IRIS+
3drobotics.com
3drobotics.com
For example: Add some face detection software, then change the payload to a laser dazzler and pepper spray cartridge. Now you have a drone that can temporarily incapacitate people. When these get cheaper (say $100 per unit), a police department could buy a swarm of 1,000 for $100k. Whenever a riot breaks out, just unleash the drones (geofenced to the desired area). Instant crowd control.
Like I said, interesting and terrifying.
As an aside, I expect anti-drone systems to become a significant debate soon enough (e.g. if there's a drone peeping in my windows, what rights do I have to disable it?), and then to become a significant commercial concern.
Your rights probably are limited to calling the police, like pretty much any other non-immediate danger legal situation that involve applying the use of force.
Is it "use of force" when targeting a piece of equipment? If you park your car in my driveway, I can move it.
I may have liability, but I think I can destroy it if it is "invading" my property.
Do I not have some "height rights" at home?
Then, while you still won't be able to stop assassinations and such, just like you can't stop them now anyway, you can at least know who did it, and punish them afterwards.
That's what came up with after thinking about it for a bit. There's probably a better solution out there.
I don't want my drone to be seen at the moment of crime anyway.
Don't like drone in front of you? Accidentally throw a piece of string on it.
Even if you get criminals to comply as far as only operating drones with proper IDs, so that you can trace the legal purchase history of a drone, that doesn't mean you know who used the drone. Drones and their supporting control equipment can be stolen (and the owners prevented by force from reporting the theft) and people willing to commit assassination by drone certainly wouldn't be unwilling to commit theft, kidnapping, and/or murder of drone owners to acheive that.
Probably we're just going to have to get used to drones being around. Like we got used to cities and crowds on public streets and horseless carriages. This paranoia about drones will be seen by future historians as quaint.
Here's a movie plot attack: A week/month/etc beforehand, plant 4-8 drones a half-mile downrange of the airport a VIP is scheduled to fly out of. When their plane takes off, trigger the drones to fly into the the plane's turbines. A fully-loaded plane with no working engines would quickly stall and turn into a fireball on the ground. You might not even need explosive payloads for this to work.
Also, it would be hard to pilot multiple RC planes or helicopters simultaneously. Any attack that requires people cooperating is much less likely.
I wish you were right.
A passenger plane taking off is going to have a hard time seeing (let alone avoiding) such small, maneuverable craft.
Of course, this is a movie plot threat. Really, nobody is going to spend the time and resources to program drones like that.
Also you'd go the opposite way (toward the plane) so the speed dont matter much...
Now, good luck to aim for the turbine - for all turbines, at once.
And then the plane just lands. They can fly with an engine out.
I could imagine license tags being one outcome of this process: If a drone goes spying outside your window or damages your property, you now have a fairly simple recourse of reporting that tag number. The existence of this recourse would also go a long way toward making civil drone use less scary and more socially acceptable.
There may need to be something more than that; a "drone lobby" perhaps?
The Silicon Valley chapter of the AUVSI is more progressive with regard to small business drone advocacy, but it's hard to tell if that is having an impact nationally.
Lots of "ransomware" malware out there is already using this tactic, and law enforcement have no money to follow.
For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results. The only thing a drone can better do is look down at your roof, or over your fence if your fence is higher than nearby buildings.
For assassination, traditional tools are clearly more practical in nearly every case. A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.
I don't really know how arsonists generally do their thing, but I can't imagine that dropping something flammable is more practical than just driving by and throwing it.
I'm sure there are very specific cases where sophisticated drone usage could be useful for committing these crimes, but I don't think it's a major concern, and not even one of the biggest concerns of drones.
For example, instructing a drone to assassinate is potentially closer to hiring a hitman, than murdering someone firsthand with a shotgun. Closer in the sense that the puportrator feels a sense of detachment.
If you had a drone with a weapon, I would think you'd want to fire on someone using some variation of Tracking Point style hardware [1], except partially self aimed. Basically see the target, paint the target, drone uses internal sensors to detect a brief instant of random stability and fires the weapon
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gun-linux-on-the-rang...
Again, doing a crime and getting away with a crime are two enormously different things. The truth is that the majority of humanity can commit terrible crimes with utter ease. There is absolutely no question about that.
Most of us don't, however, because of morality and our nature. The rest don't because they don't want to spend the rest of their life in jail, and for major crimes the probability of getting caught is enormously high. Things that reduce that probability (and a device that means you don't have to be on or even near the site, and can extract 100% of evidence with a very high degree of success, does that) open up opportunities for people to do such crimes.
As a parallel, someone mentioned bitcoins, and bitcoins absolutely opened up the world of casual extortion, because suddenly you don't have to go to a mailbox or meet in a park.
