I’m pretty into new tech gadgets.
Not the kind that just grabs up the latest must-have thing (though I am thinking very seriously about grabbing a tablet when they come out), but I get excited about gadgets that innovate beyond what’s being talked about and offer uses (both practical and entertainment wise) that aren’t being met — or could only be met at a very high price.
When a colleague sent a note along to me this morning on the AR.Drone made by the French company Parrot, I was intrigued. Then I looked at their site and the videos that explain what the AR.Drone does and I freaked.
Frome USAToday:
Moving the iPhone or iPod Touch, which have built-in accelerometers, directs the toy helicopter in forward, backward, turning and other directions. Buttons on the iPhone make it go up or down.
The chopper has four propellers and two on-board video cameras. One camera assists in flight, the other broadcasts video back to the device. That’s where game developers could use the toy’s capabilities to created augmented reality games to play in the real world, says Parrot founder Henri Seydoux.
“For the first time, you can play together with a friend like a flying ace,” he says. “You pilot your copter and could shoot him in the game and the video camera makes that connection.”
I’m an iPhone disciple — I mean, I truly think the iPhone is the greatest invention since the wheel, if not since fire. And if I can now use my iPhone to snoop on people or places with a lightweight helidrone, I’m in.
Now, after watching the video, I’m left with the question: Why does it take a decade of development and 100s of millions of dollars to develop (and not even yet field) a microdrone capability for the military, when some French company nobody’s ever heard of can pop one of these things out in a year? How soon do you think SOCOM will put out an UNS on this little gizmo?
– Christian
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
There has to major range issues with a wifi connection to an iPhone. At best, with the video bandwidth required, 50 or 60 ft range before performance and control becomes an issue. Great idea, just not (yet) practical beyond the level of toy.
The Services do have some quite capable small(ish) drones already deployed that are providing valuable surveillance for our troops. It's easy to develop a small, light micro drone that flies under user control at short ranges. However, creating a micro drone that can be launched, recovered, operated by troops in austere conditions all while carrying a payload (this means lots of weight) is another matter all together.
Now, having said that, I remember seeing a story in Aviation Week about a guy who had seen a micro drone that was approx 10" long I believe and was bassically a long cylidrical tube with three sets of fins that extended the lenght of the tube. He said the micro UAV was rotating around it's long axis and moving across the room very slowly at chest level.
He was an experienced engineer and said he hadn't a clue how it worked.
This article will get the teen age warriors that populate this site all into a super comic book blood thirsty dither.
Which will then lead into a deeply juvenile and meaningless discussion about camouflage patterns etc.
You brought up the camo patterns…
I wanted to start the cammo debate.
I think a soldier clearing a house would love to have this eye in the sky enter first. Who cares if it gets shot up. The defender just gave away his position.
At some point these drones will get cheap enough that they will be dispensable. Heck, we already spend tons of money for bombs and missiles. I wonder how many of these drones we could buy instead on one F22?
"Why does it take a decade of development and 100s of millions of dollars to develop (and not even yet field) a microdrone capability for the military, when some French company nobody’s ever heard of can pop one of these things out in a year?"
Having been an engineer on many a bloated DOD program I see a few causes for this:
1. as a defense contractor you have incentives to drag things out for as long as possible (i.e. "cost plus" contracts)
2. your customer changes his mind constantly as the need for your technology is often not clear cut and tends to change over time
3. once a new colonel steps up to program management he has to put his fingerprints on the program, mandating countless requirements changes, product redesigns and setting the development cycle back a bit
4. the industry is inherently political- companies that are inept but have congressmen in their pockets still tend to get lots of money
5. you are working with and for bloated bureaucracies- it's just plain difficult to get things done in a timely manner
I could go on and on but these are the main causes of cost bloat in my experience.
Thanks tesla…though it was a rhetorical question really…
Not to mention that this video looks like it's just CGI. Look at some of the other videos as well as the one from CES and you'll see that it's not nearly as neat as that video makes it look.
Please tell me how the drone is going to get into the house?
Would it be through the front door, or the back door?
An open window would do.
that's why they make hellfire missles!
What tesla said. There are simply no incentives, anyone with a hint of microeconomics knows that.
1) Control Range (although I’m sure a higher power wi-fi unit isn’t beyond the wit of man)
2) Battery Life (although 15 mins isn’t bad)
3) Setting up a supply chain that can keep you in compatible parts for 10+ years
That said, it’s a superb little off-the-shelf solution. The worrying thought is that it (and more importantly the inevitable next two or three slightly improved generations of it) are off-the-shelf – just like commercially availible night vision gear, gps, and so forth. One wonders what happens if militant groups start buying them…
Then we create counters to them. Then militant groups start using the counters we developed against our own drones.
This is a huge issue considering the government really wants to move toward open source/off the shelf solutions now a-days.
“Why does it take a decade of development and 100s of millions of dollars to develop (and not even yet field) a microdrone capability for the military, when some French company nobody’s ever heard of can pop one of these things out in a year?”
