New indigenous drone unveiled by Georgian President (and his 5-year old son) April 14, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones.Tags: Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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The following photo dated Apr 10, and distributed by Georgian President Press Service on Apr. 11, 2012, shows Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, right, and his 5-year old son Nikoloz at an undisclosed location near Tbilisi, Georgia, during preparations for a test flight of the Georgian-made unmanned drone.
Image credit: AP Photo
In 2008, an Israeli-Made Hermes 450 Georgian UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) was shot down by a Russian Mig-29 was shot down over the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia as this quite famous video shows.
On a side note: PressTV is currently reporting that Taliban claim responsibility for downing US spy drone in Afghanistan. Will keep you updated.
Photo: “Check your six”. You’ve got a quadricopter drone behind you April 12, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones.Tags: drones, robocoters, TV drones
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That is a nice picture.
It was taken on Jan. 12, 2012, at Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland, and shows a TV drone (not a quadricopter but a 8-rotor robocopter or a “Octocopter”) flying beside Canada’s Erick Guay during the second practice of the men’s Alpine skiing World Cup downhill race.
Image credit: Reuters
Once helicopters were dispatched to provide TV coverage of the most important events. Today, such job is performed by UFO-like mini ‘bots like the one depicted below.
Image credit: AP Photo/Keystone, Alessandro Della Bella
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U.S. drones to be nuclear powered? April 11, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Drones.Tags: Aviation, drones, Military Aviation, Northrop Grumman, Nuclear Power, Sandia National Laboratories, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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It has emerged that Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. government’s principle nuclear research and development agency, and defense contractor Northrop Grumman are working on powering the next generation of drones with nuclear power.
With nuclear powered drones, endurance could stop being measured in hours and would be measured in months with excess power used to power better communications and surveillance equipment.
Sandia and Northrop started the project to try and resolve three problems associated with drones with what they call “ultra-persistence technologies”: insufficient “hang time” over a potential target, lack of power for running sophisticated surveillance and weapons systems, and a lack of communications capacity.
The Sandia-Northrop project team looked at power supplies for large to medium sized UAVs before finally settling on nuclear power: not surprising, since Northrop Grumman patented a Helium Powered nuclear reactor as long ago as 1986 and its widely known designs for nuclear powered aircraft date back as far as the ’50s.
The project team found that nuclear power provided far more time on target and intel per mission than any other power source by quite a margin. It was also the most cost effective power source in that it eliminated the need for expensive support infrastructure near hostile territory.
And it would enable drones to carry more weapons or reconnaissance sensors.
Sandia went out of its way to say that the project is now complete and that no equipment was built or tested and this project was nothing more than a feasibility study, perhaps showing how sensitive this technology is.
There are worries that public opinion would not accept the idea of such a potentially dangerous technology, hence Sandia’s rather over the top statement.
Fears of this technology are understandable after the amount of drones that have been lost, both during combat operations and training. The risk is turning the drone into a sort of dirty bomb or the sensitive technology falling into the wrong hands of terrorists or enemy forces.
Therefore there will be no nuclear powered drones. For the moment….
Richard Clements for TheAviationist.com
Image credit: Reuters
Hand Signals: the next step to controlling UAVs on aircraft carriers April 4, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Aircraft Carriers, Drones.Tags: aircraft carrier, drones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Naval Air Station Pensacola, Northrop Grumman, Office of Naval Research, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned Air Vehicle, USS Dwight D Eisenhower, X-47B
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The environment you find on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier is constantly monitored. The organized chaos of launches, recoveries and taxi takes place in a totally unforgiving environment for an unmanned aircraft (and for manned planes too…).
According to an interesting article published by Navy Times, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took a very close look at the problem of moving UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) about the deck whilst not endangering crew or interfering to the normal operations and they came up with an ingenious camera and computer that recognises the hand signals the sailors use to guide aircraft about an aircraft carrier deck.
It may be a step that finally makes UAV use on a aircraft carrier possible. “It would be really nice if we had an unmanned vehicle that can understand human gestures” said Yale Song a Ph.D candidate at MIT who developed the system.
“Gesturing is an instinctive skill we all have, so it requires little or no thought, leaving the focus itself, as it should be, not the interaction modality” said Song.
