Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and land on a moving target
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
But if that happened today, we could minimally start getting inflatable lifeboats out to the people, supplementing afterwards with blankets for heat, life preservers, food, and so on. If you kept some on the ship in a slightly similar tragedy, the drones could offship as the sinking is happening and then immediately deliver goods to survivors. This last option seems more useful.
Weight: 9.5 pounds each.
They're not for long term use, but it would have kept people out of the water until proper rescue boats arrived.
Obviously these didn't exist back in 1912, but then again, neither did these drones.
They wouldn't save the boat but could help people in the water and don't weigh much.
Not sure the technology then for self-inflating boats for people to get out of the cold water, but today you could make self-inflating rafts under 20 pounds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1561604/Key-that-cou...
[0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-nav...
Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves.
Third. Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy.
And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess.
Not really, Where it matters, radars have been deployed that can easily find those things. I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. IIRC it was a SAR system, but I'm not sure.
> Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves.
There are newer, weaker versions that are at ~$1/shot, that would still likely take down your average drone. Also, even $600 is not "far more" expensive than a modern drone that can carry things across the border; It is slightly more expensive, but (relatively speaking), super cheap and, since it is energy, fungible (that is, you don't spend it until you spend it, unlike e.g. missiles which have to be ready long beforehand)
> Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy.
That's the popular belief, but it is not actually true. A perfect mirror such as would be required would cost today significantly more than the drone itself, as in x10 to x100, if it is at all feasible (You can't have sharp edges, you likely need glass).
It is currently infeasible to mirror-cover missiles or rockets that cost a lot more than the drone, and the problems are (mostly) not about the projectile speed or heat.
> And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess.
Lasers can blind cameras even better than they do human eyes. What sensors is this autopilot going to depend on when it is vision and GPS blinded?
Yup, long stare SAR hooked up to a DVR was a thing over 10 years ago - it could cover a lot of ground (like a large Iraqi city) with a resolution that would easily detect this drone.
Not - one drone. A drone in the air 24/7 every 5km for a border ~2000 km long.
But even if you need a drone every 5km (you don't). That's all of 400 drones, 800 if you want to have pairs doing charge-work duty. For an 2000km border guarding operation, that's really not much. An order of magnitude or two cheaper than the fence they would guard.
That's probably worse than those drones watching from above, seeing as you'd need actual infrastructure at every interval. And, that'd be fixed infrastructure, with fixed blind spots.
What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
We just, as a society, have decided that the social cost is not worth it.
Where are you getting that $600 number? The laser in the article quoted is 150kW, which firing for a fraction of a second would be no more than a few dollars electricity.
Now Trump might actually think it's a good idea - and I actually think he does - so that's absurd. But realistically it operates as a political beacon, and one that's quite effective.
Celestial navigation by imaging the sky, and combining that data with a clock and compass.
http://gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-the-crp...
> CRPAs work by exploiting spatial diversity; that is, making use of the fact that the desired satellite signals, and the unwanted jamming signals, generally arrive from different directions. In simple terms, you create a spatial filter, one that removes signals that arrive from particular directions, whilst letting through signals from other directions. To achieve this, rather than use a single antenna, we use an array of antenna elements.
Off-the-shelf open source consumer drone flight controllers already have enough sensors to achieve what you suggest.
I expect the same effect for drug or people trafficking. While no barrier will stop everyone, and there are already drones and submarines designed for crossing well-protected borders, even fairly simple obstacles will stop or deter the majority of traffickers.
You have issues with weather affecting coverage but it would be a lot cheaper than a massive ineffective wall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
One of many many reasons. While it's sufficient, it's far from the top of the list.
We gunless, pot smoking, socialized medicine, immigrant accepting countries are on the "outside".
I do say that with tongue in cheek.
How is it refueled after landing hundreds of miles away?
That's on 260 million cars, or an accident rate of something like 1.3% on a yearly basis (unfortunately, this masks the fact that ~70% of those accidents are done by < 10% of drivers. So plenty of people are, frankly, just plain insane and have double digit accident rates).
That, we find perfectly acceptable. Drivers that crash cars about once a year are not that rare. And it's not like these people are the ones having minor accidents. Maybe it's just me but ... weird how people's sense of risks work.
A lot of people find risks acceptable if it is them causing it.
New risks however are alarming, and do trigger the fearful 'better not try that in case the worst happens' response in a lot (the majority?) of people - this probably makes sense as a survival mechanism.
We're comfortable with known risks, but new risks are scary.
You start with ten points that you lose with infractions, more points for more serious ones. If you run out of points, you don't drive or face jail.
First off, it is much too lenient and the points drop off your record much too quickly. Most infractions can be reduced in court and many crashes (especially single car crashes) don't result in infractions unless they are serious.
Secondly, those people will just drive unlicensed anyway, so it really doesn't matter if we take their license away or put them in jail for a month, they already don't follow the rules and don't give a shit. There's nothing physically preventing someone unlicensed, uninsured, or unfit to drive from climbing into an vehicle, starting the engine, and driving on public roads. The only thing that can deter them is getting arrested after the fact, but that's pretty rare.
My dad lost his licence years ago (for good reason) and a judge has denied his application to get it reinstated many times (for good reason). He still drives all the time and still crashes his truck fairly regularly. Sure, he gets arrested once in a while, but that doesn't stop him.
Points and permit revoking are the way to fast-track what otherwise would be administrative sanctions, clustering them to build a criminal case.
There isn't much appetite for points systems in the US because points systems just enrich the state and insurance companies at the expense of commuters because our laws about how traffic should work are so detached from what traffic actually does.
I won't even address "non-terrible parts of the US" nonsense.
At the moment you don't have a choice if some idiot cobbled some crap together in his basement, attached a load to it and decides to place it way over top of you in the sky.
