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New Bird Shaped Drone Shown at Security and Defense Trade Show
garymortimer writes "SHEPHERD-MIL, a UAV which looks like a native bird with the same flight performance, will be featured at HOMSEC 2013. This UAV is characterized by the glide-ratio and noiseless motor that make it invisible, silent and unobtrusive in sensitive missions. SHEPHERD-MIL is equipped with cameras and geolocation software. The system is especially suitable for border surveillance missions, firefighting, and anti-drug trafficking operations amongst others."
"Bird-shaped"
The way it's written now, I parsed this at first as "Some new bird shaped a drone that is shown at a security and defense trade show".
Everyone knows that fires are blind to birds. Their one natural enemy.
http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/adjectives_compound_adjectives.htm
Why would you disguise a UAV as a bird if you want to use it for firefighting? Also, it's just a press release infomercial, some guys want to put their hand in the military money jar so they put some feathers on a remote controlled airplane. Awesome... not!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I suspect that many innocent birds will start being killed by criminals as a result of this.
quote: "The system is especially suitable for border surveillance missions, firefighting, and anti-drug trafficking operations amongst others."
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
French manufacturers of the worlds most popular UA have plainly run into problems. They issued a statement yesterday:- AR.Freeflight 2.2 was removed from iTunes last month due to the need for patentsâ(TM) clarification on accelerometer and absolute control...
In a couple of years time I donâ(TM)t believe anyone will be left flying UAS with conventional RC gear when the smartphone in their pocket will be able to cope.
It's talking about a way of controlling RC aircraft using your smart phone with a map-view control system rather than using a standard stick-controller to control the plane's pitch/yaw/roll using the control surface actuators directly. It's a shame that even software to do basic things like this has to deal with patent crap. Boo software patents!
Its not necessarily the shape or the noise that give UAVs (and other such aircraft) away. Its the propeller and the high frequency modulation of radar or its optical signature that gives these away.
Have gnu, will travel.
If they're truly wanting to make the thing "look" like a bird, they need to model a bird's flying style. Predators move around an area and search; if these just stay in the same spot or even evenly patrol an area it's going to stand out.
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
How low can you go? This is the most idiotic idea alive. This is extremely bad for the local native bird populations.
The summary you moron
Call me paranoid, but the camouflage of this bird only works against low-tech opponents. So it's only useful against wet-backs, smugglers and other criminals. Plus, the general public.
TCAP-Abort
I imagine this would be quite useful for drug trafficing. (At least for high value per pound drugs.) I am surprised they can get away with suggesting that use in a press release though.
Because, after all, you wouldn't want the fire to know it was being watched.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That bird is not flapping its wings!
How long before paranoid terrorists and militants start killing anything that looks like the harmless and peaceful avian population?
Won't somebody rid me of this albatross ?
In NSA America social networks join you!
Sorry but battery tech makes this thing useless for anything but very VERY short recon runs. Like 10 minutes MAX flight time. Until we invent cold fusion reactors all of this stuff is nothing more than engineering masturbation. Awesome concepts and builds, we lack the technology for a power supply to run it long enough to be of any real use other than a demo
How dumb do you think we are?
Interesting. Wonder if a drone detection system could be put together using the magnetron and power supply from a microwave oven as the illumination source.
The idea would be to mod the power supply to give stable, well filtered HV to the magnetron, radiate using a dish antenna (lots of wifi dish antennas out there for 2.45 GHz) and look at the return signal for high frequency modulation characteristic of a propeller. Filtering the return for F>10Hz or so should get rid of most natural modulation effects. Hummingbirds excepted.
Using a dish brings its own problems with narrow beam and having to scan. Maybe an omnidirectional system using a quarter wave vertical antenna above a ground plane? Free space wavelength at 2.45 GHz is about a foot, so a quarter wave stub is only about 3 inches high. You would want to mount the antenna on a mast so it didn't expose nearby people to the RF. Maybe pulse the illuminator to give ranging info?
