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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.
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
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
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
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.
Won't somebody rid me of this albatross ?
In NSA America social networks join you!
And I hope many guilty drones by hunters who were hoping for a trophy.
It's just so win-win...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I hope many guilty drones by hunters who were hoping for a trophy.
It's just so win-win...
Its not drone season.
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.
It's always drone season (*cocks shotgun*).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... 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.
How are you going to hit a vulture hundreds of feet in the air? Spray rounds at it with an AK47 until one of them just happens to hit?
Many large raptors don't flap when hunting -- in the USA, red-tailed hawks, bald and golden eagles, turkey vultures...
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.
"What is Man that thou art mindful of Him?"
It's a plot by George 10 to have people get used to robots before they take over.
...for that touch of authenticity
Table-ized A.I.
Well, actually... it's a little of both.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm waiting for the drones to get more miniaturized, as my current drone defense system can handle sparrows and tits. He did bring in his first starling yesterday, but I doubt he'll ever get whatever poop bombardment device the drone in TFA is supposed to masquerade as.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
I'm waiting for the drones to get more miniaturized, as my current drone defense system can handle sparrows and tits.
If a DARPA project could get drones to look like tits, would you really want to sic your cat on them? Some things you just have to handle yourself, especially if they turn out not to be drones..
Because UAVs have uses in fire-intelligence, and this is a UAV.
Learn to love Alaska
counter intuitive logic actually. If they look like pidgins, that people will be more likely to accidently shoot at them, and no one gets mad at anyone for shooting pidgins.
If you make them look like Bald Eagles, our national bird AND endagered speices, it'd make rounding up anyone who shoots them that much easier. Shoot a Bald Eagle by mistake and they'd have a very serious charge to throw at you, and will win you few symathies, either from patriots on the right, or conservationists on the lef.t
That said, I could not imagine that shooting at drones would be smart. It'd instantly alert the authorities, and they'd have just cause of arresting you right then and there, and sort the rest out later for damaging government property. They'd also have ballistics from whatever gun you used.
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.
Unlikely. The bullet is likely to blow right through the bird, and land somewhere over-thataway.
You don't actually get all that much ballistic info from the bullet hole....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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
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.
If you could shoot a drone out of the sky with a shotgun, color me impressed. I'd think it's not impossible, but highly improbable.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
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
You know the old saying, if at first you don't succeed... you need a bigger shotgun.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.