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July 20, 2010
 

Tinkerbell and bird-like UCVs

Flowvis-top

 

Fascinating article on some work being done at MIT to create an automated algorithm that would allow an airplane to land like a bird on a wire. MIT Associate Professor Russ Tedrake, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Rick Cory, a PhD student in Tedrake's lab are pioneering the work.

While it's still very early in the development process, I really enjoyed the quote from Mr. Cory at the end of the article because it sums up the power of the creative/innovative mind:

Cory will be moving to California to take a job researching advanced robotics techniques for Disney, [but] he hopes to continue collaborating with Tedrake. "I visited the air force, and I visited Disney, and they actually have a lot in common," Cory says. "The air force wants an airplane that can land on a power line, and Disney wants a flying Tinker Bell that can land on a lantern."

And this is exactly right.

More interestingly, this also makes a strong statement about the innovativeness of Disney, which is looking at the same technology the Air Force is, only they just want to entertain people with it.

Video
Image via Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL)

Filed under  //   Air Force   Disney   MIT   UCV   airplane   aviation   biomimicry   innovation   technology   unmanned combat vehicle  

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February 21, 2010
 

The View from the Naugahyde Barcalounger

Reaper

The speed at which technological innovation is taking place and humans' and humanity's ability to cope with the resulting change is at the heart of so much of what we read int he papers today. Overexposure and overload are two words that capture much of that sentiment for me. But in my small world that often refers to keeping my Outlook Inbox clean, keeping my Google Reader feeds up to date. You know, maintaining and improving bit literacy as the streams of information become ever more prolific.

Reading this article in the LA Times about the lives of drone pilots who lead strikes in Afghanistan while sitting in nondescript buildings outside Las Vegas really paints a clear picture of this growing technological/psychological challenge. Now, I've known that we piloted drones like this for a long time, and Avatar is about the logical extension of this, but I guess it never dawned on me how hard life for these drone pilots is psychologically. As the article points out, it's one thing to ship out and go to war. It's a very different thing to commute 45 minutes and "go to war" and then commute home in the evening and go to your daughter's soccer practice. 

Of course, from an innovation standpoint, this is simply amazing but then military application has long been among the primary drivers of technological innovation. Often times the goal of that innovation is to remove soldiers from harm's way. Whether that mean crafting bows that can shoot arrows further, creating bigger artillery so you don't need to deploy as many troops to get the same job done, developing airplanes that can keep soldiers out of reach, or stealth technology that can make them invisible. All of this technology has been about removing bodies from harm's way.

The drone technology simply takes this to the extreme, although with an interesting change, which the article touches on. Drones have simultaneously moved soldiers to extreme physical safety while dramatically increasing their psychological proximity to actual action.
 
Locked in on a mission, they often forget they're in Nevada. Capt. Mark Ferstl, a former B-52 pilot, said drone pilots typically feel more intimately involved in combat than they did when they sat in actual cockpits."When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling," Ferstl said. "Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems." Nelson recalled one instance when he received an urgent radio call from a ground controller whose unit was under fire. "You could tell he was running, and you could hear shots being fired at the enemy," Nelson said. He tracked the insurgents and targeted them for two F-16 fighter planes that attacked and killed them, he said."Just hearing the voice of the [controller] running, excited, tension in his voice, just asking for any air support, anywhere, hearing the gunfire, it felt good to be able to help him out," Nelson said.

More to my point:

Though more than 95% of their missions involve gathering intelligence or watching over troops, pilots sometimes must decide whether to open fire The job also involves confirming deaths, by drone or manned aircraft. Then crew members focus on corpses and ruined buildings. "You see a lot of detail," Chambliss said. "We feel it, maybe not to the same degree as if we were actually there, but it affects us. Part of the job is to try to identify body parts.

As someone who periodically works from home, it makes me wonder how long before physical wars might be waged entirely remotely from the comforts of a soldier's home. Such abstractions are hard to fathom from a societal point of view but are clearly much closer than one might think. Is this what the new front line might look like? Is this the army of the future?

Reminds me of Toys, one of my favorite movies, which sadly was a pretty disastrous box office failure.

 

Filed under  //   Army   Avatar   military   technology  

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