While many current drone programs are extremely complex – and costly – cheap drones used for spying, mapping, and even attacks could turn the tables on world militaries by giving terrorists and less well-funded groups access to UAV technology. → Read More
DARPA has released more details on the ARGUS-IS, a 1.8-gigapixel camera that will be attached to unmanned drones to spot targets as small as six inches at an altitude of 20,000 feet. The camera – which is one of the highest resolution systems in the world – can view ten square miles of terrain at a time and zoom in on targets with surprising clarity. → Read More
Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.”
He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the… → Read More
Gun control is on many minds this week, but let’s not talk about guns. Let’s talk about drones. (With a reported 300 million guns in private hands in America already, it’s probably too late for gun control anyhow.) Drones are to nation-states what assault rifles are to psychotic mass murderers. Worse yet, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah… → Read More
John Robb is an astronautical engineer turned US Air Force Special Operations pilot turned Forrester lead analyst turned startup CTO/COO turned military theorist and author, to oversimplify. His writing has heavily influenced my own (eg you’ll find his phrase “open source insurgency” several times in my novel Swarm.) He blogs at Global Guerrillas and edits Resilient Communities.
Q: Your… → Read More
Allow me just a little self-congratulatory chest-beating. Four years ago I started writing a near-fiction thriller about the risks of swarms of UAVs in the wrong hands. Everyone I talked to back then (including my agent, alas) thought the subject was implausible, even silly. Well, it’s not like I’m the next Vernor Vinge — it always seemed like a pretty blatantly obvious prediction to me — but I… → Read More
The world got a first glimpse of the “world’s first spherical flying machine” back in June this year, but its maker, Japan’s Ministry of Defense, decided it’s time to showcase it publicly a few days ago in Tokyo. And as you can see in the video embedded below, their ball drone is pretty awesome.
The drone can stand still in mid-air, fly vertically and horizontally through narrow spaces at up to… → Read More
I feel uncomfortably like a prophet. In January, and again last week, I wrote about the prospect of UAVs used as weapons by terrorists; yesterday a man was arrested who “planned to attack the Pentagon using ‘small drone airplanes’ filled with explosives and guided by GPS.” In August I wrote about omnipresent mobile phones turning the world into a panopticon; today’s NYT has an article about… → Read More
Have you been watching the skies? I have. As the US expands its unmanned air force, researchers are testing and demonstrating autonomous drones — ones that could “hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.” (According to the author of the wonderfully-titled Army-funded study Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, “Lethal… → Read More
Anyone who lives near a deciduous forest knows the joy of the maple seed, or as we called them when we were kids, helicopters. Their single wing spins the seed, slowing its descent — so why shouldn’t a similarly-designed wing be able to spin faster and actually fly upwards? Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a new drone platform, not quite a nano air vehicle but still simple and light, that… → Read More
This odd robot, made of spare parts, has more in common with the IT-O than anything of this world. It can float around for 8 minutes on one charge and goes 40 miles an hour. Plus it’s a unique form factor for this sort of RC drone, making it a real one of a kind. Add some spinning blades and an arc blaster and you’ve got a party. → Read More
Oh no! I’ve been wrong all this time! The Robocalypse won’t be a sudden proliferation of hunter-killers and corpse-eating tanks — it’s going to be a Cutezkrieg! Japan will be, I am afraid, the first to fall. They are already a slave to the kawaii. This little bugger is called the Scandicraft, and it lives in that mailbox until there is a perimeter breach, at which point it… → Read More
You know all those drones you kids use to rain grim death upon your unfortunate friends in Modern Warfare 2? Well, according to an American University law professor’s Congressional testimony, they may be illegal under international law. Of course, they could be totally fine, too, it’s just that nobody really knows for sure. That’s probably not what the U.S. military wants to hear, given how much… → Read More
So you’re in a submarine, safe beneath the ocean waves. You’re pretty safe, right? Wrong. Apparently DARPA is working on Sea Drones that will follow ships and subs as they make their way across the briny deep, reporting positions and potentially going boom-boom if they feel like it. It’s all concept right now, but it’s pretty compelling. → Read More
Bruce Schneier wrote a great piece on the unencrypted Predator drone video feeds, noting that the drones were built for a post-Soviet, pre-insurgent era and that encryption, in the case of a live feed, is more of a problem than a threat. → Read More
Either the WSJ hasn’t taken their anti-crazy pills or there is something severely wrong with the military industrial complex. I’m betting on both. The story says, essentially, that insurgents in Iraq are “taking control” of our pilotless drones with a $25 piece of software called SkyGrabber. By “take control” the WSJ means “download video feeds from”… → Read More
What a time to be alive in the UK! Manchester United come home from Meeelan with a 0-0 draw, Arsenal, um, win somehow, and there may soon be unmanned drones flying o’er the countryside! Truly the epitome of civilization! → Read More
Not for nothing, but we did a post a few weeks back about how more and more of today’s professionals are from the video game generation. That is, the man in the suit behind the desk on Wall Street (what’s left of it) or in Foggy Bottom spent his formative years in front of an NES (or whatever), and can take some of the skills he learned there and apply it to the real world. Case in point, P.W. → Read More
The good ‘ol United States of America is going to employ Predator drones on the US Canada border within a few days. The unmanned arial drones have been used for years on the southern Mexican border, but they are now needed to keep a watchful eye on Canadians seeing that the US has a booming jobs market. After all, we need to keep Canadians from defecting as it’s common knowledge that… → Read More
http://www.liveleak.com/e/7bb_1210698031 Interesting article over on Military.com about how some Predator pilots are beginning to show signs of psychological stress even though they’re not technically fighting on a battlefield. The pilots spend most of their time in air-conditioned trailers in front of an array of monitors, piloting the remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from just… → Read More
I do not fear Skynet is real, but this is getting pretty creepy. The Miami-Dade and Houston police departments is petitioning the FAA for clearance to start flying unmanned drone aircraft over the city to track down perps. They’re thankfully not for patrol or traffic uses, those will stay with the beat cops, but they’d be deployed in SWAT or chase situations to give the police a better… → Read More
Sometimes, bordering on always, I wish I had a drone to do all my [dirty] work. Something to blog for me, read and analyze exit polls from post-Maasticht Eastern Europe, grind to level 70, etc. Now, police officers in Miami will have drones patrol the skies for them provided the FAA gives its blessing. The little robotic drones (see a patriotic video of them in action here) will fight bad guys in… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
