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Drone Guides Fuel Shipment to Alaskan Town

Posted by Unknown on from the tracking-terrorist-polar-bear-cell dept.

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."

10 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Its not the drones that are the problem by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:Its not the drones that are the problem by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thermal imaging cameras are invaluable for certain engineering work.
      They can also be used to violate your rights and 'look' into your house.

      Russian journalists have used drones to get arial photos of the Moscow riots.

      And this just in Hammers used to build houses can also be used to beat people's skulls in.

    2. Re:Its not the drones that are the problem by artor3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What's so bad about the scenarios you've listed?

      The cops surveiling Occupy protests with drones... what's supposed to be scary about that? There are already cops at the scene. Why are we supposed to be scared that they now have an extra camera angle? Is it only if they have your hypothetical microwave emitter equipped on the drone? Because if so, that's a reason to be against microwave emitters, not drones, and at any rate it's unlikely they'd ever use them. They tried to the low tech equivalent (firehoses) against civil rights protestors, and it didn't do squat for them.

      And for your other example, a more uniform enforcement of traffic laws would be a good thing. Right now they're so spottily enforced that a lot of people ignore them, and it becomes a tax by lottery. If they were enforced uniformly, it would become a bad driving tax instead, which would be preferable.

      There's nothing cops can do with drones that they can't do with helicopters. The only difference is drones are cheaper. Unless your plan to defend civil liberties relies on the cops not being able to afford enforcement, there's no reason to be worried by drones. And if your plan does rely on impoverished police departments, you've got other things to worry about.

  2. Great! by jhoegl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess Iceroad Truckers had the month off.
    I thought they would drive through anything including snow drifts. I am so disillusioned. :(

  3. Re:Man is an intriguing being... by Ironchew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Some people like to be closer to nature than others. It's a risky thing to do, but the Earth is a beautiful place, and that's fulfillment enough for those people.

  4. Re:Man is an intriguing being... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Yes we are intriguing. Other people might say the same about living in a city.
    Noise level, crowding, crime, expense, risk of getting hit by a motor vehicle, etc, etc.

    To each his own.

  5. Re:Man is an intriguing being... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or, that's where your family is from. Nome started out as a Inupiat settlement, then morphed into a Gold Rush town. Much of the population is Alaska Native and the rest are just basically crazy.

    It's an odd life, but makes more sense than living in Cleveland.

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  6. Re:Man is an intriguing being... by tomhath · · Score: 3, Interesting
    One of my favorite stories, I think from Farley Mowat, is about a group of sociologists who were studying people in remote fishing villages accessible only by small boat along the coast of Newfoundland. One elderly woman they talked to had never in her life been away from the town where she was born. She'd never heard of New York City; they tried to describe it to her - millions of people living in buildings hundreds of feet tall. In response she shook her head and thought out loud "I can't imagine why so many people would want to live so far away from everything".

    I fail to see the reason why I would want to live there.

    You and than old woman are the same...

  7. Re:Man is an intriguing being... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Exactly. if you want to be close to nature come to a state like AK where it's blanket white wherever you see and land is cheap so you can own your own bog and have as much nature as you desire. my GF's family own their own bog up near Fairbanks and i just love going up there to spend a week because i can sit on the front porch and enjoy my lunch while watching a herd of caribou graze not 60 feet from my seat. Of course you gotta watch the Polar Bears on the back patio, the grandkids have been fed to them so so long they park their little fat asses on the back patio not 10 feet from you and if you don't throw them a snack they start growling at you "Hey asshole, I'm right here and if you don't feed me some dog food, then you're next. WTF? What's a endangered species gotta do to get some of those calories man?". If its something they really love like a can of Alpo or a steak, they might take it out of your hand and leave the hand alone. Then again, they might not.

    Its really beautiful country with miles and miles of unspoiled wilderness you can enjoy, fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, or just being hypothermic with a survival suit and sleeping bag on a cold afternoon, its just nice, if your survive that is. It also only stops snowing a couple of days a year and almost never melts except under the houses so its a hell of a lot colder than a New York City hooker. How them folks live in those big cities is just beyond me, hell you have people dressing like it was Halloween pretty much every day of the year.s Right now, there's hardly a soul in site, just the sun barely above the horizon and 60 mph winds. I'll take that over traffic jams any day of the week.

    There, I made it a bit more topical.

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  8. Perpetual "eye-in-the-sky" by wisebabo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?