Found this thing while wandering around YouTube. It’s big, it’s bad, and it’s full of Pez. Yum!

I was never sure why the Air Force insisted on having fully qualified combat pilots remotely fly Predators and other combat drones. Enlisted personnel, with some training, have been piloting non-combat drones for years, and in the words of one army private interviewed by Wired back in 2005, “you watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It’s pretty simple.” As I can personally attest to, flying a small airplane is most of the time far simpler than driving a car. There are three really tricky bits: takeoffs, landings, and talking on the radio. Luckily, the drones come with automated takeoff and landing systems, and as for the radio calls… Once you can say “niner” with a straight face, the rest is not so hard to figure out.

That Wired article (by Noah Shachtman who also writes for Wired’s Danger Room blog) does a good job of explaining the difference between Air Force and Army policy when it comes to drones (as of 2005 at least), so I’m just going to quote it here:

Everyone’s on board with drones – the question is who do you let fly them. The Air Force model considers them planes, which require expensive pilots who need to fly hundreds of hours in manned aircraft each year to keep their certification up. The Army model lumps them in with other tools, from cameras to guns, and puts them in the hands of anyone who can use them. Drones, meanwhile, are getting smaller, easier to operate, and even disposable. The technology, in other words, is trickling down, just like computers did a generation ago. Yet the Air Force still treats them like mainframes, to be operated by a highly trained elite. Are the flyboys on the wrong side of history?

Not necessarily. Different kinds of drones fly different kinds of missions. Tactical UAVs such as the grunt-flown, 1,000-foot-range Raven serve small groups in the field; endurance UAVs like the pilot-flown Predator send pictures back to generals and throw Hellfire missiles. The Air Force model suits the fighter-sized drones with full attack-plane features; the Army model fits the backpack-sized cameras with wings. But as drones continue to evolve, both models are morphing into something new.

I’m not sure if the physical model of what drones are has really evolved much yet (the MQ-1 Predator used by the Air Force and the MQ-1C used by the Army are basically the same drone except the Army’s version runs on diesel and has better performance), but to its credit, the Army seems to have evolved its policy, and has no problem letting trained enlisted personnel pilot their drones and even, now, engage in combat. Last month, an MQ-1C Warrior piloted by a staff sergeant, a corporal, and a specialist successfully fired two missiles at insurgent targets in Iraq in support of ground troops.

Considering the time and money it takes to train qualified pilots, I have to wonder why it’s taken so long for this to happen… I guess the question is, when it comes to remotely piloting combat drones like the Predator and the Warrior, are combat pilots trained in aircraft significantly and resource-effectively better at operating the drones than enlisted personnel trained with video games?

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

Shoebox is letting us post one of Chris Grine’s awesome Bots With Stuff illustrations every Friday. Don’t forget, there are two more every week (for a total of three) for an entire year… Head on over to The Shoebox Blog to see the other two illustrations for this week.

[ Shoebox ]

LEMUR (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot) was developed by JPL in 2005 to inspect and perform maintenance on structures in space. It has six legs, each with four degrees of freedom, but the cool part is that each leg has a connector on it that can accommodate a variety of modular tools, like lights or drills or video cameras. Additionally, the primary stereo vision system is mounted on a track around the perimeter of the robot’s body, so instead of rotating the whole robot, the “head” can just move around the track while the robot translates itself. It can even operate upside-down. Not bad, not bad at all… But can it dance?

[ LEMUR IIa ]

New Scientist posted an article today by a British philosopher entitled “High time to act on armed robots.” I’m not going to write an essay like last week, but I would like to try and point out why this is just another example of “experts” trying to needlessly scare the rest of us because the media eats it up. I kinda rant a little bit, for which I apologize in advance, but this sort of thing makes me mad. (Read more…)

I just have one thing to say about this:

Um, what?

[ Robot Resort: The Series ]

The Big Picture, photo blog of the Boston Globe, posted a feature on Wednesday about robots. There are 32 total photos (big photos) of robots ranging from Paros to BigDog to Kivas to Talons… I could go on and on, but you should just quit listening to me blather and click the link.

[ Big Picture ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

We first covered DLR’s ‘Justin’ robot back in 2007, when he was learning kinematics by practicing how not to hit his own balls. He’s learned a little bit more in the last year or so, and can now dance better than John Travolta:

Oh, and Justin (now that he’s got a wheeled base he goes by Rollin’ Justin) does plenty of other helpful things, too. Ultimately, the hope is that Justin (and robots like him) will be able to assist the elderly and disabled with household tasks. In the following video, I was extremely impressed by Justin’s finger dexterity, starting at about 2:05… Check it out:

[ DLR ] VIA [ Hizook ]

I’ll come clean: there are two things wrong with this headline. Pretty hard to pull off in a three word headline, right? Yeah, I’ve got skillz. Firstly, there are no wings involved (although rotors are technically wings I suppose), and secondly, these helicopter routers aren’t actually related to DARPA’s LANDroid program, although they operate on the same general principle. Designed for disaster zones and other areas, these quad-rotor UAVs with WiFi routers mounted on them can autonomously deploy a wireless network (both data and cellular) in just a few minutes, over virtually any sort of terrain. Made from off the shelf parts, the bots are designed to be easy to build and (above all) cheap… The infrastructure is only about $400.

The biggest problem, as perhaps you’ve already anticipated, is power. The batteries for these UAVs cost three times as much as all of the rest of the hardware combined, and still only provide about 20 minutes worth of up time. The idea at the moment is that the UAVs will locate positions to perch and then act as nodes from there, which is reasonable enough in some situations, but it crushes my fantasy of a little UAV that follows me around providing high speed internet everywhere.

[ PC Pro ] VIA [ Engadget ]

This is just a friendly, subtle little reminder that hundreds (nay, thousands) of robots are surrounding you. Everywhere. All the time. So you might as well wallpaper your entire house with this pattern and get used to the idea. It’s available in three different color combinations by Aimee Wilder at $155 for a triple roll (whatever that means).

[ Aimee Wilder ] VIA [ CribCandy ]

Thanks Andrew!