Slashdot Log In
The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Apr 07, 2005 05:00 AM
from the small-pilots dept.
from the small-pilots dept.
Victor Cheng writes "In developments that bring together a variety of technologies including robotics and digital imaging the Wasp Micro Air Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's latest tools currently in testing of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (although I'm thinking its not going to need a carrier to get this one up and flying). The 13 inch Wasp comes equipped with 2 video cameras, GPS and has a myriad of possible applications. Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Swat it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Swat it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Swat it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Swat it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I think such a thing could be built right now, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't on somebody's drawing board. American needs intelligence and loves technical fixes. If there's a technical solution to an intelligence problem, somebody's bound to be workig on it. Remember how US Navy subs tapped Soviet undersea communication cables right in their harbors?
I actually surprised they acknowledge that something this size exists. It's small enough that it is probably hard to distinguish from a sea bird.
Parent
Smaller autonomous recon vehicles (Score:3, Insightful)
The obvious early adopters of a tool like this would be Delta Force, because so much of their work involves forced
Yesterday's News (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that's stale.
Glass Half Full, Really (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Glass Half Full, Really (Score:2)
Nah, he merely meant to say that's ale - just a good ole' Slashdot typo.
Re:Yesterday's News (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Yesterday's News (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
A neat little toy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Next question, where can I get one and how much?
Re:A neat little toy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Neat civilian use... (Score:3, Funny)
It would bring an entirely new level to the
quality of trap/skeet shotgun competition.
I, for one, can hardly wait...
Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Like hell I'd pay for it. Gov't should be think twice before spying on its citizens. Especially at such a close range!
If you do swat it (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasons they build UAVs in the first place is because they can't bring agents into the area, because its still too hostile. I hardly think a family picnic is so 'hostile' as to require a UAV.
Parent
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly you've never been to one of my family picnics!
Parent
Don't need a carrier for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't need a carrier for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
If you buzzed and took pictures at my picnic (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.
Read a little further... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been waiting for these... (Score:2)
Scales a little off? (Score:5, Funny)
If its a 13 inch wasp (just over a foot), then quite frankly if something that size starts buzzing around a family picnic I doubt it would be able to hide from you all that well, and secondly I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to attack a foot-long wasp with a rolled up newspaper or magazine.
If horror films have taught us nothing it's that when freakishly large mutant insects attack (TM) you just run and hope you aren't the extra with no name who's destined to die in the first 20 minutes.
*sigh* Journalists these days...
One possible application (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One possible application (Score:4, Informative)
Spotters will only have to watch video-fragments that the sofware recognizes as being potential hits.
This could speed up and reduce cost of those search-actions a lot.
Parent
Design flaws? (Score:5, Interesting)
- What about wind? Make war only when no wind?
- My got - why do they test this on for the NAVY? I'm pretty sure, that range sucks (compared to old, but still usefull device called "radar"). I can imagine this usefull for street fights
why do they test this on for the NAVY? (Score:3, Interesting)
The most dangerous situations are when opposing forces are within close range of each other, the ability to "see" better in any situation is a distinct advantage.
Wind - Read what Sun Tsu has to say about battlefield weather.
Batteries - Handled by the supply line, if
Next, teach it to recognize humans.. (Score:2)
Re:Next, teach it to recognize humans.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Assassin weapon? (Score:2)
It can be operated from a distance, can penetrate through usual air defence and is virtualy invisible.
Re:Assassin weapon? (Score:2)
In fact I strogly dislike this idea, because someday it might be used against me.
Balance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Balance? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Balance? (Score:4, Interesting)
This technology is not 'violent' per se, any more than the Internet is 'violence-based' just because the military had a (big) hand in building it.
---
Remember, it's never to late to have a happy childhood!
Parent
Re:Balance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick question, what qualifies as money for peace?
I ask because someone repeated your exact words to me the other day and none of the things of which I could think on which we do spend money (other than making weapons or moving them and their operators around the globe) qualified as "peace."
