$10M For Unmanned Aircraft That Can Perch Like a Bird 176
coondoggie writes "Unmanned aircraft maker AeroVironment got an additional $5.4 million to further develop a diminutive aircraft that can fly into tight spaces undetected, perch and send live surveillance information to its handlers. Last Fall, AeroVironment, got $4.6 million initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the Stealthy, Persistent, Perch and Stare Air Vehicle System (SP2S), which is being built on the company's one-pound, 29-inch wingspan battery-powered Wasp unmanned system."
I can see it now.. (Score:5, Funny)
Deploy: Lazorbeak. Mission: Scout Terrorists.
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Well, that was how I remember spelling it. Technically, we are both correct. So, meh.
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Aye, both are correct [wikia.com].
Transformers did it first (Score:5, Funny)
And their robot bird could turn into a cassette tape too. For easy playback, no less.
How awesome was that?
Re:Transformers did it first (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but where is the Army going to get a Cassette Player these days?
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That might be one way to keep your expensive playback device from being stolen. I mean, who would want one these days?
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eBay?
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Nowadays you'd need a separate transformer to be able to turn into a cassette player to play it back, good luck finding one elsewhere!
Something does amuse me about the fact an ultra-high tech. robot of the future would turn into a cassette of all things though.
Might as well have optimus prime turn into a horse and cart.
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Hold on now. When one has to transform to interface with the other, it's just adaptation. When both have to transform to interface in some unusual way, it's called a kink.
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Soundwave. [wikipedia.org] Yeah, they had that covered.
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you missed the steam punk transformers series then. congratulations.
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Might as well have optimus prime turn into a horse and cart.
No, he'd just turn into a horse. When going back to robot mode, the cart would disappear into the background until he needed to go back into beast-- er... vehicle mode.
The holographic human he uses to whip himself into running is just disturbing.
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And their robot bird could turn into a cassette tape too. For easy playback, no less.
That project would go much beyond the planned $10M.
An entire tape? at $650.000 per song in IP rights?
Hawk's Fighter did it best (Score:3, Interesting)
This definitely sounds like Lazerbeak, with the reporting to its handlers and all. BUT, in terms of cool ships that perch, there can be only one: Hawk's fighter, from Buck Rogers. That series had easily some of the coolest space tech ever, rivalling White Stars in B5 and BSG's Mk I Vipers (which were designed by the same guy). I loved that series, and BSG and all too, but Hawk's fighter (and that whole
Quoth the SP2S (Score:5, Funny)
Quoth the SP2S, "nevermore" and nothing more.
Ummm... (Score:5, Insightful)
at what point does the US military stop looking like a human defense force and start looking looking like alien invaders from a robot planet?
Re:Ummm... (Score:4, Insightful)
at what point does the US military stop looking like a... defense force and start looking looking like... invaders... ?
Surely they still teach history in schools.
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Re:Ummm... (Score:4, Insightful)
at what point does the US military stop looking like a human defense force and start looking looking like alien invaderst?
Around the 1840s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny [wikipedia.org]
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supplementary material [youtube.com]
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at what point does the US military stop looking like a human defense force and start looking looking like alien invaders from a robot planet?
Robot wars mean less human casualties. It's an important part of the path away from our animal instincts to fight each other.
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In conflicts where all the combat units are robotic, how do wars conclude? At first blood? I doubt very seriously that the prevailing army is going to stop at, "Check! Mate in 3!" If anything, the amount of collateral damage will increase, and can be blamed on "equipment failure" with a dramatic shrug from the chain of command.
Well, hopefully they go better then the cold war. During the cold war we all lived in fear and then eventually increased the planet's background radiation. The problem with the cold war was that eventually the bombs got too big!
As long as our enemy is a civilized nation; then the intelligent people on both sides know that the "military" is just a distraction for those who are less enlightened.
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The soldier can be sitting in a since comfy office complex in Kansas to perform combat duties, and go home to his wife and kids at night.
We're already there, but it's Nevada instead of Kansas. The air-force controls its un-manned drones from Nevada. (I think.) Anyway, it was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWG_mzTTzMc [youtube.com]
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This is going to create all new forms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. :(
Remote control sociopaths maybe?
Doubtful, it's too much like video games.
