They could drop the load on the captain before Titanic sailed off. That would delay the journey and probably save it from the incident (if we of course don't take into account insurance scam conspiracy)
At the time, probably nothing. At best they could have sent out life jackets or something similar, though I don't know how much they weighed at the time.
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.
Not sure how these drones would perform this task better than human pilots on full-sized aircraft. Or how pre-stocking the Titanic with these drones would be better than just having duplicate radio equipment or more lifeboats.
Not to mention it was 600km (370 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland, and took less than three hours to sink from hitting the iceberg. So if you happened to have drones in exactly the right place (assuming they’re based at an airbase on land), and sent them right when the ship started sinking, they’d get there just about as the last part was going under.
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.
Jamming drones is easier than you think, the new battleground will be autonomous flying to avoid trivial radio/gps jamming. MIT has open source code for this already.
Not only that, GPS jamming can be overcome with better antennas (phased arrays of such, even retrofitted to existing commodity receivers) to eliminate jammers which are not more-or-less directly above the vehicle.
> 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.
Well, yes. Maps aren't accurate (when it comes to moving foliage, as in the video, there maps are out of date within seconds, less in strong winds). Maps don't include many things that are moving, and maps just generally don't work very well at small scales (like the scale of an, even a large, UAV landing)
The SR71 had a combination of star and inertial navigation. I imagine someone could build an astro-inertial navigation system today without much trouble.
Probably fine and less vulnerable in situations like simply trying to get a few km over a wall on flat ground. Far more complicated over terrain and trying to fly low.
Off-the-shelf open source consumer drone flight controllers already have enough sensors to achieve what you suggest.
See the paper, but TLDR: stereo video depth sensing combined with fading previous measurements (so if you detected an obstacle at 1 o'clock, 2 meters out 1 second ago, it is now very likely at 2 o'clock, 1.3 meters out. This way you can limit yourself to just detecting things 2 meters out)
The war on drugs has been a big self inflicted wound. Including building a billions dollar wall to supposedly keep drugs (and people) out. If we sold the real thing under the prescription of a doctor or nurse technician, you wouldn’t fuel drug lords, deadly look-a-like drugs, deadly cutting agents and overdoses due to potency variability. That’s a better way to manage drug use than putting up walls and laws and pretending criminality matters to a dependent drug addicts.
She the whole wall is going to be manned with anti-drone squads? If you’re manning the border, why do you need such a huge wall? Wouldn’t a fence provide better visibility?
So now we have hundreds of monitors checking wobbly camera images all the time trying to spot tiny drones in all weather and all times of day. How often do balloons need refilling? Aren’t balloons highly visible and extremely vulnerable? Has anything like this ever even been tried in practice?
That's a high altitude aircraft defence system. We're discussing low altitude terrain level drones the size of a shoebox operating up to maybe 100m altitude, just enough to pop up over the wall. Air defence radar like that is going to be completely useless for this.
I doubt this is true. There is a readily available technology for beating greylisting for example. Any semi-configured mail server can do it. Yet greylisting alone stops majority of spam.
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.
Catapults alone are good enough technology to prove why the wall is an idiotic idea. The wall is an effigy anyway for Trump, while he may actually believe that it's a good idea, that's not how it functions in reality. It's an anchor, a symbol, a thing to point to that combats illegal immigration and is a symbol of nationalism.
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.
The technology world progresses as an arms race. I'm quite sure that when these things are used to traffic drugs, a small version of [0] will be used to stop them.
Heh, that's cute. The issue with that is that locating UAV's that are, say 50 meters above the deck, more than 1km from your detector is essentially impossible. Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen.
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.
> Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen.
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?
> 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.
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.
The system I saw 30 years ago were more ground based and covered tens to hundreds of KMs.
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.
How did that ground based system solve the horizon problem ? Drones don't fly very high, so you'd need one of these systems, say at 50 meters drone height, ~ every 50km.
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.
>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.
Where are you getting that $600 number? The laser in the article quoted is 150kW, which firing for a fraction of a second would be no more than a few dollars electricity.
> Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves.
What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
Okay, since economics has extensively studied the effect of narcotics on the economy (which is positive, or to put it another way: people will work, even fight, for drugs), we can clearly establish that the cost of missing a shipment is negative. For the economy, it is actually better to miss the shipment than to catch it.
So allowing Mexican cartels to smuggle and sell, for example, heroin has a positive economic effect on society? I have to admit that's a fresh perspective.
Fine and dandy when flying over a desert but when the drone meets the city and an "autopilot" failure occurs over a freeway/highway/street or someone's head the consequences will be unforgivable.
I don't get that. Before the sun rises tomorrow, for the US alone, 32 Americans will make a mistake with their car that kills someone (potentially, but unlikely, themselves, 2 will kill themselves, 29 will kill someone else, one will kill 2 others, for a total of 33 deaths). At the same time, a further 2000 Americans will injure someone with a car, and another 3000 will cause severe (I believe > 1000$) property damage, mostly on cars.
