A big story today in San Diego's newspaper about DIY Drones at the AUVSI conference. Excerpt follows:
"'Do-it-yourself drones' create buzz at S.D. conventionThe unmanned Predator aircraft developed in San Diego during the mid-1990s has become a workhorse surveillance plane for U.S. military forces in Iraq, as well as a robotic hunter-killer.
During one 11-month period in Iraq, a squadron of Predators operated remotely by the Air Force flew 2,073 combat missions and fired 59 Hellfire missiles at ground targets.
Yet the technology underlying the sophisticated unmanned aircraft is now so easily available and inexpensive that one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures is encouraging hobbyists to build and fly their own.
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, stepped forward as an evangelist for such “do-it-yourself drones” yesterday at a conference for the unmanned systems industry at the San Diego Convention Center.
“This kind of technology, which used to cost millions of dollars, then hundreds of thousands and then thousands, now costs hundreds of dollars,” Anderson said.
As the founder of DIY Drones, or Do It Yourself Drones, a Web site for hobbyists and others, Anderson is showing just how easy it is to use off-the-shelf components to build unmanned aircraft for the masses...."
Lots more here.
I couldn't help myself - I posted a reply to that FUD article.
Hats off to you Chris: Editor, Website creator, speaker, arms dealer. Kinda Like Tony Stark.
btw - When will you be shipping the Arc reactor for my plane?
hough the analogy of the early days of personal computers is apt, you may recall that there were significant export controls on high-end microprocessors, digital signal processors, and dedicated array/vector coprocessors which probably didn't start to lapse until the mid-to-late 1980's. However, that genie has left the bottle, as the fastest supercomputers are now being built with the same processor that lives in a Sony Playstation 3.
Maybe 10-20% was non-defense, and even that was speculative. There's really no non-military market for UAVs to speak of right now, due to the regulatory environment that bans virtually all domestic commercial uses (except the recreational stuff that we do).
Bizarre post on the Aviation Week site, though if you come from the perspective that UAV's are essentially a weapons technology (figure that 90%+ of the funding for UAV development comes from defense sources), that attitude is not difficult to understand. From your visit to the AUVSI conference, how much of the stuff that you saw was not defense oriented ?
More to the point, the participants in this multi-billion dollar industry are probably not looking kindly toward the entry-level technologies you presented, for a variety of reasons. I haven't really thought much about how this will play out, but one dimension will be the pressure that will be (or has already been) brought to bear on the FAA to limit/control proliferation of UAV's.
Wow. People have to start getting past using these "terrorism" scare tactics. This is the reason why kids are getting less and less interested in science in this country. Putting technology and ideas into the hands of everybody allows people to get interested and invent new superior technology.
“This kind of technology, which used to cost millions of dollars, then hundreds of thousands and then thousands, now costs hundreds of dollars,”
this is Moore's law in action , the scary part is given onother 10 years and we are talking 10s of dollers for a Auto pilot and that AP will be 10x as powerfull . this is one of the most powerfull forces that drives electronic technology . also great job chris and thanks for giving us a voice , i guess no one else is crazy enough to.
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By the Numbers: The Forbes Fictional 15
He's #10 on last year's list, down from #6 in 2006.
Hats off to you Chris: Editor, Website creator, speaker, arms dealer. Kinda Like Tony Stark.
btw - When will you be shipping the Arc reactor for my plane?
:-)
Paul
More to the point, the participants in this multi-billion dollar industry are probably not looking kindly toward the entry-level technologies you presented, for a variety of reasons. I haven't really thought much about how this will play out, but one dimension will be the pressure that will be (or has already been) brought to bear on the FAA to limit/control proliferation of UAV's.
"Wired Editor Creates Next Terror Weapon"
this is Moore's law in action , the scary part is given onother 10 years and we are talking 10s of dollers for a Auto pilot and that AP will be 10x as powerfull . this is one of the most powerfull forces that drives electronic technology . also great job chris and thanks for giving us a voice , i guess no one else is crazy enough to.