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How lifelike (Score:5, Funny)
Will it drop bird poop on your surveillance target? I mean how suspicious would a bird be if it didn't do that?
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Yes, it'll leak battery acid, just like my @#*!& Dell laptop.
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I hope it shits napalm, just for the coolness factor.
Re:How lifelike (Score:5, Funny)
White phosphorus powder mixed into some inert aqueous gel would make delayed action incediary bird turds. I can't think of anything awesomer.
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Nah, man... I think it's a pretty awesome idea too. Provided you were able to create an appropriately resistant chamber within the bird to contain it.
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Re:How lifelike (Score:5, Insightful)
Sooner or later, we'll want these things to do more than watch and report. Trouble is, ordinary kinetic weapons don't scale down all that well to applications where size and weight are at a real premium(gun small enough to fit in your pocket, sure, gun small enough to fit in a one pound aircraft with reasonable endurance, not so much). The only mechanisms that do scale down are toxins and pathogens, which are what pretty much all dangerous animals of that scale and smaller use.
This is, of course, a problem; because chemical and biological weapons are almost certainly not a road we want to go down(even if you don't see using them as a problem, not disturbing the general norm of not using them is likely a good idea if only for your own sake); but they'll be the only thing that fits onboard, so it'll be that or nothing. I'm not overly confident that we'll choose wisely.
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These things fly, right?
Whi
Sharks ! (Score:2)
Trouble is, ordinary kinetic weapons don't scale down all that well to applications where size and weight are at a real premium {...}. The only mechanisms that do scale down are toxins and pathogens, which are what pretty much all dangerous animals of that scale and smaller use.
Biologic weapons ? Come on ! This is /. !
You completely missed the opportunity to speculate on mounting weaponized *LASERs* on these beasts.
(And paint shark motifs on the sides of the drone)
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Kinetic energy weapons do not scale down but cutting and drilling weapons do. Equip the bird with a drill lance and a chain saw.
Of course, that works in the opposite direction also. If the bird is small enough, throwing it will not damage it but spraying it with honey or glue would be incapacitating.
Re:How lifelike (Score:5, Interesting)
To expand on this, recoiless weapons like the jeep mounted ones scale down even further. A gyrojet round would work very well on a lightweight stealthbot and give it the lethal force of an infantryman with a rifle.
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To expand on this, recoiless weapons like the jeep mounted ones scale down even further. A gyrojet round would work very well on a lightweight stealthbot and give it the lethal force of an infantryman with a rifle.
But after it fires a round, it wouldn't be a "stealth" bot anymore - IIRC, Gyrojet [wikipedia.org] rounds are even louder than conventional firearms.
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No they aren't anywhere near as loud as even a service pistol. In addtion the unavoidable crack of the projectile breaking the speed of sound occurs downrange.
Slippery slope... (Score:1)
2100 (Score:2, Insightful)
UAV pizza delivery? Airborne pizza? (Score:2)
I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
[verb] like a [animal] (Score:5, Funny)
Upon reading the title, my first reaction was that there was a meeting that went something like
In the future I expect robots that can
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--> Slither like snake: already done.
--> Prowl like lion: coming soon.
--> Fly like Eagle: been around for a century.
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Do you know there are still people who say they couldn't fly? I tell you, the sky was once filled with them!
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In the future I expect robots that can
They would fly like an eagle, to the sea, fly like an eagle and let their spirits carry them?
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- Hump like a bonobo!
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With friggin lasers on their heads.
Not man-rated? (Score:3, Funny)
A 450 gram, 29-inch wing span, battery powered vehicle ISN'T MANNED???? WTF?
Sweet babby Jebus!
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I said, Get In, *click*
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How is babby Jesus formed?
How virgin get pragnent?
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In order to maintain airspeed velocity, a manned SP2S would need to beat its wings 43 times every second, am I right?
Maybe. Is it carrying a coconut?
Took twitter a bit too seriously (Score:1)
Stainless (Score:2, Interesting)
Didn't the Stainless Steel Rat already use one?
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You could be right. But I'd really prefer an owl. (Bladerunner)
Power lines? (Score:2, Funny)
Could perch on a power line and recharge its batteries for round the clock operations. Scary.
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Assuming it wouldn't get fried out by the voltage in the line before the transformer? I doubt it could balance on something as thin as a power line though, anyways.