Song’s project which began in January 2009, and was funded by the Office of Naval Research, took him to Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, where he learned the hand signals used by the sailors on the flight deck that he used to “train” 20 students 24 signals. The students wore a Yellow Turtleneck and a cranial to replicate the clothing used onboard carriers.
The students performed all of the signals whilst being filmed by Song’s camera/computer combination, which in turn translated their hand movements to stick figures. With this data, Song was able to develop an algorithm that is able to learn how to identify and recognize the signals from people it hadn’t met before therefore hadn’t learned their individual slight variables.
Song said “Based on that training data, we trained our model so that when new data comes in, it has our algorithm to classify the sequence of gestures.”
Song admitted that his system gets the gestures correct around 75 percent of the time, so obviously a lot of more research is needed before this system could be introduced onto an unmanned air system.
According to the Navy Times article, while Song and MIT look into recognizing hand signals, Northrop Grumman has developed a special remote control for moving the X-47B on flight decks by means of a device which attaches to the wrist, waist and one hand. The “yellow shirt” operating the device will have access to a display and will be able to control the aircraft’s throttle, tailhook, brakes and perform several other functions associated with maneuvring an aircraft on deck.
Image credit: U.S. Naval Air Systems Command
Anyway, drone operations automation has already reached aircraft carriers, at least for testing purposes.
An automated landing system, which allowed the X-47’s controllers to take control of an F-18, fly the approach and land the plane onto the flight deck of USS Dwight D Eisenhower whilst the Hornet’s crew makes no input into the plane’s flight, has already been tested. Seen from the outside, the landing looks totally normal. The LSOs still has the power to wave off the landing should they feel that the landing is unsafe or does not meet any other criteria required for a trap landing.
Richard Clements for TheAviationist.com
NASA’s Ikhana MQ-9 drone flies with ADS-B equipment for the first time March 29, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Drones.Tags: ADS-B, Air Traffic Control, Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, Aviation Safety, Federal Aviation Administration, Ikhana, MQ-9, NASA, navigation, NexGen, Next Generation Air Transportation System, NextGen, radar, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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On Mar. 15, for the first time ever at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center a Ikhana MQ-9 unmanned aircraft (modified Reaper) flew with an Automated Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B transponder.
It was the first time that an unmanned aircraft the size of the Ikhana with its 66 foot wingspan and 10,000 pounds take off weight has flown using the aircraft tracking device that all aircraft operating in certain U.S. airspace will have to adopt by 2020 to comply with New Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules.
The tests were part of a project named UAS in the NAS which is shortened for the full name of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System.
NASA launched the Ikhana from Dryden and flew it over the Western Aeronautical Test Range, which forms part of Edwards Air Force Base and China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center. This first flight took some three hours and the new equipment was found to have performed well: the ADS-B enabled NASA the ability to gain much more detailed information which would in theory be given to Air Traffic Controllers and airborne pilots in other aircraft equipped with ADS-B flying with the vicinity of the UAV (even if, currently, only air traffic controllers can see all the aircraft broadcasting ADS-B data in a given part of the sky).
Indeed, the ADS-B system uses a special transponder that autonomously broadcasts data from the aircraft’s on-board navigation systems about its GPS-calculated position, altitude and flight path. This information can be received by ground stations, by other nearby aircraft enhancing situational awareness.
This first flight of the ADS-B equipped Ikhana is the first in many planned flights to gain data whilst doing simulated real world tasks. During this first flight and as part of a collaborative effort, FAA’s William J Hughes Technical Centre in Atlantic City, N.J recorded the ADS-B data and will help NASA analyse the performance and accuracy of the system fitted in the aircraft.
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New videos show Syrian made-in-Iran drone taking off from Hamah airbase, Syria March 25, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Syria.Tags: Damascus, drone, Hama, Homs, Ilyushin Il-76, Iran, Pahpad, Syria, Syrian Air, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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Uploaded on Mar. 24, 2012, these videos show the made-in-Iran drone, known as “Pahpad”, taking off and operating from Hamah airbase in the city of Hama, in the west part of Syria, north of Damascus.
Hamah seems to be one of the most active regime’s airbases: a Syrian Air Il-76 offloading some “goods” and several Mig-21 and helos were recently filmed there.
Here’s the video of the departure
The drone flying at low level
Here below some screen dumps which confirm that the drone used by the Syrian regime over Hama, is the same spotted in Homs.
Related articles
- Video: Syrian Air Ilyushin 76 unloading “goods” at Hamah airbase. With several flyable Mig-21s in the vicinity. (theaviationist.com)
- First video of a Syrian helicopter gunship attacking rebels near Azaz, northwest of Aleppo (theaviationist.com)
- Mysterious drone overflying clashes in Syria could be a new type rarely seen outside Iran. And here’s a new picture (maybe). (theaviationist.com)
- Syrian drones spying on rebels: made in Iran UAVs or amateur radio controlled models? (theaviationist.com)
- Another unidentified drone filmed over Homs, Syria. Syrian, American or Israeli? (theaviationist.com)
Drones used as Proxies to get around ISP blocking and law enforcement: Predator’s to add server payload? March 19, 2012
Posted by Paolo Passeri in Drones, Information Security.Tags: BitTorrent, Cloud Computing, drones, Global Positioning System, GPS, Hacker News, Kim Dotcom, Low Orbit Ion Cannon, Low Orbit Server Stations, MegaUpload, Pirate Bay, Raspberry Pi
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Nearly in contemporary with the breaking news that a judge in New Zealand’s High Court has declared that the order used to seize Kim Dotcom’s assets is “null and void”, writing another page inside the endless MegaUpload saga, The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, made another clamorous announcement. Tired of countering the block attempts that forced, last month, to switch its top-level domain, possibly to avoid seizure by U.S. authorities, and in October 2011 to set up a new domain to get around ISP blocking in Belgium, the infamous BitTorrent site is considering the hypothesis to turn GPS-controlled aircraft drones into proxies, in order to avoid Law Enforcement controls (and censorship) and hence evade authorities who are looking to shut the site down.
The drones, controlled by GPS and equipped with cheap radio equipment and small computers (such as Raspberry Pi), would act as proxies redirecting users’ traffic to a “secret location”. An unprecedented form of (literally) “Cloud Computing”, or better to say “Computing in the Clouds”, capable to transfer, thanks to modern radio transmitters, more than 100Mbps at over 50 kilometers away, more than enough for a proxy system.
A Predator drone carries a few servers…as tin cans would trail a newly married couple’s car
This is essentially what MrSpock, one of the site’s administrators, stated in a Sunday blog post (apparently unavailable at the moment). Curiously the drones are called “Low Orbit Server Stations”, a name not surprisingly much similar to the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon”, the DDoS weapon used by the Anonymous collective, capable of evoking very familiar hacktivism echoes.
Actually this is not the first time that hackers try to use air communication to circumvent Law Enforcement controls. At the beginning of the year, a group of hackers unveiled their project to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.
What raised some doubts (at first glance this announcement looks like an anticipated April Fools), is not the the use of a Low Orbit Server Stations, but the fact that moving into an airspace would be enough to prevent Law Enforcement Controls (and reactions).
Drones are subject to specific rules and restrictions and can only fly along reserved corridors to deconflict them from civilian and military air traffic. And they have to land every now and then, unless someone thinks these pirate robots can be air-to-air refueled.
As a commenter of The Hacker News correctly pointed out: “There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about who “owns” the airspace of a given country“: definitely a drone flying too high would be classified as a threat and forcibly removed by an air force, a drone tethered to ground would be subjected to local zoning laws, while a drone broadcasting from an “intermediate” height would probably violate a number of existing laws and forced to shut down.
At the end it is better to turn back to “Ground Computing” as opposed to “Cloud Drones”. As a matter of fact “it’s probably a lot easier to find a friendly government and host a normal server in that country“.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow the author of this article @pausparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Ryan Aeronautical photo archive traces development of combat drones from the factory floor to deployment in southeast Asia March 19, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones.Tags: drones, Northrop Grumman, Ryan Aeronautical, Ryan Firebee, San Diego Air & Space Museum, Teledyne, UAV, UCAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned combat air vehicle
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Founded by T. Claude Ryan in 1934, part of Teledyne from 1969 and purchased by Northrop Grumman in 1999, Ryan Aeronautical company has designed, developed and built some of the most innovative and successful unmanned aerial vehicles, the most famous of those is the Ryan BQM-34 Firebee.
