I hope someone doesn't use this as inspiration for an exploit against LIDAR. On second thought, I hope people do start working on an exploit, so engineers can get on with hardening systems against it!
Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
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Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Meh, a 5 Mega Watt wind turbine kills less wildlife than the average outdoor cat." Do you have some sort of data to back this up?
I imagine that Retric ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228800 ) is referring to stories like https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo... and https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/opinion/sunday/the-evil-o... (DDG results for "outdoor cats wildlife death"), compared to, say, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-w... (DDG result for "wind turbine wildlife death"). This is…
That's where the comparison comes from, however it's more that these articles are linking to harm without putting it into any perspective. If we replaced all electricity generation with wind farms you would kill fewer birds from pollution than the existing power plants directly kill.
There are 10+ billion birds in the US and a smaller but very large number of bats and well over 1 billion of them die every year. Talking about hundreds of bird/bat deaths in that context is almost meaningless.
PS: A fungus on the other hand is decimating bat populations and represents a real threat. However the actual threat is not exactly making the news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#23I hope someone doesn't use this as inspiration for an exploit against LIDAR. On second thought, I hope people do start working on an exploit, so engineers can get on with hardening systems against it!
The use cases I know of for lidar don't usually include a glancing reflection off a large flat surface.
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#24I wonder how bats perceive the AT&T "Batman Building" in Nashville, TN.
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#25That made me wonder how bats see water surfaces. Though I suppose not seeing them is less of a problem since they're not vertical :P
The post explains this: they don't. Standing water exhibits the same behavior as reflectiveless flat surfaces.
When they fly over a space and "see" nothing beneath them, they interpret this emptiness as a flat, smooth body of water.
Thus the only real problem here is that for flat horizontal surfaces that aren't water, the bats will try to drink from them.
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#26Interesting hypothetical to track bat evolution in urban areas over time to determine if selection is occurring for bats whose sonar is more finely attuned for detecting diffused returns as actual signal for skyscrapers or, for that matter, improved actual sight to avoid the buildings in the first place.
Bats already have very good vision. They just can't see well in the dark.
Is probably more a case of blinded by electric lights here.
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#27I hope someone doesn't use this as inspiration for an exploit against LIDAR. On second thought, I hope people do start working on an exploit, so engineers can get on with hardening systems against it!
The use cases I know of for lidar don't usually include a glancing reflection off a large flat surface.
Colliding with a large angled piece of sheet material in the middle of a roadway doesn't sound pleasant.
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#28I hope someone doesn't use this as inspiration for an exploit against LIDAR. On second thought, I hope people do start working on an exploit, so engineers can get on with hardening systems against it!
I built a number of robots that use infrared distance sensors for object detection and collision avoidance. Sadly the stereo cabinet I had made myself and painted flat black appeared invisible to them. Several robots ran into the cabinet at full speed :-(. The mitigation was to add another sensor (ultrasonic) which was better at seeing solid surfaces (but same problem as the bats for off angle approach).
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use cases I know of for lidar don't usually include a glancing reflection off a large flat surface.
Colliding with a large angled piece of sheet material in the middle of a roadway doesn't sound pleasant.
While I agree that the sensor systems should image just about anything you can imagine, wouldn't a large angled reflective sheet produce a shadow that could be distinguished from normal road surfaces and avoided?
Re: Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them
#30Poor bats. They also get their lungs exploded by the pressure differences created near wind turbines: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/09/27/wind-turbines-are...
Meh, a 5 Mega Watt wind turbine kills less wildlife than the average outdoor cat.
turbines and cats put different selective pressure on the prey population - cats kill weak, ill, etc. thus improving the overall quality of the population where is turbine kills are probably spread uniformly and even may be skewed toward healthy active animals.