Micro Air Vehicles

Offwhite98 writes "Over at The Gainesville Sun they are running an article about really small planes used to watch all kinds of stuff. I am sure the common applications for these devices are pretty clear, but if you could use these for a lot of fun. Use 10 of them as flying candid cameras at a wedding or a party and you I am sure you will get interesting results." A little bigger than the Spy Fly but probably much more robust.

UAV's

[JohnHegarty]

"The planes are operated by remote control and range in cost from about $700 to as much as a couple of thousand dollars depending on the type of video equipment used. "

don't i remeber reading the air force where spending 100's of millions on uav's ... i would like to see someone shoot down 100 of these after they were droped out the window of a b52.

Buy shares!!!

[Neuronerd]

You cant possibly hire enough people to fly each of these planes if you use them for surveillance. Working in an institute that is heavily involved in modern forms of AI I can assure you that the number of crashing /dying planes will be immense.

Its really difficult to make a driving robot come back home. They always hit things or are very slow.

These planes better be really cheap! And the firms that deliver them will have to deliver them in the millions if a few hundred of them are to be in the air at any point of time.

Micro Airplanes Laboratory - Demo

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually attend class in the same building at University of FL as the micro-planes people. I attended a demonstration which was way cool.

They've developed an algorithm that can scan the horizon and auto-determine the horizon. In a side-by-side comparison between a human pilot and computer, the human could make you very sick. The vidoe jumps as the plan flys very erratically. With the computer algorithm, the plane flies smooth.

Another note, they use a PC to do the processing. The demo guy actually has an Apple laptop and runs all the video in quicktime. The PC processes the avi quicktime video, and returns the flight control info to the micro-flight airplane.

Another not, they are funded heavily by the DOD.

Another problem is fuel. The micro-planes only have enough fuel for a few times around a football field, and their range is similarly limited.

Finally, the coolest video they have is where the plane tracks a moving vehicle, and follows behind it.

Torsten

Discovery Channel covered MAVs

[NewtonsLaw]

A segment on Discovery Magazine, aired on the Discovery channel recently, covered these MAVs and showed some guy who'd fitted several of his model airplanes with cameras.

As someone who's also done this I can tell you that it's still important to have the vehicle in direct visual line of site if you want to be sure and get it back.

When looking at the world through a remote video camera without the benefit of an artificial horizon and other instrumentation, it's very easy to get a small model into a spin or spiral from which it is difficult to recover. Being able to directly see the model from the ground is the only safe way to ensure you can regain control in such situations.

The problem is one of orientation -- once you lose view of the horizon through the camera it becomes very difficult to tell what your plane is doing -- thus very difficult to feed in the proper control corrections.

If it weren't a breach of copyright I'd post the DivX video I made of that Discovery broadcast -- it was really quite interesting.

Reminds me of

[mstyne]

A tremendously slimmed down Cypher [russian.ee]... although these little guys probably won't lob grenades at you.. Wasn't there something like this in Perfect Dark [perfectdark.com]?

Cool, but...

[cachorro]

Aside from the coolness factor, I can't see how this could ever be competitive with something based on a helium balloon.

Sure a balloon couldn't manuever quite so fast, but it would have a much improved range.

Gallun, "The Scarab," 1936

[dpbsmith]

OK, now I know what's been nagging at me... in Raymond Z. Gallun wrote a story which appeared in "Astounding Stories" in August, 1936, and which I read as a kid in Groff Conklin's anthology, "Science Fiction Thinking Machines."

"The Scarab ... was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length... it dipped in its flight and its quart-lensed eyes took in the scene below.... Excited shouts and cries were detectable to the sensitive, microphonic ears of The Scarab...."

It flies miles, into the room where the Bad Guys are broadcasting an extortion request: they will kill a million citizens unless "all available radium in the country is brought to our laboratory."

"The mind that controlled the Scarab had seen and heard enough. Now it decided that the moment in which to act had come. With a whir the Scarab shot from the concealing shadows of the corner where it had hidden itself." It injects an anesthetic; the Bad Guy loses consciousness; the nation is saved.

The brilliant, crippled, wheelchair-confined detective explains "A fella can't just sit around, you know. And so I got to thinking that if I had a little radio-controlled robot to do my crook-chasing for me--well, anyway, I wrote a letter to our good friend Dr. Clyde Allison, explaining my situation... after a while the Scarab and all the controls that deliver it were delivered here.... "

Re:Cool, but...

[Jeremi]

Add a balloon to one of these, and a can of compressed helium to inflate the balloon with, and you can have the best of both worlds. Fly it to your favorite spot, inflate the balloon, hang around for as long as you like, then deflate the balloon and fly home.

Well, conceivably anyway....

Goodbye borders!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs a Cessna when you have a hundred MAVs? 100 payloads of 5 grams at $100 a gram, delivered over the Rio Grande from half a mile away...or perhaps a coordinated strike of a hundred little half-ounce plastique charges zipping in under the White House radar at 4 a.m. -- thanks, D.O.D! NOT!

So much for the parasites -- now, how can we counter-program a system to detect and take down such a threat? Maybe Star Wars on a much, much smaller scale?

Anti-bug security

[Apocalypse111]

I figure it won't be long until someone starts mentioning security and privacy concerns in this thread, much the same as in the Spy Fly thread. The potential for privacy breaches with this kind of technology (taken to its final stupidity) is mind boggling. However, there are several easy methods of maintaining your security and privacy. The first and perhaps most effective means would be to have some kind of device that generates a lot of electromagnetic waves or interference. Simply sweep a room with a big electromagnet and you will either short the bug out or pull it right onto the thing for you to crush, contain, whatever. Second would be an EMP device. Such a device would be decidedly more effective and thurough than an electromagnet, but I think its a bit impractical because of the side effects. Sure, you'd short out any bugs that might be spying on you, but you'd be reduced to either magnetically shielding everything you own or living like the Amish. A third option would be to introduce some kind of predator. Either develop countermeasure bugs or natural predators that prey on the look-alike species. A countermeasure bug would merely have to home in on transmitting sources to find their targets. Natural predators wouldn't be as good, though, as they wouldn't adhere to any schedules for debugging, and you would also have to care for and clean up after them, etc. I'm sure there are other means out there as well, but this is all I could think of at the moment.