Except I don't drive and I got hit by a car (it backed out into a main road over the pavement (UK) without checking mirrors properly and hit me.
Do I also have a choice about going outside my front door?
Emergency deliveries in rural areas are where this will be most useful. Getting medicine and mechanical parts to remote places during crisises is hard.
My bet: the military/security/coast guard, for far off service posts (like when they put hydro wires way out in the middle of nowhere), offshore Oil, and for very specific things (i.e. medical equipment) for remote communities.
There is room for this in the supply chain of many firms. There’s a lot of industries where waiting for something can be very expensive.
Most companies and their parts suppliers are in cities, wherein there are any number of efficient modes of transportation - to the point wherein 'a drone' wouldn't even make logical sense, let alone economic.
There's going to be a considerable overhead associated with operating them - control centers, NOCs, etc. etc. so it might very well be that the 'lack of a human' is the real differentiating factor, i.e. safety, risk.
Nobody is going to be flying 'fresh ingredients' anywhere on those drones, there are regular planes for that as well.
So the use case of 'landing on a moving sheep' is probably right up their alley: it's remote, far, and landing on a moving ship is very dangerous. So it might be the killer use case for something like this. Remember the ship would have to be fitted with a permanent lading spot, trained crew etc. etc. so it would have to be used for something needed consistently.
This is critical, as it's almost impossible to hold a sheep stationary while landing a drone on it.
There's definitely a place for "cheaper than helicopter" delivery, even if it is only where things have gone so horrifically wrong that paying almost any price is worthwhile.
However, not so sure I agree that economics will prevent 'fresh grocery' delivery. It will be different vehicles for sure, but the operating costs of a small electric vehicle with 5-10lb payload can be very low (cents/hour). I doubt there's going to be direct farm-to-house deliveries, but instead something that can augment the current transportation infrastructure. Imagine a national grocery chain adopts small electric drones for last-mile delivery. They leverage existing shipping network in place to keep stores stocked, and just send drone deliveries from store-to-house. Actual flight cost for one round-trip store-to-house is going to be pennies.
A flying epi-pen / defibrillator might be really useful, though.
Sure. For the 5 people a year that happens to. Not really enough to build a company around.
The only type of medicine that I can think of that's urgently needed, but that the person wouldn't have the foresight to keep on them is something like snake anti-venom.
If medication is really important, people tend to just bring extras along with them.
I believe they are also attempting to take advantage of runway-less takeoff and fixed-wing flight (more efficient than four fans pressing down). https://passerineaircraft.com/
Am I correct in understanding that Volans-i has two propulsion systems?
Coincidentally he completely totaled that car on Sand Hill Road with Peter Thiel on a trip to a meeting at Sequoia Capital[0].
[0] https://www.inverse.com/article/26369-elon-musk-peter-thiel-...
7 years ago I left silicon valley and moved to Raleigh, NC. It was part of our grand plan to move all the extended family back to the same area.
As part of this move I became involved with a couple manufacturing companies. I couldn't help but start helping with their IT set ups. I built some web apps to provide access to information locked up in their horrible ERP/MRP systems. 7 years later and these folks still call me a hero. Some simple web apps made a significant improvement to their productivity.
What I did was not rocket science. But it required spending time to understand the business, their workflow, and the bottlenecks. The solutions were simple after all that time was spent. The work ended up being very rewarding. There were no project managers, so I was full stack from the metal to the end user. It was also not bogged down by scaleability / uptime concerns. If something crashes, my user base is something like 30 people. I deploy with an ssh and git pull.
Anywho, I hope you get my point. I'd love to help Elon throw someone at Mars and he's my hero on many levels. But your simple IT skills could make you something of a small pond Elon for lots of non silicon valley people.
I started last year and inherited a horrific ERP system (and ancillary code for things like production scanners).
They realised they needed an ERP but they where unlucky in who they got to build it, things I take for granted as simple things to do (an interactive timeline showing job start stop, per user/department in d3) has had a massive impact on how they run things (it surfaced issues around job tear down/turnover).
Efficiency against estimate tracking (it's a table that's red/green if over under) in real time again made a huge difference since it surfaced issues with optimistic estimates from some operators and pessimistic estimates from others).
That matters because it throws off capacity planning and pricing on jobs (we go in too high, too low, too high we might lose the job, too low we take the hit on profits).
All vanilla stuff really.
None of this stuff is particularly difficult (refactoring parts of the existing shitpile are but that's because it's one gigantic pile of mud).
The fundamental problem is that there was a disconnect between the business and the specification of what they wanted, they didn't know enough to know what they could have asked for and the original devs didn't think about how they could improve on the existing business flow at all (I'm not even convinced they even considered the business in a lot of cases..).
In terms of users, about the same 50 on a typical day and I have a similar level of control, from the hardware we buy to the OS to the framework to the programming languages to well everything, it's an awesome feeling of freedom to be able to pick the correct tool for the job.
Technology applied properly can still have a multiplicative effect for a lot of SME's, there is still a vast amount of low-hanging fruit out there.
Exactly. You don’t need a 4-10 year degree in CS to solve them.
However, actual rocket science and other hard engineering disciplines is where educated talent is needed. Yet, the salary and startup opportunities are so much worse, that many mechanical and electrical engineers end up working in IT, consulting etc. You don’t build rockets, airplanes, cars or energy plants for the money
I'm an industrial engineer who deals with a fair bit of the IT side of manufacturing. I will echo the bit about it being very rewarding. It'd be cool to deploy something to millions of people, but there's something about making a physical thing work better that's just really cool. It's also way easier to explain to friends and family what you do.
So, basically the silver spoon of Silicon Valley. These guys have a shot!