Welcome to the rapidly advancing world of autonomous weapons — the cheap, highly effective systems that are revolutionizing militaries around the world. These new unmanned platforms can make U.S. forces much safer, at far lower cost than aircraft carriers and fighter jets. But beware: They’re being deployed by our potential adversaries faster than the Pentagon can keep up, and they increase the risk of conflict by making it easier and less bloody for the attacker.
Artificial intelligence and drones are transforming the battlefield into something that looks more like a video game than hand-to-hand combat. It could save lives — but also increase the risk of combat.
Oh, joy. You can take the drone out of 2020, but you can’t take the 2020 out of the drone.
A “lethal” weaponized drone “hunted down a human target” without being told to for the first time, according to a UN report seen by the New Scientist.
The March 2020 incident saw a KARGU-2 quadcopter autonomously attack a human during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction, led by the Libyan National Army’s Khalifa Haftar, the Daily Star reported.
The Turkish-built KARGU-2, a deadly attack drone designed for asymmetric warfare and anti-terrorist operations, targeted one of Haftar’s soldiers while he tried to retreat, according to the paper.
As a photographer, adding a DJI Mavic Mini to my gear locker felt like a final puzzle piece. I know I’m not alone in this feeling as many of my fellow photographer friends became pilots, as well, in the last year. But this doesn’t mean that we use our flying cameras just for drone photography and videography.
One reason for this slight phenomenon is an increase in client expectations. Reducing the skills of a photographer to just someone with lots of gear, there’s an assumption that videography is available for the asking. While I have invested in video gear like lights, a gimbal, clamps, arms, microphones and stands, my DJI Mavic Mini is up there at the top as a piece of video gear on offer. I previously wrote about my personal intro to drone life. Here are some ways that you, as a professional or hobbyist photographer, can find value in adding a drone to your bag of gear. And tricks.
While every photographer possesses video shooting capabilities in their DSLRs, it may be easier to use a drone as your first video shooting tool. One thing that DJI has done with their drones is made them out-of-the-box-ready to use. As opposed to figuring out which lens or menu settings to use, any DJI drone can capture stunning video on your first flight.
Last month, the United States Air Force successfully test flew an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called Skyborg, operating on an autonomous hardware/software suite, for the very first time.
The military aims for this UAV to fuel collaboration among manned and unmanned aircraft. For its first test run, the Skyborg suite flew aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 Mako air vehicle in the first step of what’s known as the Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experimentation Campaign.
By and large, the US Air Force Research Laboratory seeks a UAV solution that can carry out all of the functions of a manned aerial vehicle but also with the option of manned operation.
Engineering A Safer World For Humans With Self Driving Cars, Drones, and Robots — Dr. Missy Cummings PhD, Professor, Duke University, Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, Duke Engineering.
Dr. Mary “Missy” Cummings, is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the Pratt School of Engineering, at Duke University, the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences, and is the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics.
Dr. Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.
Dr… Cummings was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots earning the rank of lieutenant and serving as naval officer and military pilot from 1988–1999.
Dr. Cummings research interests include human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-systems engineering, public policy implications of unmanned vehicles, and the ethical and social impact of technology.
“Never, never ask me for a shortcut.” her mom said while she was growing up.
MiMi Aung (born 1968) is a Burmese 🇲🇲 American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
She is the lead engineer on the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, the first extraterrestrial aircraft which landed on Mars today.
She was inspired by her mother to study science, maths and engineering. Her mother was the first woman in Myanmar to get a PhD in mathematics.
She tested the technology she and her colleagues developed for seven years at NASA.
Mars’ atmosphere is a lot thinner than Earth’s. This means to keep the helicopter in the air, the blades must spin very fast and it can’t weigh more than 2 kilograms.
Ingenuity’s mission on Mars is to help Perseverance find the best routes around Mars.
Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, is an innovative conservation biologist, who is Founder and President of the non-profit Amazon Biodiversity Center, the renowned Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, and the person who coined the term “biological diversity”.
Dr. Lovejoy currently serves as Professor in the department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, and as a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation based in Washington, DC.
Dr. Lovejoy has also served as the World Bank’s chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean, the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, President of the Heinz Center, and chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.
Spanning the political spectrum, Dr. Lovejoy has served on science and environmental councils under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. At the core of these many influential positions are seminal ideas, which have formed and strengthened the field of conservation biology.
In the 1980s, Dr. Lovejoy brought international attention to the world’s tropical rainforests, and in particular, the Brazilian Amazon, where he has worked since 1965.
With multiple co-edited books (including Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere; Drones for Conservation — Field Guide for Photographers, Researchers, Conservationists and Archaeologists; Costa Rican Ecosystems; Climate Change and Biodiversity; On the Edge: The State and Fate of the World’s Tropical Rainforests), Dr. Lovejoy is credited as a founder of the field of climate change biology. He also founded the series Nature, the popular long-term series on public television.
Last August, several dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings.
So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.
The mission was just an exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon; the robots were armed with nothing more lethal than radio transmitters designed to simulate interactions with both friendly and enemy robots.
Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.
The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system’s border with interstellar space —into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.
Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. “It’s very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth,” Ocker said. “We’re detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas.”