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It's not voltage that kills things, it's current. How you do you suppose non-cybernetic birds survive the experience?
You could probably leech some power from high-voltage AC lines with an induction loop, a rectifier, and a big-assed resistor.
Re:Power lines? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not voltage that kills things, it's current. How you do you suppose non-cybernetic birds survive the experience?
Uh, by not carrying the current at all? Touch one powerline while not grounded or connected to any potential place for the charge on it to flow and nothing will happen, touch one while grounded and you're dead. Birds don't experience any current because there's no place for the current to flow.
You're right that it's the current that kills, but in this case the birds experience neither current nor voltage, so it's an irrelevant answer.
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I meant if it tried to charge off of the power line. I don't know what the actual voltage is on residential lines, but I would imagine considerably more than the 240/440 that runs up to your house from the transformer.
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Or more correctly, it's the difference in voltage that kills things. It doesn't matter if you touch a piece of wire at 3kv (relative to the ground), as long as the rest of you isn't touching the ground at the time. That's why birds can sit happily on a high voltage power line without problems (cancer causing radiation aside :). If there are two birds sitting on different wires, and the wires are at different voltages (eg different phases in a 3 phase circuit)
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Old news.
Small UAVs May Recharge on Power Lines
http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,158240,00.html [military.com]
$10M up in smoke (Score:1)
"Dad! You won't believe what I just caught with my BB-gun!"
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-Oz
African Swallow (Score:1)
Why not a real bird? (Score:2, Funny)
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And maybe they could carry this camera [f295.org].
Military robots (Score:2)
Soon we will see swarms of poisonous digital mosquitoes, mechanical snakes with nuclear warheads, which can enter the land unnoticed, robot-fish, which enters a lake via a small river and poisons the whole lake, and so on and so forth.
Let us note now how it all started.
War robots 2 (Score:2)
The definition is simple: no military equipment without a responsible human physically attached to it.
In the 50s it would have been much easier to ban nuclear weapons while there were only few of them around, not hundreds of thousand as it is now.
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While it might be a good idea, I don't think that the main proponent / user of the technology (U.S.) would agree to get rid of them. Too damn useful. And you are right that there will come the da
Suspect we have a Robert Sheckley fan... (Score:2)
Well now that they know... (Score:2)
As a sidenote, this is a general beef I have with things like this, not just the perching (but unmanned, who'da thought?) surveillance aircraft. I'm torn between my geek
Oh please (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the sort of thing that Wyat Cenack (sp?), senior military analyst on The Daily Show, described as RFC projects. "Really F***ing Cool."
Yes, this is all cool and impressive and all, but hang on a second. Why does the US still put so much faith in technology to fix all the world's problems?
I remember reading an article in The Economist years ago about an American-developed mine clearing system. It was a huge, expensively developed, bulldozer. Er, yes, a bulldozer. It had a few bells and whistles and looked like something dropped out of an Imperial Star Destroyer, but trust me, it was just a bulldozer. Well they found that it was less effective than the tried and tested British method of a trained guy with a metal detector and a big stick poking into the ground. I'll let you guess which was cheaper and more effective.
If the British had adopted in Northern Ireland the same tactics that the USA is adopting now in different parts of the world, the troubles in Northern Ireland would still be going strong, we'd have gone as far as full on civil war, and the Brits would be looking to the UN for support because they'd have pissed off so many Irish Republicans that bomb alerts in London would be a daily occurrence.
Air strikes in residential areas? Sending in troops to act as policemen when they can't even speak the local language? What the hell are they thinking? Do they seriously think that the battle for the hearts and minds of muslims is going to be won by UAVs, robotic birds, satellites, tanks, and legions of soldiers occupying other peoples' countries as if their sovereignty counts for nothing? Do they think the reaction will be any different than their own reaction would be if Iranian troops were occupying San Diego, bursting into peoples' homes in search of militants, and calling in air strikes to wedding receptions?
They need to learn a few lessons from the British. An insurgency and a poisonous militant mindset is not defeated by a standing army. It's defeated behind the scenes by the intelligence services, by infiltration, away from the prying eyes of the media and it's done for the purpose of getting the job done, not in public for the purpose of winning votes. The only thing done in public is consistent repudiation of violence as a means of achieving political aims, education about the futility of violence and how it achieves nothing but heartbreak for all involved [youtube.com] (viewer discretion advised), and providing a peaceful political alternative to the physical force method. It's less glamorous and the boys don't get to play with their toys, but it's a lot more effective.
