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Drone Guides Fuel Shipment to Alaskan Town
pigrabbitbear writes with an excerpt from an article at Motherboard.tv about a non-evil use for unmanned aircraft: "Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska right now how they feel about surveillance drones and you'll likely get unequivocally high praise. Had a remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft not been monitoring Bering Sea ice flows over the past week an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of oil may not have reached the iced-in, snow-drifted town as soon as it did. ... The drone, which was launched from Nome's shores by University of Alaska – Fairbanks Geophysical Institute researchers, isn't the sort of eye-in-the-sky most often associated with the U.S.'s various hulking, 40-foot wing-spanning reconnaissance planes ... The Aeryon Scout micro unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a 'smoke detector with wings and legs,' according to the Anchorage Daily News, and is part and parcel of a rapidly expanding fleet of mid- to micro-sized sky robots being flown domestically for all manner of tedious or risky intelligence gathering gigs."
It's not the drones that people have a problem with; It's how they're used. No amount of positive publicity on their 'good' uses can erase the fact that many, if not most, law enforcement agencies envision an armada of cheap surveillance drones monitoring everyone and everyplace they decide they don't like. Protesting wall street? Drones. Add in the crowd-control microwave emitter for only an additional $2,999. How about some drones patrolling over the freeways during rush hour, equipped with a radar gun? Now an officer can write tickets for anyone speeding over a several mile stretch of road, rather than just a particular point. Only $1,599 after mail in rebate. The list goes on.
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I guess Iceroad Truckers had the month off. :(
I thought they would drive through anything including snow drifts. I am so disillusioned.
I just wonder why someone would be willing to live in a place that is by all measures a risky place to establish a life. Why? When I think of the polar bear, the weather, the isolation and so on, I fail to see the reason why I would want to live there. Man is surely intriguing.
...but does it really matter that it was unmanned? There was no inherent risk for a regular pilot to monitor the same situation. I would hardly consider this a " tedious or risky intelligence gathering gig."
Did they get FAA authorization? Enquiring bureaucrats want to know.
Or would the geek in us just like to assume it?
From http://dec.alaska.gov/Spar/renda/index.htm
01/11/2012 - The T/V Renda and CGC Healy have not travelled any significant distance since noon yesterday. The vessels remain approximately 100 nautical miles from Nome. An experienced U.S. ice navigator hired by Vitus Marine as a technical advisor arrived safely on board the Healy around 4:00 PM today. He may transfer to Renda after assessing the challenges from on board the Healy.
01/12/2012 - The vessels worked until approximately 12:30 am this morning and made good progress. They are currently about 70 miles from Nome and hopeful for continued good progress today. (updated 10:15am)
01/13/2012 - At this time, the Renda is staying offshore while the Healy is making runs to test the ice and determine the best place for the Renda to moor for the fuel transfer.
So here's a question for the skilled do it yourselfers in the slashdot crowd.
I figure that one of those "micro-drones" only use a few(?) watts of power right? How much does the Parrot quad copter use?
Well, could you (sorry, not me, unfortunately I don't have the hacking skills :( attach a solar panel facing DOWN on one of those drones and then affix a little infrared LED on the drone. A modest ground based telescope would track the LED and continuously point a medium(?) powered laser at the solar panel. (That's one place where the hacking comes in, to have a motorized base track the drone and to provide safeties in case the laser lost "lock").
Voila! As long as the drone stays in line of sight of the base (and as long as power doesn't give out) you've got a modest little perpetual aerial surveillance platform. Can lasers of the requisite power/frequency be purchased without too much of a headache from the authorities? Can small drones fight gusts and high winds so that they'll stay up most of the time?
This reminds me of the floating "golden eyes" used by Larry Niven as surveillance tools in his novels. Someone in Japan made a spherical drone that did this but I think it could only stay up for 10 minutes on one battery charge. If the solar cells were light enough/laser was powerful enough perhaps that drone could be used.
Is the visible/infrared the best part of the spectrum to use? Would a maser (with microwave power receiver) be better in terms of efficiency or safety?
Traffic courts are the end point of a revenue supply stream. Judges do not make, "Gee, was there a valid reason?" types of decisions. They make "Is it humanly possible to apply this law here and are all the 'T's crossed?" types of decisions.
... and lets be honest, there is something in the back of the average person's head that doesn't want someone to pass them. If speed was the CAUSE of an accident then there would be a speed where when you reached it the accident would ensue.
The enforcement and fee structure of our traffic laws are based on extremely low chances of getting caught. If every possible infraction was enforced in every possible instance the average driver's license would be ticketed to the point of suspension within an hour. The policeman is the point were discretion should be applied to decide, "Should I enforce this", and the idea that infractions should be blanket enforced by an automated, 1984ish, mechano-fascist system is insane.
Also there is a general "knowledge" that speed is the ultimate "safety sin" that is so far from correct. The government's own NHTSA report that was released after 10 years of the "55 mile-an-hour limit" had background data that when analyzed (by someone other then the government) showed that the safest speed to be traveling was 5 to 10 mph faster then the general flow of traffic. That same study "proved" that 55 saved lives: after ignoring any other possible source for a reduction in deaths per mile such as much safer cars, massive improvements in tire safety, seat belt laws, etc... So after going with the spin that nothing else could have effected the number of fatalities, the best number they could come up with worked out to it costing an additional 150 man/years (from the reduced speeds) on the roads for every life saved. (One independent analysis pointed out that you could get the same expected reduction in fatalities by increasing the actual tire pressure in all cars by about 2 psi.)
When a more sensible look is made at the data, it is pretty clear that once you factor out increases in passenger car safety, tire safety, and seat belt use, it shows that drivers had become worse, most likely because they had lost driving ability and when at a slower pace it encourages people to do "other things" besides drive.
Lets be serious. Traffic enforcement is about revenue. Speed is easy to prove, it is fun/interesting for cops to enforce and the public has been led to believe that SPEED is the big scary thing,
If traffic enforcement was about "safety" there would be a mandate to enforce the laws as they relate to the generation of accidents: Failure to yield right-of-way, inattentive driving, and just plain incompetence.
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Oh, and the correct civilian use of drones is to create an open source project of mesh networked drones to monitor our government...
And that includes detecting speed traps from above!
Which is great until someone miscalculates demand and they run out of fuel in the middle of winter
Actually what happened, IIRC, is that the normal last-before-winter-ice delivery scheduled in November had to be cancelled due to a big storm. Then they had the logistical problem of getting a tanker AND an ice breaker there at the same time.
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