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.
It's simply that that's not a new risk. Everyone has grown up with knowledge of that risk and accepted it as a given, therefore it is not alarming. I think this is necessary because to constantly evalute and fear ever-present risk would be debilitating.
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.
Very much this. I've had entertaining conversations with people who were afraid of electric vehicles because they were afraid that the batteries might catch on fire. I asked about driving around with a tank of highly flammable / explosive liquid under the car, and their only response was "that's different."
We're comfortable with known risks, but new risks are scary.
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.
The difference seems to be that here in Spain you are seldom sentenced to less than two years. Jail, when you finally get there, is a serious matter. And of course you can't drive in prison so problem solved :)
Points and permit revoking are the way to fast-track what otherwise would be administrative sanctions, clustering them to build a criminal case.
Unfortunately one of the downsides of living in one of the non-terrible parts of the US is that you basically need a car to be a functional member of society. The insane drivers stay on the road because they just drive illegally. They borrow their spouses cars and stuff.
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.
About as safe as early factories. To take the discussion further off topic (sorry) It is quite easy to limit speed to the maximum allowed speed in a country. Its not hard to make a system that requires switching into city or highway mode with logging and/or remote mode detection. If we make a lot of effort we can limit speed by the amount of accidents on that location. We can further limit it by the amount of accidents the driver had in a similar situation.
You have a choice to get in a car and how far you drive.
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.
No, nobody finds that acceptable. Until you stop misrepresenting the people on the supposed "other end" of your "discussion," no one is going to engage you in a real discussion about it, which is (unfortunately) probably why you still continue to think and act this way.
I know lots of people who make rants about bad drivers but a. Fail to signal when Turing left into traffic b. Talk on the phone while driving c. Drive home from a bar "because it isn't like I'm black out drunk"
A lot of people find risks acceptable if it is them causing it.
Helicopters also have this "death zone" where an engine failure would not allow them to autorotate and have a controlled landing. And helicopters are a lot bigger and heavier.
Nah, once there are established rules about which classes of aircraft use which altitudes, corridors, etc, it will be just like private aviation operating in the same sky as commercial airlines.
It's a little sad that people's first thoughts about tech like this is "It can bring me goods faster than FedEx!" That's such a trivial thing to use it for.
Emergency deliveries in rural areas are where this will be most useful. Getting medicine and mechanical parts to remote places during crisises is hard.
I think the simple economics of it would completely rule out this being used for 'fresh groceries' ... or rather only to people who want to pay 10x for their groceries.
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.
I agree with you that deliveries to offshore oil and specific functions will be very practical.
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.
Marginal flight cost might be pennies, but they will also have to account for the cost of the drones, maintenance, repair, replacement, and liability for damages that they do.
Read the article. The founder was an operations guy at Tesla and specifically did the numbers to justify the company based on the need of Tesla parts supply.
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.
I worked in a Fortune 50 consumer electronics company, sitting right next to our procurement team. It's not my field and I'm not an expert but I know enough to be wary of a founder who makes such claims, moreover, there's enough data available to piece together what would work and not without having to accept anyone's claims on it.
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.
Car manufacturers are an interesting case, though. Despite all the efficiencies in the system, I do know of cases where boxes of replacement parts were helicoptered to the factory to avoid the contractual penalties for holding up the Just In Time system.
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.
A friend of mine who bought a farm reports that you basically have to tackle them, American football-style, in order to shear them. That sounds like it might be hard to automate.
Is there a reason that air drops are unsuitable? The new thing here seems to be VTOL. Fixed-wing UAVs can carry an order of magnitude more cargo the same distance.
> But if you're stuck in a mountain and in an emergency, a drone delivery could be quite the very nice
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?
Looks like cool tech. I wonder if they could do the same for a regular aircraft - put electrically driven propellers to lift it off the ground for a few seconds while it accelerates to above stall speed.
Yes, nothing is more depressing than listening to the a16z podcasts where they're discussing the minutiae of well-established b2b saas strategies for capturing long tail revenue. Shit, let's build some robots instead.
This is why I quit IT to become a machinist. Now seeing how starved manufacturing is for talent, I suspect IT 'easy' money is a huge brain-drain on society.
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.
I'm early into doing this same process right now for a somewhat larger facility. Capacity planning, product tracking, estimating lead times, etc. will make a huge difference in how the facility is run.
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.
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
The man who gets the most press in the tech community is trying to launch rockets to Mars and build electric supercars and networks that cost ludicrous amounts of money. Whether you think these ideas are any good or not, people are doing large things in our society. It ain't all web apps.
Well, zip2 then x.com then PayPal. Also sold some program when he was 12 pre the web. Here's some video of him after the zip2 sale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHKT3yxYvDQ
Fair, but that's built with off the shelf parts, not an off the shelf device (He didn't actually mass produce it I assume?). In the article is a device you can unpack from the store, and then have it go 500 miles with 20lb bomb within minutes. I find more frightening than the fact that it's possible with the right skills to build something like it.