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Yes, this is all cool and impressive and all, but hang on a second. Why does the US still put so much faith in technology to fix all the world's problems?
Because at some point a lot of us have to go back to living in grass huts (not all bad, mind you) or we have to believe that the only way out is through.
I remember reading an article in The Economist years ago about an American-developed mine clearing system.
You should have read about this one [jmu.edu] instead. I don't know if this is the same project, but there is one with a spider robot that has bamboo legs. It steps on the mines from a distance, and loses a leg, which can be replaced.
Air strikes in residential areas? Sending in troops to act as policemen when they can't even speak the local language? What the hell are they thinking?
They're thinking about paring down the population and setting the stage to make a lot of money. Who's "rebuilding" Iraq, again?
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Apologies for reading this days later, but: I remember an episode of "Over There" (short-lived "docu-drama" on US soldiers in Iraq), in which the soldiers' mission was to break into some Iraqi's house. Turns out there was a lot of money hidden in a wall. They took it. The Iraqi came home, started shooting at the thieves, and was killed.
That episode (which was maybe ... 4 years a
Nobody likes a robotic bird (Score:2)
Why Re-invent the Wheel? (Score:2)
We have an abundant supply of birds pre-configured with BOTH perching AND the ability to fit into small places!
Just rig some mind control device to them and presto! An added side effect is camouflage as a freakin' bird!
Downside would be peta freaks.
Alternatively Birds with Freakin' Lasers attached to their heads! Muahahaha!
Would that count as biological warfare?
Extended range version (Score:2)
Please don't exaggerate (Score:2, Insightful)
I was just going to ignore this but then I noticed people modding you up. Sure missiles are expensive but not THAT expensive. I remember reading that a Tomahawk cost about $1M, and it is a very sophisticated missile with inertial and GPS guidance, long distance jet engine, variable geometry airframe and rocket booster. I seriously doubt some missiles cost "over 20 times 10 million". Not even nukes (although they *might* be in the tens of millions).
If you're talking development costs, sure that could be
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Re:10 million? Cheap (Score:4, Informative)
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AeroVironment makes some pretty neat stuff. They also make extremely high power electric vehicle chargers -- as much as 250kW.
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Actually, I've seen some RC airplanes do some pretty amazing stunts, being able to flip back to face upwards and hover on their propeller for long periods. There's some videos on YouTube of that sort of thing. There's no reason fairly cheap kit couldn't be made to land using a similar technique.
$10million is quite a bit to make it land properly on it's tail, to add surveillance to it and make it a bit more stealthy.
It's not going to be anything super long range, or anything, but at $10mill I'm betting they'
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That is the point. You will then know for sure you found the enemy.
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Well the 'bird' is for surveillance, and that means being inconspicuous. If they know where the robot is to shoot at it, then for the purposes of many missions it's already failed. A motionless bird, even one with a 29" wingspan, is much harder to spot when sitting still on a branch than when flying around.
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But still, this only works if it looks enough like a bird to be inconspicuous, AND no one sees it land in the first place.
Well my point was that once its perched then no it doesn't really need to look convincingly like a bird because nobody is going to see it. If you're looking for actual birds they can be pretty hard to find if they aren't moving; motion is typically how you spot them. You probably walk past birds this size in trees without ever knowing they are there all the time. So as long as they m
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Well you're certainly right that it'll be vulnerable to discovery when it first arrives... I imagine (in the purest sense) that they'll send it to its destination at night and have it just camp out for as long as need be.
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Already here. I worked with a professor who was into this stuff. He had UAVs which could change the color of the lower panels to whatever color the sky above them was. They were *really* hard to see.
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I thought of the short sci-fi story "The Giant Killers" which was about a small team of soldiers trying to capture the AI unit of an automated tank. They had a Heimdall system (backpack optical/radar system with speech recognition/ability) to help protect them against night-time missile/biological attacks. There were spybirds which could perch on tree branches and also circle at an altitude looking for targets, then they would inform the other systems and launch an attack themselves.