Sad breaking news.
A foreign engineer from an Austrian company was killed and two South Korean colleagues were injured Thursday when an unmanned spy drone crashed into their control vehicle during a test flight, police said.
The trio were testing the aircraft for South Korea’s military in the western port city of Incheon, police said.
“A 50-year-old foreign engineer from an Austrian company died on the spot when the S-100 drone crashed while they were controlling it remotely from inside the vehicle,” a police spokeswoman at Incheon told AFP.
http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-kills-engineer-in-south-korea/
Comments
Interesting comment Jack. Care to expound?
Still just as dangerous, even without the cockpit. Blaming N Korea for GPS jamming is silly. Maybe after 100 more people die, they'll finally balance the blades.
I am sure it has nothing to do with GPS or even software. It was probably landing near the GCS and some mechanical failure caused it to tilt and accelerate. Maybe just bad luck that it was towards the van.
I suspect this accident is little to do with intentional external interference and more to do with engineering or operational procedures
Ok, one would assume that they would not have lifted off, if they sensed that the GPS was giving wrong values. So, at the time of launch the GPS was not being spoofed. So, give the amount of money involved, I'm assuming a team of decent programmers were involved with full-time to come up with clever algorithms and implement them.
Being a self-claimed clever programmer, but no time to implement anything, I would use an algorithm to detect and handle GPS failure such as this:
1- Self-test for valid GPS and sensor reading.
2- Launch if self-test passed. (GPS is functioning properly)
3- Start recording waypoints at the update rate of my GPS.
4- At any point that the GPS reading is completely nonsense compared to my velocity, and last good GPS reading go to failsafe mode.
The failsafe mode, I would implement, for a helicopter, would be something like this:
1- Stop. (using inertial sensors, not GPS)
2- Plot a course from my last valid GPS reading, to my launch location.
3- Use inertial sensors to plot a course back to launch.
Yes the GPS does not necessarily know its being spoofed.
But I doubt it was that, it was just what was said to the press.
@Ellison, OK, assuming they have an inertial dead reckoning system, as a backup, that could help. And it's a fair assumption that they did.
The problem is, I think, if somebody was spoofing the GPS signal, that would probably over-ride the inertial system. Similar to what happened with that drone in Iran.
Regardless, it doesn't sound like the idea of GPS spoofing is anything other than supposition at this point. But, if it was spoofing, and it appears they even managed to steer the craft into the command and control station, that's a pretty frightening prospect that they had that much control.
Sorry to hear that Tobias, its a great platform with a bright future. Lets see what the accident report brings.
Condolences again to all those that knew Jozef.
Knew him well. Good guy, great engineer. Taught me a lot.
Jozef, I will miss you.
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