOILS project, the IML team created the previously mentioned Batcopter. The goal was to fly a UAV through the dense clutter, and record the bats' response with three ground-based high-speed FLIR cameras and an airborne 3D HD GoPro camera. The hope is to extract fundamental control laws of flying behavior in order to achieve better autonomous UAV flight."
Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na BATMAN!
The bats are going to be disturbed by this UAV and will not act naturally, so this is all pointless. (Insert quantum joke here)
Could this be used to carry a detonator circuit and a small amount of high explosive?
Most likely this will cause a large disturbance with all the bats and cause them to run into each other and crash......... Or not... I'm just sayin.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
I was expecting something which Batman would fly in.
To the Bat-Remotely-Operated-Teleprocessing-Device! -www.awkwardengineer.com
You can't have a UAV and call it the Batcopter. there is only one Batcopter and it is flown by Batman.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
I realize that most of the comments here will probably be poking fun at the batcopter, and I can't wait to read what the /. audience is going to come up with. I guess I underestimated the coolness factor of flying towel racks. However, if you want to discuss the science behind it, I'll be more than happy.
It was a neat project, and we're only just starting, although that's probably the first and the last time that I'll go into the field. Apparently, we have some 30TB of data to wade through, so there's enough there for any dozen PhDs. The next task is to figure out what we actually recorded and to see what we can do with it.
Dr. Kenneth Sebesta
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
This is sort of misleading. They appear to have a $100 open pilot module, 4 RC hobbyist brushless motors and props, an hd go pro camera. a 4 channel radio control transmitter and reciever, I assume a high output lithium ion battery and charger. The only part that seems to come from the hardware store is some glue and duct tape. The article mentions that originally all this stuff was mounted to some aluminum rods purchased at home depot, but the rods were replaced with carbon fiber parts. I don't think the source of those parts was mentioned.
...Or so I thought, until I saw the netting in the closeups.
http://ardrone.parrotshopping.com/us/p_ardrone_main.aspx
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Thousands of fotos of angry bats giving the finger. Or worse. Argh!
What a neat project, bats are amazing mammals and rarely hit objects in their way, I was exploring a cave in Santa Cruz, CA once and in a slightly larger than body sized passage when a solitary bat came flying by, it cleared the 6 inches above my buddy with ease, never slowing down, and I was on my back and got to see and feel it pass inches over me, it was a trip!
Another time on a 9 day caving excursion in remote areas of Nevada, I watched a sunset while standing in the entrance of a cave while thousands of bats flew out of the cave around me and across the valley in a long picturesque swarm.
This cave had a "Hollywood" entrance that one could walk around in, and bats were flying all around me and I was walking around slowly, and not once did a bat collide with me, and there were thousands of them!
It was quite an incredible experience.
Not as incredible as exploring the cave while the bats were leaving, it was terribly Stinky! from all the Guano and such.
Yuck! Our hair stunk so bad of bat urine (even with our caving helmets on) that we had to take impromptu showers with our drinking water to wash the stench out.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2225174&cid=36390518 Because it shows you for who & what you REALLY are, a Linux troll?? Absolutely. Caught red-handed, with your pants down troll, lol.....