The Fanwing May Be The Next Widely Used UAV

cstanton — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:29:00 GMT

"One of the few truly new aircraft since the Wright Brothers" Clive Thompson of The New York Times

Pretty neat quote taken off of FanWing.com

The fanwing is an awesome remote controlled aircraft designed for a short take off, high lift, and slow speeds.

Pat Peebles, the designer of the fanwing brings up a good point in the interview when he says that typically aircraft efficiency is based on how much air an aircraft can take in. To go for maximum efficiency, he just designed the fan to go across the entire wing and to distribute the propulsion as much as possible. It gives the aircraft great stability and allows it to travel at very slow speeds. Like 30km/hour through the air slow. Like floating.

The thing is virtually silent, so unless someone's looking very carefully into the sky, they probably won't even know it's there. The superslow speed, the high lift, and how silent it is make for it to be extremely useful as an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.

It will only take about 15 minutes for one man to set it up once it is in production, making it practical on the battlefield. The whole thing only weighs about 5.5 kg empty and the maximum takeoff weight is 12.5 kg, pretty easy to carry. When you add the 4kg battery, the MTOW allows for hardly anything but a 2kg payload. I guess a camera or scanner or whatever they use probably weighs less. Though it would be pretty cool, you couldn't really drop bombs with a 2 kg payload.

Check out the website, its really pretty cool. They have a lot of neat pictures of the development. The flow visualization is pretty neat too.

Cyborg Crickets

cstanton — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:01:00 GMT

As our military tactics and technology is progressing, the US has been recruiting new members of the animal kingdom into its ranks. First, it was just mammals, such as dogs and dolphins, and now it has come to insects.

Much like the use of canaries by coal miners, the military is now exploring the use of insects for detection of the use of chemical weapons and even humans. They load up the insect with a small package of electronics that control its muscle movement and sense different scents, such as human scent, and certain chemicals, like Sarin or hydrogen cyanide. Since the electronics have basically taken over the primitive nervous system of the creature, they are also able to change their wing movement patterns. The types of insects whose communications are based on wing movement are cicadas, locusts, and crickets. All of these could be candidates to join our ranks as mindless drones that function as individual detectors.

Before we send troops into a certain area, we will be able to send in a squadron of crickets that will be able to, thanks to the equipment that has been merged with their bodies, detect whether there are harmful chemicals in the area. Another use could be for infiltration of places that would not be easily accessed by infantry to detect whether or not there are warm bodies in a building. The ability to detect human scent would also come in handy in detecting earthquake victims or people caught in the rubble of an explosion.

Science is coming so far as to make R/C cars out of animals. I think it's pretty neat. I say that we use locusts and direct swarms to wipe out crops and mosquitos to aggrivate the hell out of the enemy. It's probably a good thing that I'm not in charge of these new military ventures. I only call it a venture because of the machine apocalypse, we don't need them with the bugs on their side!

The Loris Bite : military

The Fanwing May Be The Next Widely Used UAV

Cyborg Crickets