Drone
(via ibrokethe4thwall)
Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late
“Losing Humanity” is the first major publication about fully autonomous weapons by a nongovernmental organization and is based on extensive research into the law, technology, and ethics of these proposed weapons. It is jointly published by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.
Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic called for an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons. They also called on individual nations to pass laws and adopt policies as important measures to prevent development, production, and use of such weapons at the domestic level.
Fully autonomous weapons do not yet exist, and major powers, including the United States, have not made a decision to deploy them. But high-tech militaries are developing or have already deployed precursors that illustrate the push toward greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield. The United States is a leader in this technological development. Several other countries – including China, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom – have also been involved. Many experts predict that full autonomy for weapons could be achieved in 20 to 30 years, and some think even sooner.Read more after the jump.
(via npr)
(via popmech) Lasers can recharge an in-flight UAV so the drone doesn’t have to land. Here’s how it works.
Just add the APM 2 autopilot to any RC aircraft and it becomes a fully-programmable flying robot with a powerful ground station and Mission Planner.Drones in the morning. Drones in the evening. Drones at suppertime.
Micro-Drones Improving Intelligence, Autonomous Capabilities Point to Bigger Role in Military
…researchers led by Roland Brockers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have developed a MAV that uses a camera pointed at the ground to navigate and pick landing spots. It can even identify people and other objects. The system enables the drone to travel through terrain where human control and GPS are unavailable, such as a city street or inside a building.
A human operator needs to tell the drone only two things before it sets off: where it is and where its objective is. The craft figures out the rest for itself, using the camera and onboard software to build a 3D map of its surroundings. It can also avoid obstacles and detect surfaces above a predetermined height as possible landing zones. Once it selects a place to put down, it maps the site’s dimensions, moves overhead and lands.
In a laboratory experiment, a 50 centimetre by 50 centimetre quadrotor craft equipped with the navigation system was able to take off, travel through an obstacle-filled indoor space and land successfully on an elevated platform. Brockers’s team is now testing the system in larger, more complex environments.
…Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that autonomous navigation and landing capabilities are unprecedented in a drone of this size. “Typically the information required to locate a landing site and stabilise a vehicle over it is coming in at a 100 times a second,” he says. “No one else has been able to design a system so small with this kind of processing power.”
(via Micro-drones: The new face of cutting-edge warfare - tech - 23 July 2012 - New Scientist)
(via futurescope)
Revealed: 64 Drone Bases on American Soil 
What does it mean that my book is now normal, and real life is science fiction?
(Source: soupsoup, via sunfoundation)
“The Fears of a Drone” my reference list for story development
Moisture
Rear attack from above
Nets
Lasers
Seekerbots
Highwinds
Inclimate weather
Autmatic shotguns
Poorly engineered hardware and parts
Badsoftware:
Plugins, OS, upgrades, trojans, fishing scams, MalewRe
Poorly written self repair routines
EMPs
Care to share any more you can think of?
sFly Quadrotors Navigate Outdoors All By Themselves
Quadrotors are famous for being able to pull all sorts of crazy stunts, but inevitably, somewhere in the background of the amazing video footage of said crazy stunts you’ll notice the baleful red glow of a Vicon motion tracking system. Now, we don’t want to call this cheating or anything, but we’re certainly looking forward to the day when quadrotors can do this outside of a lab, and the sFly project is helping to make this happen.
