The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle 222
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."
Swat it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Swat it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Swat it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
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.
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
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
I've always thought of the Pentagon as a building, you know... one of those huge things you can actually enter. Thirteen inches seem a bit small for that.
The concept of a hovering Pentagon is cool, however. Nukes are so Cold War, in 2005 it has to be a flying office building.
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
The smaller the plane, the harder it is to control. They already have planes way smaller than that and also helicopters but good luck using them outside because even a slight breeze will make them damn near impossible to control.
The only solution to the problem I can see is if we embed a microcontroller or something that can quickly compensate for the wind like insect
Re:Swat it? (Score:2, Interesting)
An amazing amount of electronics has to fit in a very tiny area. Things like cameras, GPS, flight control, servos, batteries, etc... all add up. The batteries are pro
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
Sean
Re:It has to be big enough... (Score:2)
Re:I Think The Navy Forgot Some Stuff (Score:2)
If possible, put a system in so that, coupled with GPS, and a second reading (from a different angle), they can pinpoint the exact position of something on the ground? You know, for goodies like cruise missles/smart bombs (instead of actually getting someone close enough to laser designate)
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
(Strangely apropos in light of the "I for one..." comment...)
Re:Swat it? (Score:2)
On another note, this kind of reminds me of the movie "Toys" with Robin Williams.
Yesterday's News (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that's stale.
Glass Half Full, Really (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Re:Yesterday's News (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:A neat little toy... (Score:2)
It'll probably just buzz about your cities, looking for 'terrorists'. I din't think it'll have the speed to keep up with a ship, especially a warship.
Frankly, I don't quite see its use on ships. It seems to be programmable to follow a certain GPS path, filming things. Very useful for keeping an eye on the population, perfectly useless on ships.
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...
Re:A neat little toy... (Score:2)
Re:More importantly... (Score:2, Insightful)
First, it's not a paper airplane, it's probably made of a bunch of exotic l
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.
Re:Privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is pretty much the rest of the world thanks to your idiot of a President!
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Which is pretty much the rest of the world
Hey, during the last two weeks I've been basically walled off by a couple of coworkers who decided my radical stance on the Schiavo case -- the courts have determined that the medical report is accurate and that the husband's assessment of her wishes is the best available -- means I'm unamerican. Lots of talk about the "culture of life" as opposed to my "culture of death."
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Staple him to the ground, leaving him unable to move, to speak, to do anything. Feed him through a tube and keep him from dying through an unholy conglomeration of machines. If he's not a veggie, after 15 years he'll be ready to begging for death.
I had more to say, but the "right to life as a hollow undead corpse" movement has brought out the worst in me. Their hypocrisy stings.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly you've never been to one of my family picnics!
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Don't need a carrier for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't need a carrier for this? (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:Read a little further... (Score:2)
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...
Re:Scales a little off? (Score:2)
Absolutely true. In fact, the best thing you can do is grab a nearby member of the opposite gender who knows your name, exclaim each other's names loudly and with emotion, have a brief but emotional dialog about seeing each other when this is all over, then run for cover.
Although this will almost certainly
Re:Scales a little off? (Score:2)
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.
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
Nobody cares (Score:2)
so many answers....
How about it's mother?
(ha-ha)
how about it's inventor?
(especially if it's the end of the DOD due to a lucky shot)
how about it's user?
(imagine, you go military, and get to play with this kinda hardware- hell, that's whattid cause me to sign up- excellent hardware toys- and you lose it, it's like losing a great laptop)
budget freaks
(how do we spend X billion a month there anyway)
Re:Design flaws? (Score:2)
My first thought on seeing the picture was that the top-front wing area looks a whole lot like an array of solar cells. Wouldn't work too well at night, but during the day could give enough power to significantly extend the flight time.
Next, teach it to recognize humans.. (Score:2)
Re:Next, teach it to recognize humans.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Next, teach it to recognize humans.. (Score:2)
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)
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!
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:2)
Marxism is a formula for peace (To each according to their needs etc). (Read what the Pope said about marxism - interesting given his role in defeating it.
Education - particularly of the under-priveledged is the single-most effective tool for peace.
