Missile tech helps boffins land drone on car moving at 50 km/h

I thought you could only fly a drone within the direct line of sight of the operator?

Or does that only apply to personal use, and not to commercial operators?

Roost spots

Some of the early stragglers developed long distance travel patterns by attaching to diesel electric trains and then finding spots to perch on overhead high voltage cables to recharge at night.

We should have worked out the significance of car HT coils failing to be delivered and their reverse use, but this was in the days before a true grasp of iVolution.

This seems like a continuation of the failure to grasp that there *isn't* a good use case for having large numbers of drones that can't be done in a more energy efficient manner in some other way.

And if the "sharing economy" means that one hitches a lift on my car, I'll bungee it on and maybe let it off a couple of weeks later. (yes, I know there will be a percentage point or two increase in fuel consumption...)

Apart from surveillence work or for use as camera platforms, most drones are either toys or weapons. I can only assume we're never going to learn from the last dotcom bubble, which seems to have taught us nothing about investing in technology.

I'm looking forward..

..to flocks of the things squabbling for 'roosting' space or hanging around motorway junctions looking for a likely truck. (I'm not really !)

No video?

As an RC Helicopter person I would have loved to see a video of this, I wonder how heavy the touch down was?

Actually, there might be some uses.....

Active IR/Radar chaff/flares. It woul dbe essential for next gen tanks and support veichles. Enter a hot area, deploy a continuous swarm of drones to act as chaff/decoys, recharge and redeploy.

Ships could use them too for point defence - possibly helicopters.

Even further - use drones as micro, disposable weapons platfrorms to deploy, and return if not used. Indeed - why bother with batteries - you could host more weight efficient powerplants, if you could automatically redock to refuel...

Knife missile, anyone?

Scary thaught.

hitching a ride on buses

Good luck with that round here. You'd get faster deliveries using a team of arthritic donkeys rather than trust the local bus (dis)service.

"Instead of flying home, the authors envisage drones hitching a ride on buses, delivery trucks or boats"

Until the bus or truck goes under a low bridge.

Kalman filter...

This is already in use in any flight controllers running the Arducopter (or similar) software, such as APM and Pixhawk, called the "EKF" or Extended Kalman Filter. Essentially it takes inputs from multiple sources (1 or more of the following: IMUs, more GPS, barometer, compass...), assigns a "trustworthiness" rating to each one based on how far it said the machine was from the previous estimate, then uses that info to estimate where it is now. It works incredibly well.

It should also be able to cope with hardware failures, but my experience says a bug in the code means it can't - it appears to assign a minimum trustworthiness, which is still a long way above the deserved "0" rating. Which can lead to some interesting maneuvers.

Kalman filter

"a Kalman filter, an algorithm commonly used in robotics to determine useful trajectories for an autonomous device to employ"

That's very much the Stephen Fry method of describing a Kalman filter. It's more accurately a way of measuring predicted state vs actual state, removing sensor 'noise' and unaccounted variables in the process and refining the estimate. In the case of landing on a car, they would no doubt be useful in smoothing the tracking process of the car's tracked position and the drone's.

Look out, Low Bridge !

The next big thing!

If this concept takes off* I can see pigeon racing becoming a thing of the past, the traditional truckload of cages to be replaced by trucks carrying racks of drones to distant release points.

All of the fun but without having to field complaints from the neighbors about vast quantities of flying-rat shit on their car/washing/kids.

* Yes, I know.

Stealing fuel

Unless these drone operators have permission, "hitching a lift" on the roof of another vehicle is going to add drag and increase fuel consumption. Only a small amount I'll grant you, but that seems to be the way so-called "disruptive" business models are heading. They take a little from everyone and claim it's not a problem because it's such a small amount. But it all adds up,

Then we get to the recharging facilities. To be even slightly viable, this is going to require large numbers of buses and trucks to be adapted with some sort of standard charger. Or maybe each participating bus and truck company will need to choose an ecosystem to become part of. Need to land a drone and recharge it? Gotta find a compatible truck. Everyone has seen Apple get rich from their walled garden and their own standards, so all these new start-ups want to create their own proprietary standards and be the next Apple.