Boeing reported today that it has successfully destroyed several flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using a laser weapon mounted on a truck. The weapon was mounted to an Avenger Air Defense vehicle, which normally uses surface-to-air missiles for attacks. The successful test involved the Laser Avenger tracking and destroying three UAVs in flight, which set a milestone for, “the first time a combat vehicle has used a laser to shoot down a UAV”.

Boeing was a little reserved when addressing the question of how exactly the UAVs were destroyed, only saying, “A hole was burned in a critical flight control element of the UAV, rendering the aircraft unflyable.” As for how long it took to do this, what “critical flight control element” it was, or if such a system is truly viable in a combat situation, that is left to the reader’s imagination. It should also be noted that Boeing has apparently made significant progress with this system, as only about 1 year ago they were proclaiming the destruction of IEDs by the Laser Avenger.

“We doubled the laser power; added sophisticated acquisition, tracking and pointing capability; and simplified and ruggedized the design,” said Lee Gutheinz, Boeing program director for High-Energy Laser/Electro-Optical Systems. “Boeing developed and integrated these upgrades in less than a year, underscoring our ability to rapidly respond to warfighters’ needs.”

An interesting point is that Boeing seems to be trying to sell the Military on the idea of destroying UAV threats to our soldiers, while, to my knowledge, there haven’t been any such threats to date. In fact, robotic air authority seems to be solidly on the USA’s side. Do they know something we don’t, or are they just being pessimistic?

Regardless, while we mourn for our robotic bretheren, I say this is pretty darn cool.

 

If anyone doubted the US Air Force’s commitment to unmanned (read: robots) aircraft, you won’t after you hear this: The Air Force plans on acquiring more unmanned than manned aircraft next year. That’s a pretty amazing statistic, and amounts to billions of dollars of potential new business for companies in that market. The USAF currently maintains about 27 unmanned vehcles in the air above Afghanistan and Iraq at all times, and plans to double that number over the next 3 years. But, in order to do that, they need to train hundreds of new pilots to help fly them. They might also considering training more counselors to help the pilots deal with the trauma.

From the lab of YutaHiroto Tanaka, here’s some slow-motion video of a butterfly ornithopter in flight. It appears this video is part of a paper that was submitted to the IROS 2008 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) conference.

[Via DIYDrones, Via MAKE]

Bob May, the actor that played “Robot” from the original Lost in Space TV show has died. He died at the age of 69 from congestive heart failure. Lost in Space debuted in 1965, and is a retelling of the Swiss Family Robinson story, in space. Apparently May got the part because, ” … he fit in the robot suit”.

May wore the suit for hours at a time and learned the lines of every actor in the show so he would know when to respond to their cues. Because it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the suit, he kept it on during breaks.

RIP, Mr. May.

[Via BoingBoing]

Shown below is a video of a robot that uses the perceived vanishing point of an image to navigate through a corridor. The robot, based on an iRobot Create, uses a standard webcam and video processing to locate the vanishing point of what it sees, and navigates towards that point. Such navigation works very well in office-like environments with straight walls, windows, and ceilings. The robot also uses visual clues, like orange traffic cones, to recognize specific locations.

I was responsible for vision-based navigation of the robot within the hallways. I used the vanishing points from the parallel lines present indoors to compute the robot heading. This was then fed into a controller to control the direction of the robot for navigation. The computation was made robust to change in light conditions, false detections, occlusions by a layered filtering approach that included RANSAC and least squares filtering among others.

Such navigation has some very interesting implications for simple navigation through common environments (houses, offices, shopping malls, etc.). Has anyone tried this using RoboRealm? You can read the project report (PDF) here.

[Via Hackzine]