I'm not a detective, but I suspect having the large, complex piece of electronic equipment that was used as the weapon would be a godsend compared to the evidence available in a normal murder or assassination investigation.
And the idea that shooting a gun brings down some hailstorm of official response is myth. Fire a gun in most places and ... nothing will happen. Folks will rush to the scene of any murder, but will only find the sniper's location after hours or days of investigation. It won't be like the NCIS show where the investigator glances around and says 'must have come from that rooftop; its the only secure sniper post in a half-mile!' You can shoot from nearly anywhere with line-of-sight, from the partly-open door of a parked delivery van, without much risk of discovery.
A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.
Aside from the difficulty of a few hundred meter shot in urban settings, shooting a weapon from a location announces where you are, exactly when you are there. Aside from the immediate and overwhelming response likely, the human traces would be enormous and unavailable. A drone, in contrast, comes from some unknown place off in some unknown direction, can with ease get anywhere near the target (on a nearby roof for instance), and then when the task is complete it can go low and fast and get back to a drop-off. For arson and peeping, the same premise holds -- a drone can go to exactly where is needed, do what is necessary, and get away with, currently, essentially zero risk of capture.
Will we eventually have drone registrations and tracking systems, comprehensive urban radio tracking and announcement, police overrides, etc? Yeah, probably, which was what I was getting at -- events will inevitably happen, and regulations will adjust.
Could a professional band of assassins pull off an assassination with a drone? Certainly. Would it be far easier to just use a rifle? I'd say absolutely.
Perhaps, but you've still got to pay the guy holding the rifle. A drone could self-terminate. Most parts can be 3D-printed & assembled in a clean tent, untraceable. The most expensive part is possibly the infrared camera ($1~2k).
I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Drones allow you to access viewpoints that are otherwise impossible using telescopes at a fraction of the overall cost.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLB66lge6oA&list=UUZfBMqj1pN...
Well, say I set up a drone for remote control over the internet, then rent it out to people that are located half around the globe. I act as a cut out, and whomever is spying will (may[1]) be hard to track.
[1] If I'm getting paid, there's the issue of anonymous transactions, and as for control, latency might be too high to use Tor -- but the main point is that drones already facilitate something new, if not revolutionary new.
The ability to anonymously open fire on virtually any target one chooses is a scary reality, but it's almost here. With no risk of prosecution, murders will happen that never would have happened before. Be nice to your neighbors :) .
> in order to tase or spray someone it has to get really low.
> These things are very slow and not that agile.
My nephew has a palm-sized copter with remote that flies for 10 minutes, right now, got it for XMas.
There have already been dragonfly-sized gadgets made by graduate students. Check out youtube.
RFID tags are all the computing power you mention, already on your high-end product you bought from WalMart.
The future is clear. Maybe a one-use metal-air battery on a chip-bot? If I can say it, its conceivable.
For sure. Laserpointer to blind it, jam gps to confuse it...
> And in order to tase or spray someone it has to get really low.
For tasing, sure. And for spraying an individual in the face. But if we're talking swarm-based crowd control, there might be other options. Anything bad that drops down (say 1000 minature cs-cannisters -- effective even if a few are "thrown back", other gas that is heavier than air, perhaps created by blending two components "on board" the drone, perhaps forms of acid or irritants liquids that are arezol'ed with pressure... audio-attacks...
In fact, swarm based drones might even be hard to take out, if they could rely on low-bandwidth, near-field comms, such as IR, lasers, (directional) ultrasound or whatnot. Not even sure if there's much current research in combining directional ultrasound with the type of advanced coding that is used for high-bandwidth radio short-wave/microwave comms.
The features have been there for a couple of years now albeit they've been improved and made more and more reliable over time.
That includes stuff like follow me (follows phone gps coordinates) auto land, auto return to home point, etc.
I've had an APM board (well, many APM boards really) along other boards for flight control since many years.
Now they sell is as a board called PX4 which is more powerful but uses the same software (but should evolve into something better than the APM).
In reality tho stuff like follow me doesnt work as well as on the video. The short 3s extracts are best case scenarios.
The main issue is that it cannot track the subject (no image recognition) so it really just follow some gps location and hopefully the camera is aligned (it auto aligns it depending on the trajectory, else you need a copilot to care for the camera).
Funny trivia, a large amount of kick starter projects with their "awesome" return to home, follow me, etc are using the APM board and the APM is the only reason they even get support... except the APM is free/opensource hard and software.
DJI being an exception, but their board isnt as full featured as the APM/PX4...
Finally, remember that these helicopters fly for about 15min and are still relatively prone to failure and interference. we're far from reliable large scale reliable delivery, mass governmental use, etc.