Plastic props might be detectable. They won't reflect like a metal prop would, but they do have a refractive index different from air, so there will be an index step reflection. Carbon fiber props should give a quasi-metallic reflection signature. Metal parts (which includes wiring harnesses, etc.) in the drone should generate returns, but they won't be modulated by the props, so LF-reject signal processing won't help.
This seems doable. Therefore, somebody will do it.
The Gun Grabbing continues
http://xrepublic.tv/node/2921
I know this hasn't hit ya yet, cause maybe ya haven't heard yet.
Shrinks are now gun grabbers. LIE on your medical shit forever forward.
Better yet, stay out of the system/tornado or it will suck you in.
... why nobody's made a drone with the profile of a vulture. In the US, at least, some species of vulture is common in most areas. They're big (so there's room for interesting hardware, and perhaps even a grenade-sized glide bomb), they're black (so no need to worry about mimicking particular coloring), and they don't flap. They also ride thermals; it shouldn't be that hard to program a drone to sense updrafts and use them to stay aloft.
..all large birds of prey in the middle east suddenly hunter to extinction in frenzy of paranoia.
Birds have enough problems without being always shot at on sight because they might be spies.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...for that touch of authenticity
Table-ized A.I.
Nobody will suspect a bird flying over their house. This is perfect for spying on you! :)
Well, actually... it's a little of both.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
As soon as people suspect being watched by one of these things, they'll just start shooting birds at random. So maybe they should make them look more like pigeons instead of some of the more rare species out there.
Oh, and paint the messenger pigeons yellow.
Expect to find lots of dead cranes now. Make your next drone look like a drug trafficker, and the problem solves itself (unless the purpose was to spy on ordinary citizens).
I fly RC quite a lot, and it's not uncommon for birds of prey, gulls and magpies to attack model planes. Magpies, especially when broody and you are near their nest, will attack relentlessly. A mate has a plane that's shaped and painted to look like a hawk, and he reckons he gets twice as many attacks when flying it compared with his more conventional rigs.
So I wonder what the lifespan of these things will be?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Because UAVs have uses in fire-intelligence, and this is a UAV.
Learn to love Alaska
It's only enemy is Elmer Fudd and the Duck Dynasty boys.
I was expecting a little more. It looks like its just a standard model airplane with a little reworking of its controls so it can operate without a rudder and a high resolution camera. I highly doubt it would look very convincing in a real world situation. Maybe flying off in the distance it might fool someone for a bit but once it was overhead it would become apparent pretty quickly that it wasn't using its wings naturally for control & propulsion.
In the borderlands there was a bounty on ravens; no one there ever dared assume any raven was just a bird.
with so many drones to come to our skies, it won't be long before Google Earth and it's Street View feature go "Real Time."
Welcome to the real "Second Life."
is if the drone got pecked to death by real birds.
"But the birds will loose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline."
"Oh, and some of the birds will be spy bots, too" -- Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind
looks like Hawk or Falcon - all raptors Federally protected.... :)
and by the way, heard this at a Birding convention in Tacoma - Eagle tastes like Spotted Owl.
jk
Depends on the the number of Wind Turbines in the area.
I think i read about this in the hunger games.
The main difference from the "real" thing is these emit radio waves which are easily detected and tracked.
In every single fantasy novel I've read, in which the antagonist demi-god was clairvoyant through an avian medium (usually ravens or crows because the dark one is so totally goth) there was an outstanding bounty on the vile critters. Imagine if the dark eye was a keystone species? There aren't many birds in the desert, for example, and those falcons and hawks are usually *absolutely necessary* for the ecosystem.
A hawk? I'm not impressed. A 35-foot pterodon, now we're talking! Plus one that big could carry missiles, huah!
http://rocketdungeon.blogspot.com/2012/02/remember-smithsonians-flying.html
http://www.edgeascension.com/index_files/Page2570.htm
http://www.edgeascension.com/index_files/image2497.jpg
"Man, that bird has the biggest dong I've ever seen! Wait, that's not a...[KABLOOEY!!]