A Drone Helicopter That Can Land On a Moving Truck 60
garymortimer writes with a story (the accompanying video is worth watching) of an unmanned helicopter than can automatically land on a moving surface. Though it's shown landing on a bed of a moving truck, the real purpose is for sea-based use: "This automatic system for take-off, landing and deck-landing of UAVs is the fruit of the joint expertise of Thales and DCNS. Thales is responsible for the positioning system and its interface with the UAV system, the supply of a UAV demonstrator system and slaving of the flight path along a trajectory. DCNS is responsible for predicting the vessel motions, the harpoon system as well as the interface and integration with the vessel."
I for one... (Score:1, Funny)
welcome our new Drone overlords!
Re:More war (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure what it's like in the AU, but over here on Cybertron it makes the news when one of our robots dies extraplanetarily, or even when one gets hurt, and then again when their chassis arrive back home. Too many mechanoids (eg more than 0) getting killed makes war unpopular. The press only tags along because reality TV is popular there, and we don't really hear about any of the "organics" getting killed anyway. If it was all meat-sacks on the front line then war wouldn't seem so unpopular to the average viewer... hell it would almost seem like a sport with appropriately mounted cameras and is probably less graphically violent than most recycling plants/junk yards.
Having pain-slaves on the front line could change everything.