Wasn't there
An SUV with a drone built into the roof, I think they marketed it as you could fly ahead and see how far the traffic jam ran for, with the feed showing in the dash screen.
This would be useful for its retrieval.
Robotics boffins have landed an autonomous quadcopter on a car moving at 50 km/h and think doing so might just change the drone business. As explained at arXiv by a group of researchers from Mobile Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) look handy for …
An SUV with a drone built into the roof, I think they marketed it as you could fly ahead and see how far the traffic jam ran for, with the feed showing in the dash screen.
Sure. At which point you'd have a drone-jam instead, prolonging the time you'll be stationary.
Somehow, the people that come up with these ideas are nothing short of fanatic in avoiding the consideration of possible downsides.
I thought you could only fly a drone within the direct line of sight of the operator?
I think the correct phrase is "you are only allowed to fly a drone in direct line of sight of the operator, and therein lies the rub: as various airport incidents demonstrate, you cannot outlegislate stupid..
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.
Vertical launch drone deployment and delivery system (VLDDADS).
Delivery trucks drive along your street (probably taking video for Streetview), launching drones as it goes to deliver your packages. Drones return to the host truck to recharge, and reload with the next package. The truck never has to stop, avoiding a nuisance to local traffic, and eventually the driver will become obsolete as the system moves to an autonomous vehicle.
What's more, packages will continue to be dropped over your side gate, ensuring the contents are smashed, keeping up Amazon's current delivery standards.
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.
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.
"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.
At the absolute most I can maybe (big maybe) envision this being used by an actual delivery van and the drone just goes from truck to door with the delivery. Saves the Driver dragging his ass out of his van all day.
But what I still dont get with any of these would-be drone delivery services, is how you obtain the signatures you Need in order to prove delivery? Maybe the drone carries a touch pad that you have to somehow sign without getting your fingers chopped off by the rotor blades? But seems like a deal breaker to me. Plus how does it ring your door bell?
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.
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.