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Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's almost as if the risk of being killed by terrorists is blown out of all proportion to further some kind of political agenda. You're orders of magnitude more likely to get hit by a bus.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can already do that with your own manually controlled drones(surprisingly, no one has done this yet). There is no need to hack the airports drones.
manually controlled drones How about we just call them "remote-controlled aircraft"... which is what they were called before the whole "drone" fad came along (and "drone" itself used to imply at least some autonomous capability.)
Indeed. RC planes and helicopters have been around for a very long time. But all of a sudden they're potential weapons of mass murder because... They have a few extra propellers!?
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Birds are already programmed for that. It's called self preservation. Airplanes are huge chunks of metal that make a deafening roar. Grown men are rightly afraid of coming near one.
> Birds are already programmed for that. It's called self preservation. Not exactly. Bird strikes are a huge problem especially in "congested" environments, aka humans sealing up more and more former forest/agricultural land with concrete... and thus forcing the birds to airports as they usually have spacious amounts of grass land with ample space for insects. There's a reason why bird strikes are most prevalent in c…
Are they a "huge" problem? How many occur every day? How many fatal accidents do they cause - as a percentage of all flights?
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is classic short-sighted engineering hubris. Realistically how much statistical threat is there from birds? And how long until this design malfunctions somewhere? If this is rolled out in scale and put in use at every airport, it's going to happen.
> Realistically how much statistical threat is there from birds? From wikipedia: "The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) reported 65,139 bird strikes for 2011–14, and the Federal Aviation Authority counted 177,269 wildlife strike reports on civil aircraft between 1990 and 2015, growing 38% in 7 years from 2009 to 2015. Birds accounted for 97%"
But how many did any actual damage? How many resulted in fatalities?
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#96I suspect the birds would eventually ignore the drones unless the drones are made to pose an actual physical threat to them. City pigeons are so accustomed to cars and humans that they barely move out of the way in time to avoid being crushed.
The drones would chase the birds away. And in cases when the birds are to be sucked by a jet's engine the autonomous drone would follow suit
Aircraft have beacons to stop them flying into each other, I'm not sure why they wouldn't design the drones to be able to detect them.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#97Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Birds are already programmed for that. It's called self preservation. Not exactly. Bird strikes are a huge problem especially in "congested" environments, aka humans sealing up more and more former forest/agricultural land with concrete... and thus forcing the birds to airports as they usually have spacious amounts of grass land with ample space for insects. There's a reason why bird strikes are most prevalent in c…
Are they a "huge" problem? How many occur every day? How many fatal accidents do they cause - as a percentage of all flights?
What makes the problem "huge" is the fear of bird strikes. You can read up (e.g.) on https://www.thespruce.com/how-do-airports-prevent-bird-strik....
In absolute numbers, per FAA there were 13k bird strike events in 2016, with 262 deaths+279 injuries from 1990-2013 (so about 11 deaths/year on average): https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/wildlife/faq/
Obviously most birdstrikes are harmless but everyone fears a scenario like in 2009 in NYC.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because he's a bird?
It is not obvious to me that a bird will flee from anything that approaches it, regardless of past experience, simply "because he's a bird". See above about city pigeons. Or aggressive geese at the park. Or birds that get sucked into jet engines because they apparently don't consider a jumbo jet to be an obstacle worth avoiding, hence this conversation.
> Or birds that get sucked into jet engines because they apparently don't consider a jumbo jet to be an obstacle worth avoiding, hence this conversation.
The problem there is that the bird has no time to react. Planes are way faster and actually suck air.
Re: Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously
#100Earlier 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…
You can already do that with your own manually controlled drones(surprisingly, no one has done this yet). There is no need to hack the airports drones.
Cost of upkeep and maintenance (not to mention trained personel) is going to be very high if this isn't automated.