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DARPA Wants Help Building a Drone That Flies Like a Hawk
DillyTonto writes DARPA has put out a call for ideas on how to build a fast, autonomous, maneuverable UAV that can fly up to 45 mph, navigate without assistance from humans or GPS into and through buildings that are a labyrinth of stairwells, small rooms, narrow hallways and terrorists. DARPA wants this drone to fly like the bird in this awesome hawk POV video that shows it shooting through gaps narrow enough it has to tuck its wings to get through. If you can watch the video without thinking of the forest moon of Endor, there may be some movies you should watch over the holidays.
Bird brains don't calculate the physics from first principles, and that's not really necessary even for a robot. The key is a fast feedback loop: am I falling? Do that thing that increases the lift from my wings a bit; am I going up too much? Decrease lift; am I going to break my wings off on that tree that's coming up in 0.6 seconds? Increase lift a bit for 0.4 seconds then tuck wings in; etc. etc. I think the key difficulty here will be realtime object recognition, made harder by rapidly changing lighting conditions, and maybe obtaining fast and accurate enough response from the actuators / motors. The image processing problems mean this is probably a good role for lidar but I'd imagine you'd still need some specialist custom silicon to keep everything within the size and power constraints of a hawk (and lidar does introduce a signature issue that the military might prefer to avoid).
Just what we need. When they can stamp this out for pennies, they will truly be able to spread 'democracy' to every corner of the earth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are present day computers powerful enough to calculate the physics for that
That is only needed during the design and testing, when a lot of CFD simulations will be needed. But once the bird is deployed, it will just use a lookup table. When you are walking down the street, you don't use physics to calculate the exact length of stride to optimally place your foot. Instead, you just take a step more-or-less like the last one, and then compensate any over/under stride on the next step.
Having working in the incestuous realm of DARPA, what I can tell you is that somebody already has a proof of concept pretty much ready to go. Since I have to be billed as "fair" they put out the RFP (with a ridiculously short deadline - which is no problem for the folks with the almost working prototype). This company is in cahoots with the DARPA PM, who in all probability worked at that company in the not too distant past.
This is how it is at DARPA.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is typical DARPA MO. I don't know when the RFP was issued, but they are known for ridiculously short lead times - because the reason the RFP exists at all is because someone has a working (or damn close to it) prototype.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.