Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones
army.mil
army.mil
It looks like they're improving the fidelity of computational models for acoustics, which is an important step.
But that doesn't imply that any change to the design of the drones has actually been identified yet, even if that's what these models will be used to do.
At least there's an obvious civilian benefit from this work.
(Imagine if you will: everyone constantly doing research into new lightbulb technologies — so we’d get the LED a century sooner! — but nobody ever researching the implications of evacuated incandescent bulbs [vacuum tubes! CRTs!], nor into the implications of miniaturizing/printing LEDs, etc.)
It’s kind of like where fusion research and ML research were during their “dark decades” — everybody doing breadth-first searches of the possibilities, nobody digging much deeper into the implications of research that showed promise.
In all three cases, it’s because it’s hard to model those implications without a real experimental prototype; and because, in all three cases, costs to do real experiments (for reactors; for training datasets; etc.) shoot up exponentially as you “go deeper” — as you need to do those experiments in the context of a working example of everything you know so far.
The true issue is one of team size dynamics. Particle physics has figured this out: to continue foundational research, you need a few large teams with huge grants/budgets (to build particle accelerators), rather than many small teams (that can’t individually afford to build particle accelerators.)
But other fields haven’t managed to have the same epiphany, and so in those fields, small teams just continue to explore the parts of knowledge-space they can “reach” with a small team — which isn’t really too productive.
(ML got going again because large companies figured out basic research into ML could be a loss-leader for renting out time on specialized ML-accelerator hardware. Nuclear science never slowed down, because governments were doing the basic research with huge teams+budgets from the start. Etc.)
My favorite was when they showed the image with the working microscope.
Me> They only get significantly ahead of the industry when nobody else is doing research.
Even if they can't say that "the secret is to change the fans like so", they'd at least say "thanks to this work, the latest drone prototypes are now half as loud as the old ones" or something to indicate the progress.
If the fact that a noise reduction was achieved was itself classified, then the headline would trumpet an advance in computer modelling, which is what the article actually talks about.
Marketing. For a potential adversary to gain useful knowledge from this article, they'd need some numbers to understand the extent of the capability. They're not learning much from "we're using computers to make shit better", they already know that.
It is not uncommon for the military to publicly announce something, yet keep the specs a closely guarded secret.
So the goal is to make this a more generic computer model to avoid the cost of wind-tunnel testing using a fluid dynamics model. I don’t know from the article if any of this has actually unveiled anything - sounds like the goal of the work, which is progressing Ok.
EDIT: Link to the paper. Yours for $30. Ugh. Why is this costing something when I already paid for the research? https://vtol.org/store/product/computation-and-extraction-of...
For this, I'd look in DTIC, though I couldn't find it yet: https://publicaccess.dtic.mil/padf_public/#/home
404 for me. Not sure whether that's because I'm not in the US or because I'm using a mobile browser or whether you messed up the link.
What I find from media science reporters is often missing background or context (or just flat out wrong) with oodles of impact (supposedly). From scientific journal articles I often lack the required background to even follow the abstract and almost certainly not the jargon filled paper (whether they are written that way on purpose I have my own opinions about).
I know you can't spend time explaining every building block concept, but the selection of what gets background and the succicintess of the explanations here is really nice for me.
Drones might benefit from that trick. But you pay a penalty in performance and energy consumption.
[1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/mh-...
Well, you could make boutique drones exploiting state of the art tech that are so expensive you can only afford three of them. Or you could just buy load of cheap throwaway drones and swarm your targets with them.
Remember, lots of drones used as ISR assets had unencrypted video downlinks because the chance that the enemy could also see the downlinks was considered less bad than the cost of rolling out state of the art crypto across coalition forces
You would think they would have highly directional signals by now.
Directional optical links might be feasible, but probably a lot more expensive than a simple radio.
And sometimes they seem to be quiet and other times it’s a loud buzz. Really seems like they’re not optimized for their job?
Quiet bug-proof houses are a new invention. Very few mosquitoes successfully make it inside, bite, escape the building, and find a suitable place to lay their eggs. If most mosquitoes get killed after entering the building, natural selection may be pushing for mosquitoes that don't enter homes at all.
Everyone who flies drones knows they're annoyingly loud.
They have been getting somewhat better though, and you get what you pay for.
I believe that a lot of that comes down to the current state of affairs simply being the cheapest or most cost effective solution.
I don't know what the military is currently investigating, but if memory serves me well then the commercial industry has been long working on more silent designs (in particular regarding propellers). Of course, even there it is a constant trade-off between effectiveness (regarding propulsion) and what is considered acceptable discomfort for passengers or the environment (regarding audio).
I believe that drones could already be made way more quiet with long existing technology. The key question here might be: how much shorter do you want your flight last, and how much more expensive do you want your drone to be?
Not gliders...
I can't imagine it'd be much more than tweaking helicopter designs to suit miniature versions. Designs they've had for decades. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they already have rotor drones using what they're talking about.
Propellers are rotors. Rotor is the generic term for something that rotates, while a propeller implies movement along the axis it is providing thrust.
In other words, a propeller is a specific type of rotor.
I agree it does seem to be confusing as to exactly what this applies to though. The wording says one thing, but the picture and common sense seem to indicate it may not be as specific as that? /shrug