And the cool thing about high speed rail or auto transport as we move into this world of IoT:
You can carry loose lithium [spare] batteries, and likely fuel cells when they're out. Good luck with airplanes at this point as they'll likely ban any high energy density power source.
Issue a mandatory NOTAM. And [already they did] shutdown the local airports.
They do it all the time at Edwards AFB here on the west coast. No one flies into the space and guess what... your tech challenges become zero. None of these aircraft are going to go flying off...like a drone for instance. Only today, the big challenges are RF issues, but luckily these aircraft have no tech that deends on digital RF connections.
I'd still take a B52 and a couple of F22s and JSFs buzzing around with some afterburners running. You see that here. Impressive.
The 25% of old cars don't use catalytic converters. That's common in most 3rd world and EU countries....
Retrofit and call it a day.
Poorly designed or obsolete languages:
"do not reinvent the wheel because thou are not as wise as the wheel builder"
Rightfully designed, efficient languages:
"do not reinvent the wheel because you can be more efficient, and focus on behavior/app logic"
The perfect case of C following the latter is the Linux Kernel--they do not reinvent a lot of things.
HURD played the same role as Duke Nukem Forever back them.
Linux is successful from the volunteers that developed the driver/HAL suite around the kernel. If we were still have basic display driver issues today, no one would be on Linux... except maybe the network guys.
Cool, I guess flying will easily get me to the corner of 14th and Pennsylvania Ave. Really, the exact corner...
Really, all this shows it that the more precise location you need to be in, the more energy you'll use. Sure, flying may theoretically get you closer, but if you factor in the infrastructure required vs a dirt road, it's more expensive (today's street cost a lot for robustness.
Goes with my mantra: More precision == more effort (i.e. cost in this case). Applies to pretty much everything.
Self selection my ass.
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently, and hire their buddies. Unfortunately that also includes staying around, which means working all day long, much like working in a college lab.
Not different from any college academic fraternity. I saw that with SPS as we had a dedicated study room, aka hang out for nerds (tv, frig, couches, tables, bookshelf library, etc...).
I want to see proof. Photos of a hovering drone says nothing nowadays.
Really, even Google's '8 guys surrounding a drone' video doesn't show autonomous capability--though their cars are a different story (i.e. real).
Nowadays, I see 9 or 10 companies touting fully autonomous flight, redundancy and delivery, RTF, ready to go, 1hr flight, 1min charge--I want to see a 1 min video of an actual test of a real use case: drive up, 2lbs payload, launch to delivery to land, to recharging, no setup and one-touch. It's very possible to create content of that, but I don't see any...
Then really, a drone on top of a truck--I see things (IMU) shifting off calibration, sand-papering the props, dust-n-dirt, sun damage, and them some. You put skis on top of a truck, not precision electronic devices.
Hence, whatever happened to RUDP?
Everyone keeps turning UDP into some pseudo TCP w/o all the extras....that's what RUDP was built for.
I hope that part of landing you describe is not under closed loop. If so, that's why Elon's tweet was removed....
It's typical for any vertical landing mechanism [on Earth] to go open loop. Most quadcopters (much like ours) have enough throttle authority until entering ground effect, rockets in vertical landing also apply, but it's a different type of ground effect as you can see in the video--that thing had a high descent rate likely to keep it from horizontally drifting off target. In our copter's case, once we enter ground effect, our s/w goes into a open loop algo and it does a similar hover-slam technique--why? again, to keep it from drifting horizontally (likely induced from ground effect), aka on target.
Once you enter ground effect, all models will likely fail using a closed loop approach, and you need to go open loop, vertical dead reckon and use gravity to your advantage. If they are expecting oscillations upon touchdown (i.e. Elon's phase lag comment), there's something else wrong, or their approach (again, closed loop?) isn't right: you shouldn't design to have oscillations, especially when it's applied in ground effect.
“This level of autonomous swarming flight has never been done before,” said Mastroianni. “
I beg to differ. Some groups I know of have been doing this (with vehicle to vehicle communication) since 2012.
Bingo.
As a researcher, we've found DoD made hardware is highly optimized for the task at hand. Most military equipment I've used in the public sector is very good at the task it's made for, some of it is very robust too.
That is a good thing and justifies their expensive price tag, BUT nearly all high tech military equipment forget to fulfill one requirement:
minimal collateral damage
Missile shrapnel hits surrounding homes? Drone loses RF, crash lands? Humvee leaking leaded fuel? F22 runs at 200dB noise cruising low attitude? High tech rifles discharges uranium-laced shells randomly on the ground? "Who cares, it's not apart of the mission".
In the public sector, especially what I see in entertainment: collateral damage is pretty much the #1 or #2 safety requirement.
our hexacopters can carry upto 1.5kg and about 650mm boom to boom and still get 15min flight times.
Drone delivery will be good for [highly] customized, small articles. Drug perscriptions would be a potential. And thus will justify a preimum in delivery costs. Commodity items--just ship it through ground, it scales better since there's already an infrastructure (i.e. roads). Eventually once "roads", "driveways", and "mailboxes" are established for drones, you'll likely see a shift.
Naysayers of delivery drones are just being ignorant to the fact there's a huge infrastructure to support ground delivery, dating way back to the pony express let's say, and missing the fact that your house design is apart of that infrastructure (e.g. mailbox "slot"). Drone mass-delivery just became an idea what? 2 yrs ago? Sounds like naysayers are mre like fanboys and the media more like a hype machine, but the tech will become reality once a infrastructure is developed/deployed.
That's a deep answer. This is the funniest article of the day for me as a flying robot/drone developer.
While the germans are flying drones all over the place, selling them and have a regulatory framework, they are complaining they cannot build/sell autonomous cars... and calling out other countries, mainly the US as beating them in that game.
But in the US, it's the completely reverse... or bizarro situation. While Google and Uber are building autonomous cars, and getting them approved for use, drones on the other hand are DOA with no framework insight... and drone companies are complaining countries like Germany and France (and Australia) are beating them in that game.
Oh, "the irony of the rant".
How cares about skynet when it comes to heat and computers... I worry more about the Matrix instead.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