The most serious of the problems was that the drone stopped working mid-flight causing it to fall 20 feet on to concrete. We were very fortunate that no one was standing under it.
I recently just bought a DJI Phantom 2 after a bit of decision paralysis. I really like the open nature of the 3DR product line (and the fact that it has a San Diego presence is great) and seriously considered the IRIS but after doing a lot of "forum research" bad customer support when a problem was hit was a very common theme.
I don't even know how "real" of a problem this is versus just being an echo chamber thing but it was pervasive enough that I figured I'd just buy the $600 Phantom 2 as a starter and then reassess if (well, almost certainly when) I start looking for something more than just a 'starter' drone.
As an intermediate pilot myself, I'd be scared to fly anywhere near the style that the promo videos do - over open water, one mistake means your drone is taking a dive. More experienced flyers are used to the fact that flying machines crash and parts need replacing on a fairly regular basis no matter how carefully you fly. That's going to be a harder sell to people buying a complete package expecting awesome output like the promo videos.
Sometimes a propellor detaches mid-flight, or the battery unplugs due to some crazy vibration. Of course, it shouldn't happen in a good design, but users are careless and it only needs to happen once to cause a good crash.
What about one hundred poisonous robotic bumblebees?
You might think these unfeasible near term, but a drone that simply flies high and drops 300 dumb, poison-tipped flechettes (think capillary-powered syringe tips) is feasible today, isn't it?
(Sorry for the derail, I think the product looks great, I'm just commenting on the rapid development pace of drones so far, wondering what implications might be in another ten years)
This sort of Technophobia has been around since the beginning of civilization.
Instead of focusing on the FUD, we should try to focus on the good.
So I suppose what I'm saying is that, when people said "what will we do when they start using these huge flying things to attack us?" The answer was, "Nothing, your city is going to be destroyed." So maybe use another example of, "old FUD," because it seems like the people worried about Zeppelins were absolutely right. :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_strategic_bombing_during...
Hopefully the tech is too hard to come by for any nutjob to build it, but I wouldn't be surprised if miltitaries start weaponizing them.
Is this a 'when batteries become magical' thing?
Basically, yes.
To get more power you need a bigger battery, but if you have a bigger battery you are carrying more weight and thus need more power, so you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.
Batteries are improving (and stronger/lighter materials to build with are helping as well), but nowhere near the sort of Moore-ish improvement we are used to seeing in other places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d9Eg2s54PM (from this extensive build log: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1816216)
A production example: http://www.birdseyeview.aero/
One demonstrating autonomous flight with a 3D Robotics flight controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEL1gQpDO28
1.) I assume people would want to record themselves doing something a bit more interesting than just walking in a wide open area at the same pace where 100' of cable can't get snagged on anything. 2.) Any sort of quick changes in direction are going to tug on the wire, at worst risking causing the drone to crash, at best causing the video to take you out of frame. 3.) If there's any sort of speed involved, the drag of that wire in the wind will eat up power. 4.) The weight of 100' of cable will add up quickly, especially if you want it to be robust enough to handle being snagged/tugged. You certainly don't want a break in the cable, because a sudden loss of power will be catastrophic.
So yeah.. batteries need to get magical or our power usage efficiency needs to get way better.
So some people simply have planes with vertical take off then the props rotate when you need to go faster/longer.
Thats a lot of mechs thus less reliable tho - at least so far. Also the props are huge and thus cause a lot of drag still. See the v22 osprey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtGjzbVb76U for ex.
Theres some experiments with covered props (but that lowers the efficiency at lower rotational speed) so that there is less friction when gliding forward.
GPS needs a very good view of the sky, from lots of angles, to work well. Lots more work to do to do it reliably outdoors with patchy-or-no GPS.
As examples, inertial navigation or laser or vision-based techniques (VSLAM etc.) might be ways to deal with GPS issues.
You can't track an external, independently moving object using only inertial sensing.
Visual tracking should work, but is not reliable yet. Lots of people are working on it.
So far this year, this work from TUM has been perhaps the most impressive, and the code is published online:
Quadcopter parenting and all the interesting applications will require major improvements in battery capacity:weight ratio, though.
If you are into this stuff and in the Bay Area sign up for the Meetup my Partner and I run [4]. The next one at the Amazon Prime Air offices but unfortunately is way wait listed.
[1] https://github.com/diydrones
To answer the initial question, the latest versions of ArduPilot implement terrain following (based on terrain data loaded into the flight computer before-hand). Additionally, there is also now support for range-finding instruments like Lidar Lite [0], although I don't believe those are currently being used in the terrain following mode. Such instruments could conceivably be used to implement "look-ahead" functionality to more accurately avoid obstacles.
Obstacle avoidance is coming though! The research world is converging on a solution!
I can't believe this. Anyone here tested this drone?