Sanctions Or Not, Iranian Competition Yields Successful UAVs 147
garymortimer writes with word of the result from a high-tech student competition that doesn't come with sponsorship from DARPA or Mobil — far from it. Instead, the sponsors include "military and non-military organizations" within Iran. "In this competition, participants must provide a UAV equipped with a camera to search a 10 square kilometer area for at least 40 minutes to find 3 square meter marks on the ground with different English letters on them. Finding ground targets and reporting the geo location are criterion for choosing the contest winner." (This article updates another from last year, which gives some more details about the competition.)
Comment Subject: (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the things the Middle East is very good at. The Portuguese have a word for it: Desenrascanco [cracked.com], which basically means the quick and dirty solution that's thrown together at the last minute and/or from what's on hand.
We saw this innovation in Libya, including some humorous military innovations such as the Bread Helmet [perspy.com] and some far less humorous things like technicals, anti-air turrets, etc. Iran saw how effective the US's drones were and they want some of their own. They saw how effective stuff like DARPA is, so they do the same thing. Of course, Iran has the advantage of coming late to market so they can get all of the component parts much, much easier.