Final Blog - UAVs

UAV’s 

Final Blog

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAV’s, have been around for quite some time. The first UAV was actually designed and employed before the Wright brothers made their first historic flight. Some of these first drones included aerial vehicles such as balloons, and small planes. I remember hearing a store about an engineer making a small, gas powered, drone that flew about a mile before it ran out of gas; this happened in the late 1800’s. As with much of the technological advancements in this world, war has motivated people to create and advance technology until it has reached a near science fiction level. Before we reached this level in evolution, scientists were still using the technology available to them to impress and wow and kill their advisories. During World War One, the United States military was creating pilotless vehicles that they would load up with explosives and send towards enemy territory to crash and inflict as much damage as possible (IWM Staff, 2018). This is a barbaric and indiscriminate way to conduct war and obviously very, very obsolete. Although, this started a long line of improvements that ultimately lead us to where we are today. 

War might have sped up the advancements of these weapon systems but when we stopped fighting and the dust settled, we realized that what we had now has a lot of potential both commercially, and for entertainment purposed. Commercially, drones are used every day to survey hard to reach areas like bridges and wind turbines. As well as taking picture of properties and cities, towns, buildings, companies, you name it. With the advanced cameras out there today, combine with the ability to easily elevate it as high as 2,000 feet with the proper clearances, this commercial service has really blown up lately. These tools have also been used as a means of entertainment both personally, like small toy drones a person receives as a gift or something, and competitively. 

There is a whole market out there for people that uses these unmanned aircraft in competition either racing, skilled maneuvers and moving things as a competition. In Australia, these races are quite a big deal. There are many racers and even more people that like to watch the races (Edwards, 2018). It’s gotten so popular in fact that the small and fast drones are no longer entertaining enough for the large competitive drone following. They are not racing large drones too, as much as 40 pounds! 

With all of these advancements in drones the real question is what’s next. One would think there isn’t really anything else we can do with drones because the military operated ones are already so advanced. However, in the last 100 years we’ve realized that the sky is no longer the limit. According to New Scientist, we have a new age species of drones that can think and learn as they operate. This ‘deep learning’ technology has been used before in computers but all of the models they’ve used it in have been grounded to land by either wheels or legs (Hambling 2015). These drones can remember where they’ve been, try to figure out where they’re going and the best route to do so, and remember what worked and what didn’t. This technology has been put to the test in a lab where one drone was balancing a long, straight pole on the center of it. That drone leaned and flew up while the other drone followed along and tried to catch the long pole by balancing it on the same end in the same manner; but only after it did an entire flip in the air. The video is on Youtube and very entertaining to watch because the drone didn’t get it on the first try but after its 6^thor 7^thtry, landed it perfectly. After they learned how to do to it, they could to it almost perfectly every time after that.  

Of course, this was in 2015 and a lot has happened since. It’s absolutely amazing what SpaceX has been doing with drones and this deep learning technology. The rockets that SpaceX uses to transport things to a from the international space station, the Flacon 9, is a drone that it operated solely using drone technology. This isn’t a conventional drone of course but if you break down the characteristics of what a drone is it does meet the standards; it just exceeds them by leaving the atmosphere and returning by landing it’s self as well. The military should be taking notes from this civilian company and learn how to incorporate this sort of technology into its UAV’s. 

In conclusion, the evolution of drones has come a long way and will most likely be the spear head into making this world automated and more advanced. The amount of technological power we have in this generation is second to none is only going to become more advanced. I am truly excited to see where we end up and how much longer before man operated aircrafts become obsolete. 

Citations

IWM Staff. (2018). A Brief History of Drones. Imperial War Museum. Retrieved April 17, 2018 from https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-brief-history-of-drones

Tom Edwards. (2018). Competitive Drone Racing Takes Off in Australia. ABC News. Retrieved April 17, 2018 from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-22/fpvr-racing-takes-off-australia/9572076

David Hambling. (2015). Smart Drones that Think and Learn like Us. New Scientist. Retrieved April 17, 2018 from https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630172-000-smart-drones-that-think-and-learn-like-us-to-launch-this-year/