
Mini Drones: Army Deploys Tiny Helicopters - sdoering
http://news.sky.com/story/1047004/mini-drones-army-deploys-tiny-helicopters
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forbes
$20,000,000 for 160 units. $125,000 each. Slightly more expensive than the
remote control helicopters you buy as toys. If this number is correct, I would
love to know what justifies that amazing cost per unit.

EDIT: Jeebus, it is actually 20 million pounds.

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hartror
R&D.

The production cost of the units is likely quite reasonable but the cost of
developing and testing the system is what cost ₤20mil.

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3amOpsGuy
Begs the question though, what exactly are they doing during R&D?

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.

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rubyrescue
except that theirs probably (hopefully) is not (easily) jammable and the
signal is not (hopefully/easily) interceptable...

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3amOpsGuy
Hopefully!

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.

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rdl
The frequency hop rate for commercial stuff is pretty low.

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sakri
This combined with Google glass. Each soldier could have a couple of them
buzzing around with "autonomous" or "controlled" modes, with a
landing/charging pad on their backpack.

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mtrimpe
I like the idea. When the battery of the first starts dying the next one could
even be sent into the field for a seamless handoff.

I'd prefer it be used for non-evil uses somehow though ;)

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jpalomaki
I find it pretty amazing how quickly this Minority Report stuff is turning
into reality. Don't know how autonomous these are right now but I would assume
in near future you would just open a box to release a swarm of these and they
would manage themselves, patrol on certain area, come back for reloading etc.

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].

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TOqikZTBMY>

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pawelwentpawel
_(...) and now that we have balanced the defence budget we are able to
confidently invest in these kinds of cutting-edge technologies._ \- _The nano
helicopter has been developed by Prox Dynamics AS of Norway as part of a £20m
contract for 160 units_

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?

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hartror
A hobbyist UAV is probably not weather sealed, hardened against interference
or heavily tested under battle like conditions. These are assumptions but
they'd be my requirements if I was specing this system. They also appear to be
an order of magnitude smaller than hobbyist UAVs with video.

~~~
Intermernet
I think you're probably right with regards to most of your points, but size is
now fairly competitive ([http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/preorder-crazyflie-
nano-qua...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/preorder-crazyflie-nano-
quadcopter-kit-10dof-with-crazyradio-bccfk02a-p-1365.html)).

I'd love to know what the battery life is like though!

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qxcv
Battery life "up to" 30 minutes according to preliminary specs. Impressive.

<http://www.proxdynamics.com/products/pd_100_prs/>

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piggsvin
More info here from a Norwegian article here:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=auto&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tu.no%2Findustri%2F2012%2F05%2F03%2Fflygende-
spion-veier-16-gram)

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netcan
I have a feeling that we're still just scraping the surface of drones-as-
military-equipment. They are being used now in very remote parts of a remote
(and relatively small by global standard) war.

The future is scary.

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conanite
Coming up next in Afghanistan: giant fly swatters.

