New robot aircraft eliminates need for fleshy slaves A robot-aeroplane inventor with successful designs behind him has come out with a radical new kind of skydroid which, he says, offers long range combined with vertical takeoff and landing - and automated ground support as well. Tad McGeer with his Flexrotor. Credit: Aerovel You can take the inventor out of the garage... …
Surely the ideal landing pad is a bowl near the boat's midpoint, so that whatever the water's like, the point of landing is the same point (ignoring the z coordinate). You could even achieve this with a loose net, if you make sure the rotor has stopped moving before it falls over.
that Boeing is allowing this, as this one looks pretty damn close to the one that Boeing bought the rights to and definteily looks like being a potential competitor to their bird.
Actually im probably more surprised that Boeing didnt offer this lad a job, if he's single handedly designed and built something that a behometh like Boeing thinks is good enough to buy then surely he's good enough to have working for you!
When I built the first wireless network in my neighborhood, how i wished for an aerostat of some sort to get line of sight in tree filled towns. As I have often ranted, geographically routed self forming mesh networks can deliver unlimited bandwidth to any node.
During the early formation of these networks, the community would benefit from a few overhead nodes. Once a tipping point is reached in deployment, the fleet could be moved to a new terretory.
Come on, Google, Mesh Networking is the future, buy a bunch of these planes and get a good start on our future.
there should be very little sound coming from this engine if the exhaust exits from the tail as I suspect it does,if most of the exhaust is well baffled anyway there will be more noise from that massive prop/rotor.flames cos if it crashes it burns very well
Darn right! Those little theiving buggers will swipe that prime piece of tech up before the branches have a chance to break and strip it for parts in seconds flat.
All you'll find is a couple leaves and a few droplets of silicon lubricant (for the plastic gears, you pervs).
A small fleet o' these beasties flying a grid pattern would not only be good for geomagnetic scans but would be highly effective for Coast Guard Search And Rescue (SAR) missions as well, since it would put a lot more "eyes" (sensors) over the target search area than conventional helicopter and aircraft searches, increasing the chances of finding survivors alive.
"Personal EPIRB is so cheap and accurate these days that search and rescue should be obsolete. Anyone going to sea without EPIRB is too stupid to contribute to society and is not worth saving."
Not quite. the modern versions of these are picked up by satellites and the system is known as satSAR. However it is carried as a payload of opportunity, so it's possible that you *might* get in trouble where no satellite is flying over for some hours, possibly a serious matter if anyone is in a critical condition.
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