its starts with the innocuous birds..and then ends up herding people between flights...and protests.
Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#72Considering 15 minute flight time, 2 hour battery recharging time, and several miles runway circumference, I guestimate you would need around a 100-200 drone system to maintain constant surveillance around a medium size airport.
you don't need a quad/octo copter to do this, it could be a winged aircraft, and those are several orders of magnitude more efficient.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#73Guess this dog needs to start retraining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QxZv_wJ1aA
Got some bad news on that front: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/piper-dead-dog-airport-mi...
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is downside risk: drones get hacked, or someone figures out how to make the drones fly into planes, or herd birds TOWARD planes. As a society we've been pretty cavalier about algorithmic control. Which can work well for a lot of things. But probably shouldn't be trusted (without a TON of validation and regulation, as we've done over decades with airliners) with controlling stuff that can injure people or dama…
If we're discussing movie-plot scenarios, it seems like it would be much easier for an attacker to buy their own drone. And maybe figure out how to put explosives on it, too.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy ... but I fear this is going to be an all-to-likely scenario. Someone's gonna do it and it will change aviation for a while; restrictions, mega investment in new tech i.e. special radar, anti-drone kind of stuff. Won't be able to fly a drone anywhere remotely near an airport. And there are a lot of airports!
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#75This very much smells like fluff piece. Tech for obstacle avoidance is not yet mature to the level where it would be safe to have autonomous drones near bird path and potential busy air traffic. Add battery restrictions, wind, weather etc and you get nice vaporware demo.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're discussing movie-plot scenarios, it seems like it would be much easier for an attacker to buy their own drone. And maybe figure out how to put explosives on it, too.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy ... but I fear this is going to be an all-to-likely scenario. Someone's gonna do it and it will change aviation for a while; restrictions, mega investment in new tech i.e. special radar, anti-drone kind of stuff. Won't be able to fly a drone anywhere remotely near an airport. And there are a lot of airports!
Yes, agreed. What we've learned over the past few years that where algorithms exist, there are incentives to try to exploit them. Ad and PR firms: Google search algorithms, Twitter ranking algorithms. Political orgs: Youtube ranking algorithms, ad placement algorithms. Repressive govts: Facebook abuse reporting algorithms (done in Ukraine), Twitter hashtag algorithms, tweet ranking algorithms (bots pushing particular political tweets).
Humans may be in some ways easier to influence, but once an algorithm gets big enough, it can be worth attacking if the impact would be huge.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're discussing movie-plot scenarios, it seems like it would be much easier for an attacker to buy their own drone. And maybe figure out how to put explosives on it, too.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy ... but I fear this is going to be an all-to-likely scenario. Someone's gonna do it and it will change aviation for a while; restrictions, mega investment in new tech i.e. special radar, anti-drone kind of stuff. Won't be able to fly a drone anywhere remotely near an airport. And there are a lot of airports!
I guess. But then you have to ask why IED's are apparently only used in certain war zones? Many technically possible attacks seem not to happen all that often.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#78This very much smells like fluff piece. Tech for obstacle avoidance is not yet mature to the level where it would be safe to have autonomous drones near bird path and potential busy air traffic. Add battery restrictions, wind, weather etc and you get nice vaporware demo.
What happens when the pilots come to depend on the vaporware and are no longer skilled enough to land in their own? Or when they run the avoidable risk of colliding with drones as opposed to a flock of geese?
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a pilot, but at 3000 feet AGL, you have a lot more room for emergency maneuvering / diverting back to origin or alternate right? I remember hearing something about how many small aircraft incidents occur at low altitude on takeoff or landing, partly because it's harder to recover from a stall condition (perhaps engine-out as well?) at low altitude...
One way of thinking about altitude is how many mistakes you have time to recover from before hitting the ground. The higher you are the safer you are - you haven't crashed until you hit the ground. For a single-engine plane, 500' AGL depending on the plane and wind is enough to make a 180° turn and land on the takeoff runway if its clear. 1000' AGL will let you do it on just about any suitable surface at the airport…
What kind of birds fly above 20,000 feet???
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#80Considering 15 minute flight time, 2 hour battery recharging time, and several miles runway circumference, I guestimate you would need around a 100-200 drone system to maintain constant surveillance around a medium size airport.
The technology is still young clearly, but:
1. Drones don't need to always be flying. Flocks of birds turn up on radar quite a lot and I don't see some early detection system for birds as impossible.
2. The flight paths for migrating birds can be predicted, reducing the need for a high presence in some directions.
3. 15 minutes of flight time is low, with some super big LiPo batteries for high performance drones you're easily getting an hour. The benefit of these large batteries is that they can be charged quickly too (charge rate based on power offered).
4. They are relatively fail safe, if the drones stop functioning you just go back to not having any real support.
5. It's likely that with some additional work, they could work on calculating the conditions that cause flocks of birds to fly towards scary sounding planes. I imagine it to be quite likely that they will only fly from certain directions given wind conditions, etc.