OK, maybe not everything you know is wrong. However, at a recent National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) Seminar, I was impressed with not just how little I knew, but also how much that I thought I knew was simply not true.
Test your level of misconceptions below:
1) Interoperability is not the ability to talk with everyone all of the time. Read more
A familiar cliché in autonomy research is that we want unmanned systems to be like a dog, i.e. independently capable of some tasks, but fundamentally subject to the control of a human operator. Researchers at Auburn University evidently felt “like a dog” wasn’t adequate and went for the real thing.
Wintergreen Research is publicizing a finding that the “…first responder and military ground robot marketplace will expand at close to 20% annually for the rest of the decade.” Furthermore, “Markets at $4.5 billion in 2013 reach $12.0 billion by 2019.”
This is welcome news for the developers of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). Robohub points out that this projection is consistent with a Markets and Markets report that predicts a 17.4% CAGR for the same time period. Of course, any headline in the media must be greeted with a certain degree of skepticism. Do these projections make sense?
Eye spy
I was having dinner with a new acquaintance when an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) bumped my foot. I looked down and saw a radio-controlled toy.
“Oh, don’t mind that,” said my host. “That’s just my son playing.”
“He plays too much with that thing,” groused the boy’s father. “What really bothers me is that it has a camera. I’m don’t like being spied on in my own home.” Read more
Originally, only the IT guy was supposed to attend the trade show. He had a tech background and frequently doubled as a purchasing agent. However, the police sergeant had performed Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) missions in the military. The chief thought the experienced, older man could bring insight to the department’s process for acquiring an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV)…
Read the rest of the article about handheld controllers here.
AEODRS in the spotlight
All eyes in the Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) community are on the Advanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robot System (AEODRS) program. An important RFP for the increment-1(small robot for dismounted operations) is expected soon, and everyone wants a piece of the action if not the whole shebang itself.
Several things make AEODRS especially attractive to Defense vendors. For one thing, in a time of sequestration and other budget pressures, it is one of the few fully funded Department of Defense (DoD) UGV development programs around. Secondly, it is arguably the most important.
Read the rest of the article here.
Like all Americans, we were horrified to learn about the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Like all Americans, we were relieved when the suspects were captured. Only recently, did we discover that AMREL technology may have played a small role in the manhunt.
On Friday, April 19th, a Honda Civic was found to be parked in Watertown, Massachusetts. The car had been abandoned by Dzohkhar Tsarnaev after he and his brother had a gunfight with the police.
The police were understandably nervous approaching the car. According to the most recent reports, the suspects had more than one homemade bomb and had even thrown them at the police during the chase. Was the car rigged to explode?
I once read a quote from a futurist that many distinctions that we currently take for
granted will be not be valid in the future. Things that seem as different as day and night will be indistinguishable. Day and night, for example. The proliferation of night vision and other sensor technologies will cause future generations to have radically different views about the level of privacy traditionally offered by the cloak of night. Another distinction that is already blurred is the one between manned and unmanned vehicles. Read full article here.
Yikes! The NDIA just announced that it canceled the Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference (GRCC) 2013.
In an email dated March 5, NDIA stated:
RSJPO Roadmap and ICAF Robotics Report
The last two blog postings were about what will not happen in 2012. We thought we would take a break from this series and predict what you can expect. Without a doubt, you can expect more reports, visions, and roadmaps from the Department of Defense. Here are two recent DoD documents that are worth a look.
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