Navy Drone Wanders Into Restricted Airspace Around Washington | Hacker News Reader

Navy Drone Wanders Into Restricted Airspace Around Washington

nytimes.com

24 pointsph0rque22 comments

I think it is cool that it is semi-autonomous.

I don't think it is cool that the US military is using it for law enforcement operations in Central America.

Can't wait until the US starts blanketing various countries with drones. Excellent precedent.

I understand Foucault observed that imperial countries tended to bring their methods of colonial control back to control their home populations, in a sense colonizing themselves. Similarly, it seems like it's only a matter of time before this ubiquitous surveillance and automated enforcement are used in developed, democratic countries.

Well the British Empire isn't exactly as large as it was in its imperial days but London could be fairly accurately described as ubiquitously surveillanced, perhaps moreso with CCTV than mere (ha) UAVs would allow, since the CCTV cams permeate urban canopies (buildings).

I was impressed (not in a good way) by this news:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/web-used-to-trac...

CCTVs seem to be quite ubiquitous indeed.

Can't wait until the US starts blanketing various countries with drones. Excellent precedent.

But when the drones invade the US, the gun nuts will finally have something to do!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come

Additional info on The Register: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635807

Reminds me of an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex...

You're thinking of 2nd Gig.

Unmentioned in this story: what happened when a low-flying aircraft entered restricted airspace around DC? Did they already know it was this wayward drone, either by transponder or the drone's ground crew informing them?

Actually, this question was addressed by the best line in the story: The Navy did not describe the scene inside the ground station as operators sought to re-establish control with the drone.

The ground station was where the operators were controlling (or not, as it happened) the drone from. It wasn't the place air traffic was being monitored or where reactions to a blip in restricted airspace would be determined.

I wonder, how much damage could you actually do with that drone? I mean, if it isn't armed then there isn't much too this story - failures happen all the time.

But failures don't always go for a 23-mile joy-ride into restricted airspace. That's kinda cool.

As to damage, given the size, probably not a whole lot if it just died and fell. Might kill someone who's incredibly unlucky. But consider if it flew around at a really low altitude: power lines, people, windows, all in range of the blades. Given that it went 23 miles on its own, having working ground-avoidance software isn't an unreasonable assumption.

From the article: it "was flying at 2,000 feet".

I see no reason to assume it would have any ground-avoidance software besides flying higher if it detects it's near the ground.

And when something's glitching? Say an avoid-ground routine and a go-down routine, plus some sort of importance measurement (very near ground? go up fast). All reasonable in a self-piloting machine.

Now say the go-down routine gets abnormally high importance, or fires off a million times per second.

Unlikely? Yes, but so is what happened. And I specifically included "consider if", because it's not what happened, but could conceivably, and was probably one of the panicked fears going through their heads.

Even small private aircraft have GPS chart plotting terrain avoidance these days

A 600 lb helicopter landing on your house would do significant amounts of damage.

Depends on how concentrated the weight is and how hard it hits. Most roofs can handle a bunch of 200 pound roofers working on them, or tons of snow, without any difficulty.

Or a parking lot, street or intersection.

Let's put that Chevy 'Like A Rock' slogan to the test!

And so skynet begins.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Funny joke.

But I'm pretty sure this reinforces how far away our robot overlords still remain.

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