Mini Drones: Army Deploys Tiny Helicopters
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
EDIT: Jeebus, it is actually 20 million pounds.
The production cost of the units is likely quite reasonable but the cost of developing and testing the system is what cost ₤20mil.
About 2 years ago i was building comparable devices for around £285 GBP each. Today i can do the same (thanks to cheaper lighter parts and experience on my part) for slightly over £110, that could be reduced for bulk builds.
My R&D costs were 2 weeks worth of my evenings reading and planning.
You can buy a commercially developed equivalent with better flight stability than the model they've produced (their design is inherently more unstable - and thus agile, and possibly slightly quieter) for under £60 delivered, video reception equipment is a separate purchase at £30.
Although i reckon even the common kit that's been available to consumers for the past few years could be tricky to jam without concerted effort:
http://www.futaba-rc.com/technology/fasst.html
I.e. to jam this frequency hopping requires than you either a) figure out what channels to jam at what time or b) saturate the full bandwidth.
If you can do either of those, you'd probably be better jamming the voice comms than RC helis. Not sure though.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do any amount of "crucial R&D" that will eventually be sold to taxpayers irregardless of outcome? Every big corp manager's dream.
It doesn't matter if the thing works extra reliably or not: an average lifespan of the battlefield equipment is measured in hours. At a significantly lower costs these copters could be disposable suggesting an entirely different patterns of tactical use.
Apart from the redistribution of wealth from the taxpayers' pockets into the pockets of elites the military spending is "no questions asked" then compared to social projects. Taxpayer's either won't care at all or will come up with reasoning such as "military grade means X1000 the civil costs".
And then it's military on top of that, which means ruggedized equipment, security and lots of field testing.
I'd prefer it be used for non-evil uses somehow though ;)
Visualizing the information is then one thing. That reminds me about Microsoft maps augmented reality presentation from TED where they superimposed live video feed over street view style imagery [1].
That's loads of money if they are not much different from toys/hobbyist UAVs. Do you think that those helicopters are just streaming video or is there some kind of software merging it all together into a 3D reconstruction (odometry?)? If not, what can justify this price?
I'd love to know what the battery life is like though!
But the big rub is that it's a very hard problem to tackle. There's already tons of rules and regulations to try to prevent the issue of corruption. Adding more rules makes the 'normal path' even less efficient. Taking rules away risks lots of graft in the 'worst case path'.
And even if DoD somehow adopts a most-efficient acquisition scheme, it still has to get the prime contractors to become more efficient to actually realize savings based on this. There's only so many defense contractors to choose from for major acquisition projects, and from the DoD/nat'l defense point of view it's better to buy expensive kit than to stop buying at all for a few years into order to weed out the most sluggish contractors.
The future is scary.