Environmentalism, education, health care, foreign aid, etc. Whatever your take on how the current administration is shortchanging these areas for allocation
Re:Balance? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of d
Re:Balance? (Score:3, Insightful)
> lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence.
Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.
Worked out why most of the people on the planet are against the actions of the US government yet? How about reading `understanding power` or `hegemony or survival` by C
Re:Balance? (Score:4, Informative)
You're confusing tools and technology with the policies that put them to work. I think those policies are largely correct, but that's a different discussion. Once a policy decision has been made (say, to step in an help end the ethnic clensing of thousands of people in the Balkans), the newer tools and tactics of the US military achieved exactly what I'm talking about: effective use against the intended targets, and a great decrease in the side effects. If we had not spent so much money on developing those tools and training our people in their use, we'd still be having to use the approaches used in WWII. In fact, the US has so raised the threshold for expectations of minimal collateral damage as we do things like help disable the militants in Serbia and Croatia, that any slip-up of any kind is now seen as horrible. Any unintended loss of life is horrible - but we're able now to disable bad guys (even those who set up shop in mosques and schools) with a previously inconceivable surgical skill. This is different, of course, than, say, blowing up trainloads of commuters in Spain, or burning partiers alive in Bali nightclubs. But the same tools that allow us to keep equipment working in the combat field also allowed us to ferry supplies and support into the recent tsunami-damaged area well before any other sort of major relief could have helped there.
Parent
Re:Balance? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.
Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).
Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks
Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).
Parent
Poor performance (Score:4, Interesting)
I think a more viable role for it would be to spy on protesters right here in the good 'ol USA.
As for expensive, my park flyer does the same thing (well, almost) and it was $500.
Powerconsumption (Score:3, Interesting)
Surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
The main challenge is, not surprisingly, the weight. One of the trade-offs we were faced with was wether to do signal processing on the plane (requiring more CPU), or on the ground (requiring more link capacity). Another problem is that, because it is so small, it is very prone to wind, vibrations etc which have to be taken into account when post-processing
Micro Air Vehicle!!! (Score:5, Funny)
A great paper on MAV design (Score:4, Interesting)
What fascinates me about MAVs is that you can do absolute cutting-edge research on a shoestring budget. Many prototypes can be designed, analyzed, built, tested, and thrown away.
Thad Beier
Robofly (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasp of Old (Score:4, Interesting)
This "Wasp" however, was more along the lines of the old Dick Tracy trashcan flyers. "That's Incredible" even had footage of the vehicle in flight as demonstrated by Army personel. The intent was for rapid removal of injured from the battle field and for recon...mostly recon as I remember.
The details as I recall them are that the pilot stood in this large "trash can" like thing that had room for two personel (standing/limping). It could fly at tree top level at about 60 to 70mph. It was stated that the vehicle used the jet engine from a cruise missle.
The video they showed on the show showed the vehicle lifting vertically, sliding left, right and backwards as well as cruising at treetop level very quickly.
I thought that it was the coolest thing I had seen way back then. Does anyone else happen to remember this?
Oh, the humbling of naval aviation! (Score:3, Funny)
Then: "Torpedo Eight has been wiped out, sir!"
Now: "Torpedo Eight is stuck in a tree, sir!"
tone
Why Nimitz? (Score:3, Informative)
That's not all. If your test vehicle flies off and crashes, it sinks, winding up where only governments can get at it, and you probably have a recovery vehicle attached to scoop it up before anyone else does. You can position and reposition armored obstacles as needed for testing and have plenty of complex objects to find and photograph -- you don't have to build anything.
WASP (Score:3, Funny)
A 13" White Anglo-Saxon Prodestant with two video cameras and a GPS device? I agree, you're just asking for trouble coming at that with a fly swatter.
Re:Grammar Nazi Strikes Again! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent