UAV / UCAV / LAR (robotit) Uutiset ja jutut

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Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division staged what Iranian state media described as "massive drone drills" on March 14, including coordinated offensive operations with dozens of flying-wing drones based on the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel, captured by Iran in 2011, and Iranian copies of the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator. During the exercise, called "Towards al-Quds" (al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem), a total of about 50 drones—including "Saegheh" unmanned combat aerial vehicles based on the RQ-170's flying wing design—were used in a coordinated air strike on training targets 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles) from their launch site.

https://arstechnica.com/information...offensive-exercise-with-over-50-drones-maybe/

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/03/14/591010/Iran-IRGC-combat-drone-drill

 

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XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrator completes inaugural flight

The XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrator, a long-range, high subsonic unmanned air vehicle completed its inaugural flight March 5, 2019 at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona. The Air Force Research Laboratory

www.wpafb.af.mil

Husky UGV - Outdoor Field Research Robot by Clearpath

Husky unmanned outdoor field robot is a leading UGV for all-terrain robotics research. Mobilize your research, and go where no robot has gone before.

www.clearpathrobotics.com

IRIM Lab Koreatech

www.youtube.com

 

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Pääkaupunkiseudulla eri yritykset testaavat omia valmiuksiaan käyttää drooneja kevään ja kesän aikana. Parasta aikaa lennokkikuljetuksissa on meneillään tai vireillä useampia kokeiluja.

Esimerkiksi lentokentän lähellä olevasta logistiikkaterminaalista on yritetty tällä viikolla kuljettaa Matkahuollon paketteja kahteen K-markettiin.

Googlen tytäryhtiö Wing puolestaan on ilmoittanut, että se ryhtyy tänä keväänä testaamaan Helsingin seudulla tavaroiden kuljetusta lennokeilla. Tällä viikolla yhtiö täsmensi, että testauspaikkana toimii Vuosaari.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10697493

 

[Talvela]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1110544204005064704

 

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Two years ago, we spotted an interesting delivery drone concept at a military expo in Washington, D.C., called TACAD, or TACtical Air Delivery. The idea was to use gliders made out of cheap, disposable materials to deliver a substantial amount of supplies over long distances. You’d have to launch these gliders from larger aircraft, but they’d be able to deliver hundreds of kilograms of supplies over a hundred kilometers away, and then they’d just be left where they landed, simple as that.

Like many concepts that we see at trade shows, we didn’t necessarily expect much to come of this idea, but we’re delighted to report that the folks behind it—Logistic Gliders Inc. (LGI), based in Dixon, Calif.—have recently concluded a successful series of flight tests with the U.S. Marine Corps.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton...ones-undergo-successful-tests-with-us-marines

There are two different kinds of gliders that LGI is working on: The LG-1K, which can carry about 300 kg, and the larger LG-2K, which can carry over 700 kg. The bigger LG-2K glider is the one being tested in the videos above; it’s about 4 meters long with a 7-meter wingspan, and has a range of about 110 km at an optimal glide speed of 240 km/h. As the video shows, the glider can be dropped from a helicopter or pushed out the back of a cargo aircraft, and then it will deploy its wings and glide either autonomously or via radio control. Landing is a sort of controlled crash no matter what, but depending on how much room you have, the glider can either belly land or pop a parachute for a nose landing, with honeycomb paper cushioning the impact a bit.

IEEE Spectrum: Can you estimate the final cost of both LK-1K and LG-2K gliders when produced in a reasonable volume?

Marti Sarigul-Klijn: LGI’ goal is to reduce the glider unit cost without sacrificing capacity to be comparable to a standard air-dropped parachute Container Delivery System (CDS). This could be especially true if gliders are eventually mass produced at the same numbers as CDS–for example, in 2013 about 250,000 CDS were produced for the U.S. military in that year alone.

CDS costs $4,500 to $11,000 a unit, depending upon the parachute used. Currently the glider prototypes cost much more since every part is made in-house using simple hand tools such as a jigsaw and hand drill. Our electronics contain many components that are needed for flight test only. Also we currently pay full retail for these parts. The production glider electronics may cost only a few hundred dollars if the customer allows us to continue to use commercial off-the-shelf components. The parachute is GFE [Government Furnished Equipment] and costs the government less than $1k.

 

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For a pilot, there really is no substitute for knowing what’s in front of you. In a drone, that capability is known as detect-and-avoid, and so far, no drone has cleared the bar.

Sabrewing, a startup in Camarillo, Calif., may well be the first to do it. It’s working on a cargo-carrying drone that’s due to begin test flights in 2020.

“Even the military does it only in a kind of rudimentary way, say with a camera system; our system has to provide a way for the aircraft to autonomously avoid obstacles,” says Ed De Reyes, the chief executive of Sabrewing. One of the drone’s first applications will likely be for the U.S. military, which wants pilotless systems to ferry supplies to outposts and to evacuate wounded soldiers under circumstances too dangerous to justify sending in manned aircraft.

The drone will combine data from a camera, a lidar capable of looking 350 meters ahead, a radar, a forward-looking infrared detector (for landing at night), and a send-and-receive GPS navigation system, known as ADS-B.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk...rgo-drone-that-can-detect-and-avoid-obstacles

In the test flights, planned to take place in the Aleutians, a string of islands in Alaska, the drone will hoist 360 kg (800 pounds) when lifting off vertically and a quarter more than that when taking off from a 90-meter runway.

The aircraft will have four ducted fans, powered by motors driven by electricity generated by a Rolls Royce turbine. The wingspan will be 9 meters (30 feet), the length slightly less, the speed up to 180 knots, and the cruising altitude as high as 6.7 kilometers (22,000 feet).

 

[atu-c2]

Martin UAV offers new VTOL tactical UAS for Shadow replacement programme


https://defence-blog.com/news/marti...cal-uas-for-shadow-replacement-programme.html

 

[Benelli]

Venäläiset kehittävät lentävää haulikkoa.
https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/aseistettu-lennokki-vai-haulikko-siivilla-−-venajan-uusi-ase-videolla/

Pitäisikö meidänkin?

 

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This weekend, nine teams of robots (and their humans) will make their way to the Edgar Experimental Mine in Idaho Springs, Colo. There, they’ll take part in an initial integration exercise for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, or SubT. DARPA SubT is a challenge on a similar scale to DARPA’s incredible Robotics Challenge that took place in 2015—a series of competitions based on real-world needs, attracting some of the best roboticists in the world with sophisticated robotic hardware to match.

The integration exercise (which is closed to anyone but the participating teams, we definitely asked) is just the first step in a challenge that will involve both a virtual competition and a competition for physical systems, each with multiple circuits culminating in a final that wraps everything together into one epic event. Some teams will get over US $4 million in DARPA funding, and the prize pool for the finals is up to $2 million. We’ll be following SubT through multiple stages all the way until the final event, which is schedule for August of 2021.

In this article, we’ll get into the details of what SubT is all about, and in a separate post later today we’ll put everything in context with an interview with DARPA program manager Dr. Timothy Chung.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton...ts/subt-the-next-darpa-challenge-for-robotics

In this post, we have an interview with SubT program manager Timothy Chung, whom we met late last year at DARPA’s D60 Conference. “I think for many of the technologies we’re seeking to advance—it’s one of those, aim for the moon, even if you miss you hit the stars type of an approach,” he told us about the new challenge. “So we envision some component technologies being immediately operationally of value, but we’ve set the bar ambitiously high enough for it to be DARPA-worthy and also provide a vision for how that kind of impact could be magnified if and when we’re successful.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton...allenge-qa-with-program-manager-timothy-chung

We’re mostly interested in the robots, but is it too early to ask whether any teams have suggested specific biological systems?

It is early, but what I can say, is that there have been different ideas for what that would take that could leverage previous DARPA programs. DARPA was interested in sensors on dragonflies, as one example. I think that there are opportunities for folks, it’s a question of systems integration, and ability to demonstrate the technologies integrated into systems that can have the range or endurance or mobility potentially to get it there. It turns out insects might be really resilient, but they’ll take a long time to cover the more than kilometer ranges that we’re thinking of for SubT. So now we have an expediency trade-off that we want to explore and that might help bound the problem, and we’ll see what other solutions rise to the top.

What are the restrictions that the teams will have to compete under? Are you expecting one platform, or multiple platforms working together to tackle such diverse underground environments? Do teams need to have a solution that fits in some sort of real or hypothetical box, or could I throw a thousand robots at the problem if I had them?

In trying to stay true to the vision of wide aperture, I’m intentionally not trying to prescribe one or more or a number of robots. I’m interested in covering, exploring, searching, rather large areas and not giving you a whole lot of time to do it, and so one might argue that that helps incentivize distributing and dividing-and-conquering the mission, so that’s one approach. The second idea here of course is that, this is the real world, nominally, and things will go wrong. I say outright to all teams that attrition is a possibility, and your robot may not necessarily come out exactly the same way it went in. And that’s also a testament to what we’re interested in: understanding autonomy in the context of basically zero human-manual interventions. We don’t want graduate students or technicians or engineers running in there to right a fallen robot, or swapping out batteries, or reconnecting a plug that’s come undone, or what-have-you.

The third way we might incentivize things is, it’s not about finding one object and doing that multiple times—a one trick pony in terms of an object detector or a feature classifier may not get you full marks. So now we’re thinking about how do you compose different capabilities, and you could potentially load it all up onto one exquisite platform, but in the face of all the other considerations, maybe you don’t want to put all your eggs in that one basket. You may want to have some assets that carry certain sensors and other assets that carry different sensors, and of course pay the overhead penalty of having now potentially teams of robots .

The caveat we throw out there is, there will be points at which your system will have to fit through a manhole-sized hole or a human crawlable space. That’s somewhat of a way of a volumetric constraint, albeit loosely, because you can imagine all sorts of way to navigate through there. In terms of number, it’s not necessarily a question of one or a thousand, but is it worth it to you, as a team, either either from a cost-investment point of view or the potential overhead of having to maintain a thousand robots, that your approach merits you trying it that way.

Because of the nature of the environment, is the expectation that these systems will be fully autonomous during the competition?

The concept here is to be able to provide situational awareness in a timely fashion back to home base, but we anticipate that it’s going to be very difficult to communicate, because that’s part of the capability we’re seeking. But one could imagine that there’s a high level type of interaction that you could have if you choose to pay the cost of sending data and maintaining a way to pass data or commands back into the system—there’s potential opportunity where that might help benefit the performance of the team.

telepresense ei ole pois suljettu asia, mutta jos uskot että pystyt niin ilmoittaudu kilpailuun mukaan.

 

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Aloitetaan maanantai huumorilla. Portaat eivät ole enään ongelma tämän ohjelman jälkeen ... tai ovat.

Spoiler

"Duunarirobotti"

Spoiler

Tämä saa minulta hyväksynnän

BionicWheelBot | Festo Corporate

Inspired by the flic-flac spider, its natural role model, the BionicWheelBot can both walk and roll.

www.festo.com

 

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[Raveni]

 

[Benelli]

SUPER ei olekaan niin super...
https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/venaja...kin-taysi-floppi-simahti-17-kertaa-syyriassa/

Venäjän hurja robottitankki onkin täysi floppi: Simahti 17 kertaa Syyriassa
KASPERI SUMMANEN | 05.07.2018 | 12:48- päivitetty 05.07.2018 | 12:51
Miehittämättömän taisteluajoneuvon ominaisuuksia on liioteltu valtavasti.
Venäjä on suitsuttanut uutta Uran-9-robottitankkia suorastaan vallankumoukselliseksi kyvyksi maan asevoimille. Venäjän puolustusministeriö vahvisti maaliskuussa, että itsenäistä taisteluajoneuvoa oli myös testattu Syyriassa. Venäjän valtion mediassa on julkaistu runsaasti lennokkaita videoita (alla) Uran-9:n ”viimeisistä testeistä”. Niissä robottitankki tulittaa kohteita ja ajaa maastoradalla.
National Interestin mukaan ilma- ja panssarintorjuntaohjuksilla sekä konetykillä varustetun Uran-9:n ominaisuuksia on kuitenkin liioteltu runsaasti.
Venäläisen puolustusalan tutkija Andrei P. Anisimovin julkistamien tietojen perusteella Uran-9:n on ollut Syyrian testeissä pettymys. Kehuttu tankki ei Anisimovin mukaan yksinkertaisesti ”kykene suorittamaan sille annettuja tehtäviä”.
Defence Blog on kerännyt tähän Anisimovin venäläisessä turvallisuuskonferenssissa esittämiä kommentteja. Tutkijan mukaan Uran-9:n mainostettu toimintaetäisyys oli vain muutamia satoja metrejä alun perin luvatun noin 2,8 kilometrin sijaan.
Syyrian kokeissa koettiin myös kaikkiaan 17 lyhytaikaista ja kaksi pitkäkestoista ”hallinnan menetystä”. Tällä tarkoitetaan mitä todennäköisemmin sitä, että laite lakkasi toimimasta tai vastaamasta ohjaajansa komentoihin.
Uran-9-ajoneuvojen kerrotaan myös kärsivän runsaasti teknisistä vioista, jotka vaivaavat niin mekaanisia osia kuin myös robottitankin sensorijärjestelmiä.

Tämä ei ole hyvä uutinen. Se minkä me saisimme vastaamme on paranneltu versio jossa Syyriassa havaitut virheet on korjattu.

 

[SJ]

Tämä ei ole hyvä uutinen. Se minkä me saisimme vastaamme on paranneltu versio jossa Syyriassa havaitut virheet on korjattu.

Onko muuten missään tietoa, että miten hyvin nuo on suojattu? Riittääkö ITKK- vai tarvitaanko jonkinlainen sinko?

 

[Benelli]

Onko muuten missään tietoa, että miten hyvin nuo on suojattu? Riittääkö ITKK- vai tarvitaanko jonkinlainen sinko?

Profiililtaan tuo on lähellä Wiesel 2:ta mutta on noin kaksi kertaa niin painava ja puolet hitaampi.
Veikkaan että tuossa on kohtia joista Itko ei mene läpi ja kohtia joista menee läpi.

 

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Virallinen mainos Darpan tunneli kilpailusta. Kuten sanoin edellä, jos tuntuu että on idea ja pystytte niin mukaan vain. https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/go-subterranean-with-this-darpa-challenge/

 

[Raveni]

Virallinen mainos Darpan tunneli kilpailusta. Kuten sanoin edellä, jos tuntuu että on idea ja pystytte niin mukaan vain. https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/go-subterranean-with-this-darpa-challenge/

 

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A British Army Watchkeeper drone stalled itself and crashed into the sea on a bad weather flight test, military investigators have said – though most of the wreckage was never found.

The unmanned aircraft, tail number WK042, fell from the sky in February 2017 while trialling a new ice detection system. The drone was being flown from West Wales Airport, formerly known as Aberporth Airfield, by 47 Regiment Royal Artillery.

Investigators concluded that one of its pitot probes used for reading the aircraft's speed and angle of attack (AOA) became blocked, causing the Watchkeeper's onboard flight control logic to enter an erratic series of climbs and dives until it stalled itself and flopped into the sea. They criticised the craft's maker, Thales, for not fully understanding how its algorithms responded to loss of accurate sensor data.

Air Marshal Susan Gray, director-general of the Defence Safety Authority, criticised the Ministry of Defence and Thales for their "incomplete level of detailed technical understanding" regarding the drone and its systems. So far the British military has crashed five Watchkeepers, including two in quick succession during 2017, which led to a months-long grounding of the entire fleet.

Those two crashes, of which WK042 was one, were not publicly revealed until a senior Navy officer blabbed about them within earshot of a sharp-eared reporter, prompting accusations of an MoD cover-up over the troubled multimillion-pound programme.

The automated decision-making that led to the crash has some parallels with the recent Boeing 737 Max controversy, in which automated flight control software has been fingered as a potential factor in two fatal airliner crashes that cost hundreds of lives. The Watchkeeper crash investigators stated:

The software algorithms used to identify and disqualify single sensor failure were not always well understood by [Thales] within the UK. Consequently, the effectiveness of the algorithms at maintaining the integrity of the air data required by the [flight control system] for safe flight was in part unknown.

"From its detailed analysis," wrote Air Marshal Gray in her formal comments on the Service Inquiry (SI) report, "the SI concluded that the design of [Watchkeeper's] air data system limited its ability to fly safely in cloud and precipitation." A buildup of moisture in the Watchkeeper's pitot probes was found to have caused its automated flight logic to start doing crazy things – ultimately leading to a stall and a crash.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/15/watchkeeper_drone_crash_wk042_moisture_blocked_pitot/

 

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It’s been a little over two years since we were first introduced to Astrobee, an autonomous robotic cube designed to fly around the International Space Station. Tomorrow, a pair of Astrobee robots (named Honey and Bumble) will launch to the ISS aboard a Cygnus cargo flight. There’s already a nice comfy dock waiting for them in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), and the plan is to put them to work as soon as possible. After a bit of astronaut-assisted setup, the robots will buzz around autonomously, doing experiments and taking video, even operating without direct human supervision on occasion.

NASA has big plans for these little robots, and before they head off to space, we checked in with folks from the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., to learn about what we have to look forward to.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton...asa-launching-astrobee-robots-to-iss-tomorrow

 

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No comments, https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot

Toinen robohukka https://www.ghostrobotics.io/