prosthetic knowledge

BionicOpter 

Remote-controlled drone that flies and is in the form of a dragonfly - video embedded below:

With the BionicOpter, Festo has technically mastered the highly complex flight characteristics of the dragonfly. Just like its model in nature, this ultralight flying object can fly in all directions, hover in mid-air and glide without beating its wings.

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The 10th Anniversary of the First Drone Kill 

As this piece from The Bereau Of Investigation shows, four words that changed the course of military action were “OK. Fine. Shoot Him”:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) usually gets all the credit for the first US drone targeted killing beyond the conventional battlefield.

But it was the military which gave the final go-ahead to kill on November 3 2002.

Lt General Michael DeLong was at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida when news came in that the CIA had found its target. The deputy commander made his way down to the UAV Room, showing live video feeds from a CIA Predator high above Marib province in Yemen.

The armed drone was tracking an SUV on the move. The six terrorist suspects inside were unaware that a decision had already been made to kill them.

Interviewed by PBS, DeLong later recalled speaking by phone with CIA Director George Tenet as he watched the video wall:

‘Tenet goes “You going to make the call?” And I said, “I’ll make the call.”  He says, “This SUV over here is the one that has Ali in it.”  I said, “OK, fine.” You know, “Shoot him.” They lined it up and shot it.’

Eight thousand miles away and moments later, six alleged terrorists were dead. Among them was a US citizen.

Read the whole article here

Video of Spy Drone Intercepted in Israeli Airspace 

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was identified penetrating Israeli airspace this morning, and was intercepted by the IAF at approximately 10:00 AM.
IDF soldiers are currently searching the area where the drone was downed, in open areas in the northern Negev, to locate and identify the drone.

Interestingly, the first shot at the spy drone missed, it was the second shot that got it.

SurVoyeur 

A DIY Drone created in Namibia for land surveying, put together by Gisela & Joe Noci who have been working in the area for solutions to wildlife conservation and other local needs. Via DIY Drones:

This aircraft is a sub 4.5kg electric, able to carry up to 600grams payloads for up to 45minutes. It is also a fully autonomous system, with full autolaunch and autoland in harsh terrain. It has been extensively flown here in Namibia, mostly on land surveying missions, photographing up to 150hectare in one flight. We have fitted it with a Samsung 20Mpixel camera, giving us down to 2cm ground resolution on the resulting georeferenced ortho-images.

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Art of Bjoern Schuelke

Kinetic installation artist has been producing surveillance drone-like / solar powered pieces well over the last decade:

Björn Schülke pursues a creative style that is equally influenced by modern abstraction and instruments of scientific measurement. The slow deliberate movements in his sculptures spatially consider mass and weight of form. Also influenced by the Dadaist tradition and Jean Tinguely, the theme of an absurd machine is key in Schülke’s work.
Playfully transforming live spatial energy into active responses, his objects experiment with solar panels, infrared surveillance, and propelled wind power. Many of his larger kinetic sculptures combine elements of surveillance technologies, robotics, interactive video and sound.
Schülke’s active sculptures question the way in which we interact with modern technology: on entering the installation site, the audience becomes part of the ‘system’ as the works (some freestanding, others suspended) monitor or react to the human element.

You can find out more about the artist at his website here, including video examples and an informative pdf brochure.

BaTBoT 

Project explores possibility of robotic flight, taking design cues from the wings of bats:

The evolutionary process of flying animals exhibits significant skeletal structure adaptations such as, large material property gradients and variations the development of extreme adaptations (bats wings are essentially equivalent to hands).

Although observing and gaining inspiration from these animals can provide significant insight into the physical requirements of flapping flight, it remains an engineering challenge to develop equivalently effective flapping wing vehicles.

The Fluid Mechanics Laboratory and the Swartz Lab at Brown University, have been carrying out a remarkable research about the understanding of in-vivo Bat flight aerodynamics. Using wing-tunnel testing and performing motion capture by tracking markers located along the bat body and wings, high-speed cameras are used to provide an insight of bat flight behavior.

In collaboration with Brown University, this research is oriented towards the development of a biological inspired bat robot platform, that allows to reproduce the amazing maneuverability of these flying mammals. The highly maneuverability is achieved by reproducing the flapping and morphing capabilities of their wing-skeleton structure. This structure is composed by several joints and a membrane that generates the required lift forces to fly. 

More information can be found at the project’s site here

Tacocopter - Update

Earlier, I posted about a too-good-to-be-true future tech food delivery service called Tacocopter, a startup which claimed you could order a taco on your smartphone, and it would be delivered straight to you via quadcopter drone.

According to this Quora post … the service is real!

Dustin Boyer, Co-Founder at Tacocopter

Yes, we’re definitely real :)  There are a number of technical and legal hurdles that our team is working through.  If you’re interested in pushing the boundaries of robotics and food please email  jobs@tacocopter.com

There you go … [link]

Tacocopter

Service which ‘claims’ to deliver Tacos by drone technology once ordered by phone.

If it is real, then the future of current military technology will be for delivering food!

http://tacocopter.com/

Is this real? Anyone confirm it? Or is it a great big troll / leaked April Fools?

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet via WIRED: Danger Room

Cyber warfare has taken an interesting direction:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have their been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

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