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Army Tests Autonomous Black Hawk Helicopter
An anonymous reader writes "A specially equipped Black Hawk was recently used to demonstrate the helicopter's ability to operate on its own. In the first such test of its type, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research's Development and Engineering Center, based at Redstone Arsenal, flew the Black Hawk over Diablo Mountain Range in San Jose, Calif. Pilots were aboard the aircraft for the tests, but all flight maneuvers were conducted autonomously: obstacle field navigation, safe landing area determination, terrain sensing, statistical processing, risk assessment, threat avoidance, trajectory generation and autonomous flight control were performed in real-time. 'This was the first time terrain-aware autonomy has been achieved on a Black Hawk,' said Lt. Col. Carl Ott, chief of the Flight Projects Office at AMRDEC's Aeroflightdynamics Directorate and one of the test's pilots."
Skynet. That is all.
That means that when the US government sends them out on domestic civilian pacification/suppression/reconnaissance missions, the people can shoot them down without feeling bad about killing people. It's too bad the government does not share such reluctance.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I saw these at a kiosk at the Mall the other day.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I am sure there will be many posts about 'big brother' and the evils of the government, but I have to say....cool.
I have always been interested in robotics. This is just amazing to me. We have moved so fast (in regards to computing), I can only imagine what will be common place in the next decade.
p.s. It would be awesome if they posted the algorithms they used for this. I won't hold my breath.
This is sort of scary to me. It is as though we're living in the age of SkyNet yet most of us don't know it.
Ok, I'm seriously missing something. Is that my paranoid gene? So all tech now will be bad, because all tech can be used to kill people? Seriously?
Come on, idea of Internet was conceptually concieved by military for communication infrastructure to survive localized nuclear attack! So it must be bad too!
I'm the only one who sees beneficts of this, or drones... Or Slashdot has long time ago lost it's common, humor and cool head senses and I'm preaching to wall here?
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Good for them. Maybe they can use this to finally get the Osprey to fly as well.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Why did this AC get marked insightful while the other guy who pointed out that military tests have been VERY favorable to the objects being tested for...ohh... I'd say the last 80+ years?
What the military considers a "test" and what happens when you actually use the thing in combat conditions have been shown time and time again to be nowhere close, this goes all the way back to the mark 14 torpedo in WWII that the military said passed all the tests with flying colors, yet in reality if the thing didn't just blow up in the middle of the water because the magnetic exploder was faulty it would go completely under the target since it ran as much as 25 feet too deep or it would just clang against the hull of the ship since the contact fuse was also shit. the only good thing about it was when the damned thing turned on you you at least had just as much chance as the enemy of it turning out to be a dud, which is why we only lost two subs to it.
So if anything those ratings should be reversed, as its pretty common knowledge that with the DoD and the defense contractors so chummy the tests are rigged as much as possible to give the thing being tested a favorable outcome, be it giving the Patriot a low flying level target coming in at a known height and trajectory,, similar conditions being given to the Phalanx, hell I could sit here and list weapons that passed military "tests' with flying colors only to turn out to be crap in the field all day, its not exactly like this is a revelation here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Or sometimes last-minute changes to production are made that completely invalidate the tests.
Take the M-16, great in final tests, but soldiers were dropping like flies in Vietnam because their rifles were jamming. Turns out the Army chose a different powder manufacturer for production cartridges, and this caused fouling and corrosion of the chamber and barrel, and increased the rate of fire beyond design specs.