
A surveillance drone that never needs to land - Oatseller
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543196/this-surveillance-drone-never-needs-to-land/
======
dogma1138
Whats new in this? there are quite a few tethered surveillance platforms out
there, even rotor based[0].

Heck we had a run away blip just a like a week ago that one is also a tethered
platform in most cases and that actually doesn't need to land because motor
powered tethered platforms usually need to land every X amount of hours / days
just to let the engines cool down (some might have paired engines that can be
spun up and down in order to maintain altitude while one of the paired engines
is idling).

These platforms allow you to usually have much more powerful engines that can
maintain the altitude of a much heavier payload but ofc are much less
maneuverable, they are often used as very tactical surveillance platforms for
various events sport games and other such venues, political rallies, news
coverage and venue broadcasting (Elistair's[1] solution for example mainly
sold for commercial broadcasting proposed and not homeland/border security)
and critical infrastructure protection.

These aren't the type of drones one would use however for wide area persistent
surveillance for those purposes Google's and Facebook's internet providing
drones would probably be a better platform and ofc military extreme long
endurance platforms like Global Hawk[2](which can be now also autonomously
perform air refueling) were kinda designed for it

[0][http://www.uasvision.com/2015/05/14/iai-and-sky-sapience-
par...](http://www.uasvision.com/2015/05/14/iai-and-sky-sapience-partner-on-
tethered-hovering-aerial-systems/)

[1][http://elistair.com/](http://elistair.com/)

[2][http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/10/05.aspx](http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/10/05.aspx)

------
pcunite
I hope that technologists are also students of history. You do understand
where all this is going don't you? What are you doing now to safeguard the
future?

"Not my problem, won't happen in my lifetime" \- yes it will.

~~~
omginternets
>I hope that technologists are also students of history.

Not in the good ol' USA they aren't. This is precisely why I cringe every time
I hear the usual anti-intellectual rant about how STEM fields are the only
thing worth funding.

If you're serious about creating benevolent technology, you must necessarily
be in favor of funding the humanities.

~~~
HiLo
Very good point, I think it's very telling that they seem to have minimal
appreciation for those fields. These techies hate the Wall Street types but
are quickly becoming them, like the nerds who became jocks.