Ryan was a pioneer in aircraft, missiles and unmanned targets, and a photo gallery made available on Flickr by the San Diego Air & Space Museum archive provide a detailed account of the development of the early UCAVs (Umanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) from the desing phase, to the deploymnet in southeast Asia including some rare images of the early sketches, experimental types and testing activities with A-6, F-18 and F-4.
Below you can find a very small selection of images edited by Scott Mahew (thanks for the heads-up!).
The remaining +3,200 images (covering also the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh, the ST, PT and Brougham series of aircraft) can be found here.
All images: Ryan Aeronautical via San Diego Air & Space Museum archive
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New Iranian drone capable of carrying out military and border patrol missions announced. Soon in the Syrian airspace? March 19, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Iran.Tags: drones, Iran, Karrar, Syria, UAV, UCAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned combat air vehicle
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On Mar. 17, a FARS News Agency article announced the production of the Shaparak (Butterfly), a new drone that can perform a wide variety of missions, including surveillance and border patrol.
The new robot has an endurance of about 3.5 hours, a maximum operational range of 50 kilometers (31 miles), and a ceiling of 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). Powered with a two-cylinder engine, the remotely piloted aircraft is equipped with three digital color cameras to transmit hi-rez footage to the ground control station, and can carry an 8-Kg payload.
The Shaparak is only the last one of a long series of made-in-Iran drones making the news lately.
UAVs believed to be either based on Iranian types or sold by the Tehran regime spying on the rebels activities have characterized the Syrian uprising in the last few weeks. This highlights that, although some were actually much similar to remote controlled scale models than real unmanned aircraft, in spite of foreign sanctions, Iran is continuing building new drones, some of those are successfully exported to local allies.
Noteworthy, the same FARS article traces the recent history of the Iranian industry in the production of UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles).
In Feb. 2011, Iran inaugurated the production line of two home-made Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), named ‘Ra’d’ (Thunder) and ‘Nazir’ (Harbinger), with bombing and reconnaissance capabilities while in Sept. 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled the Karrar, country’s first home-made UCAV during a special ceremony in Tehran during the national “Day of Defense Industry”.
Karrar UCAV (Image credit: Internet)
Related articles
- Syrian drones spying on rebels: made in Iran UAVs or amateur radio controlled models? (theaviationist.com)
- Mysterious drone overflying clashes in Syria could be a new type rarely seen outside Iran. And here’s a new picture (maybe). (theaviationist.com)
- Syrian Mohajer 4 drone spying on the clashes at Homs, Syria (theaviationist.com)
- Another unidentified drone filmed over Homs, Syria. Syrian, American or Israeli? (theaviationist.com)
- Iranian indigenous aircraft and micro-drones: Mach 2.5 stealth plane and scale models (with no military significance) (theaviationist.com)
Boeing’s Phantom Eye revolutionary drone eyes its first flight March 15, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Drones.Tags: Boeing, drone, liquid hydrogen, Phantom Eye, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, USAF
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Boeing has recently announced that it has performed some medium speed taxi runs for its latest High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) surveillance drone the Phantom Eye at Edwards AFB on Mar. 10.
A revolutionary design, powered by two liquid Hydrogen fuelled engines pumping out 150 horse power each, which turn 16 foot diameter propellers attached to its huge 150 foot wings. Phantom Eye is designed to operate at an altitude of 65,000 ft for up to 4 days in one mission and has a 450-lb mission payload capacity whilst cruising at a speed of around 200 knots.
Boeing announced the new robot in July 2010 and had initially said that its first test flight would come during early 2011; however, due to technical issues the first flight date has slipped somewhat (and has not been announced yet). Boeing still has a few fast taxi trials to complete before it can start to think about the drone’s first flight, although it was very excited about the data gained from the first run. The Phantom Eye has covered some 4,000 feet at speeds up to 30 knots in this its first powered movement aboard its launch cart system. The latter is a system similar to the one of the WWII Messerschmitt Me163 Komet rocket powered fighter but it is not clear if the new Boeing’s drone uses a deployable skid like the Komet for when it returns to its operating base.
Richard Clements for TheAviationist.com
Image credit: Boeing
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- America’s Killer Drones Of The Vietnam War (gizmodo.com.au)