Let’s take just the comms part of it. 802.11 is a no go, and range has nothing to do with that. Try CREW deconfliction. So a CREW deconflicted radio set is going to set you back, I dunno, $10-15k AFTER it’s been actually developed, and then it’ll weight a ton, and suck power because unlike 802.11 it hasn’t been optimized with billions of dollars of funding over an entire decade. So now, using the hardware shown, you can’t take off, and if you could, your runtime just went to three minutes. So you upsize everything, and then fail to meet the requirements of a microdrone.
Then while all this is going on, you add the defense contractor and program manager comments made by a clearly well informed (and therefor jaded) poster earlier, and it takes forever.
We put out a wireless camera system that was disposable. It cost well under $1k, had a ton of cool features, and was requested forward. Then the frequency manager got a hold of it, required a freq change to a $6,000 transmitter solution, which took another 12+ months to get it into the field. So the cost went up by a factor of 10, and fielding time was quadrupled. Not because we couldn’t do it, but because the military wouldn’t allow us to.
I had a bunch of buddies early in the war in Iraq dealing with the early IEDs. mostly stuff in a pile of trash, command det by wire. Their biggest issue on partol was that they would find something that looked like a bomb and then wait hours for EOD to come forward and find out it was a bag of trash. So I sent them a half dozen $30 remote control cars. They would take the things and run them forward into suspected IEDs. A few of them didn’t make it back, but a 2lbs RC car does not push a bomb, but it can push a bad of trash. I was told those 6 trucks saved them hundreds of hours of waiting, and the ones that where lost where cheaper than anything that EOD would have moved forward to look.
My point here is that off the self things work, sometimes they don’t meet 100% of your needs, but it’s cheap and it’s available now. The EOD buys packbots for $58000 each, and they do very little more than the $30 RC car.
The RC car idea is great, of course if the military decides to adopt something like that you know that that RC car they end up adopting will cost thousands of dollars and be no better than the $30 one. The other side benefit of the $30 RC car is that it gives something for the troops to play with during their downtime.
And to think, the military could pay for all the RC cars it would need by taking the money it uses to sponsor a handful of NASCAR teams…
Why would 802.11 be out of the question? Deconfliction is built into the standard. 802.11a RFC substandard has a range of 5000m, and if you didn’t want to try to find a system that coudl run that (it was not used much) you could use 802.11n which has a 250m range. (More than enough for most micro). Encrypting the radio is a simple matter of some off the self software/hardware (I have Linux machine 1″x1.5″ that could easily handle encryption) to any simple standard (rotating SSL for example) that would take weeks to crack each key.
Agreed.
This is not a freq sharing issue, OR a standard deconfliction issue. It is a CREW issue, and cannot be deconflicted. If you don't know what this means, then this is a pointless argument!
Christian, you aren't seriously asking why the defense contractors charge so much are you? I mean it's only government money and they've always had free access to it. This, however, is different, it's being marketed to a consumer that knows they really don't need it so they have to make the price point attractive.
I am impressed that you get around to asking why it would have been orders of magnitude more to get from a defense contractor though. Questioning the need for any of their offerings has become about as unpatriotic a thing as you can do in your country. I just hope none of them cut off your funding now.
Of course, Mr. Coleman may want to toss out an article now warning about the poor security coded in and how a band of North Koreans may be planning right now to take them over and fly them into hydro lines or worse yet, school yards. "Children's school yards, Mandrake". poe POE PoE pOe. ;0)
Why are posts being deleted by the admin as soon as you click submit?
I give up. This is a joke.
Why am I able to read your post?
Gee. I guess you didn't notice "posts', as opposed to the singular 'post'. Nor what it said which would imply there were previous efforts. I wrote a longer comment and submitted it. It was instantly listed as rejected (no profanities etc). I tried again. Got the same result. Then I wrote that and it went up.
Wowza. One comment suggesting Mr Coleman write an article about how North Koreans are already planning to take these over and fly them into power lines or school yards and it is deleted by an admin the second I post it. That was nasty.
Wowza. One comment suggesting Mr C write an article about how North Koreans are already planning to take these over and fly them into power lines or school yards and it is deleted by an admin the second I post it. That was nasty.
One Killer Bee is no big deal, but when they swarm…
Program them to do nest building in inaccessible locations,
develop a variety of payloads, including batteries and solar
powered chargers; The swarm could render its territory a
total no-go zone, only attack human+weapon, or search
for specified faces, and terminate with extreme prejudice.
Available tech+ingenuity = a win in Afghanistan for less
money, and lives, than we plan to spend there.
I'm surprised the army allowed them to use the RC cars. Usually a Safety nazi pops up and declares the risk of the transmitter detonating the IED as too great.
But if you could get someone to rig a wire control system (Cat5 or telephone wire come to mind) Then you'd have a really nifty solution.