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
Suffecient to participate fully in one's society
AIK
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:2)
Simple Math supports the original poster. Modern well equipped Military is able to operate with greatly reduced loss of life.
More people died on the shores of France in one day of a WWII, than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. This is the result of a Modern military.
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).
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
Well, if you're going to include the last 100 years, you'd probably want to consider the influence of Britain, France, Germany, the Soviets, and so on. The current state of affairs is driven as much or more by the untidy un-doing of post-(European)-colonial effects than anything else. Obviously, if the the region didn't have so much oil (which Europe, Asia, and everybody else also like to buy), the parties at each others' throats in that region wouldn't h
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
Except that where Britain historically left colonies behind, we leave democracies and busy economies with which we have to compete. See Germany, or Japan as examples. See the newly chosen presidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Being a "super power" is nice, except that everyone wants everything from us, hates us when we do anything, hates us when we do nothing, hates us even when we do what they want, a
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
That is just dumb.
Re:Balance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
But you're implying it. The reason we had to go into Afghanistan is because the (mostly foreign, and foreign-funded) group of extremist Islamist punks (remember the Taliban?) that was running the country through killings and oppression refused to cough up the guy that was responsible for those attacks. They weren't just temporarily hiding him, they were in a mutually supportive relationship with him. The Taliban and Al Queda were both parasites on the people of Afghanistan,
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
And if you say "terrorists", I'll point and laugh at you for being so afraid of a paper tiger(in military terms).
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.
Re:Balance? (Score:2)
Go read a history book, moron. These folk hate you for what you have done to them over the past 50 years. These things haven't been covered by Hollywood, so it's doubtfull you know of them. If you believe that "they hate freedom", I really have to ques
Re:U.S. government has been an instigator of viole (Score:2)
After the Second World War was the Cold War. This was a conflict, sometimes "hot," over, essentially, the future of civilization. It involved the more democratic west facing down oppressive, totalitarian communism, and succeeding. The US military is now, as a function of the US population and economy, much, much smaller than it was while being built up to stare down the Soviets and their attempts to make the rest of the world operate under the thumb of their happy, pr
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.
Re:Poor performance (Score:2)
Re:Poor performance (Score:2)
If I am interpreting their verbage correctly, the AC's first sentence is exactly right. Having a cheap eye in the sky that might notice the next crop of knuckleheads loading dynamite into their boat around the bend in the river would be very useful. If all it does
Powerconsumption (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Powerconsumption (Score:2)
Congratulations thought on not only RTFA, but reading the related links.
A representative will be by shortly to remove your account.
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
Swatting expenses increase over time.. (Score:2)
Or, like the poster, you might only have time to think only once before swatting becomes expensive. Better to just swat immediately.
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)
Payload (Score:2, Funny)
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?
Re: That's Incredible (Score:2)
I vaguely vaguely remember that episode (I was probably around 7-8 years old)
As usual, anything that took place in the B.G. era ("Before Google") is difficult to find informati
Re:Wasp of Old (Score:2)
The Wasp and lots of other really neat, really funky stuff along the same lines can be found at this page. [vectorsite.net]
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
Think twice? (Score:2)
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.
blown away? (Score:2)
Then again, maybe that little engine puts out such a buzzing that you can here it for miles unless you have the cover from the so
University of Florida... (Score:2, Informative)
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)
Re:Make magazine (Score:2)
First, pick up some Depron or similar foam insulation material from Home Depot.
Second, get some of the free airplane plans that are available on the internet, such as:
ahref=http://www.tornlogic.com/avov/st1.pdf [slashdot.org]http:// www.tornlogic.com/avov/st1.pdf>
Or, if you simply have to have the "Wasp" look, try this one:
ahref=http://rharazin.tripod.com/models/F3/f3_over view.html [slashdot.org]http://rharazin.tripod.com/models/F3/f3_o verview.html>
Then take apart a broken CDR
Re:Make magazine (Score:2)
Re:What's the point for the Navy? (Score:2)
You can put up a *lot* of these for the cost of a single fighter, they're a lot less prone to notice, and they can get camera angles a fighter