Boffins build smallest drone to fly itself with AI A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance. Although computer vision has improved rapidly thanks to machine learning and AI, it remains difficult to deploy algorithms on devices like drones due to memory, bandwidth and …
Not a chance.
'Non-fossil' Renewable power sources are very poor. They deliver low amounts of power, which is easily disrupted. No engineer in their senses would use them - unless it was to obtain subsidies from a government bemused by Greens.
I suspect that you have been seduced by the never-ending stream of propaganda suggesting that full grid power from Renewables is 'just round the corner' into thinking that these systems are useful...
"0.094W is a damn low requirement"
Yes but the Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter it is on has a 240mAh battery, takes 40 minutes to charge and it can then fly for 7 minutes. The maximum payload is 15g leaving little margin for it to be solar powered unless you want a duty cycle of about one flight per year.
Yes but the Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter it is on has a 240mAh battery, takes 40 minutes to charge and it can then fly for 7 minutes.
That comes out as a total current draw of around 2A, and a power consumption of some 7W (taking the battery going from 100% to near empty in those 7 minutes).
The maximum payload is 15g leaving little margin for it to be solar powered unless you want a duty cycle of about one flight per year.
Poking around on AliExpress to find a panel weighing less than 15g, several suitable candidates come up. With a power output of 0.25 .. 0.3W they can recharge the battery in a day or two, so that's 150 flights per year.
Can we all have some of what you are smoking please? It is really powerful stuff.
Some of us are living on renewables already.
You can drive an Electric Car and charge it from the Sun at home (as I do) or use a Charge point operated by one of the several companies who supply 100% renewable Electricity.
If you still doubt that it can be done why not take up this challenge and perhaps (????) you might get converted.
Go along to that mecca for petrol heads, Silverstone in early June (9th and 10th to be exact) and attend the 'Fully Charged Live' event. You can even get to drive an EV and talk to people who know which direction the future must go or we are doomed.
If not, please carry on hanging on every word that Donald "Build that wall" Trump says. He is an evolutionary dead end like Neanderthal Man was.
"Some of us are living on renewables already"
No. You just think you are. Cast your mind back a few days to the 12th May. It wasn't windy with the total wind power for the UK generating less than 200Mw for nearly 24 hours. Hydro was producing a similar amount. Solar at this time of year is quite good peaking at about 5Gw in the middle of the day but obviously going to zero by the evening. If you include biomass (burning wood) as renewable (some folks do and some don't) then that's another 2Gw. Demand was 20-30Gw. 9Gw came from nuclear (including 2 from France) the rest was almost all generated from gas.
Wellll-
If you are on a "renewable energy tariff" your supplier commits to buying sufficient renewable power on average to cover their total customer load on average. Doesn't mean that at a given instant *your* supply is totally sourced from renewables, but averaged over a period it will be.
Sometimes the renewable supply is below sold renewable demand, so non-renewable kicks in (those CCGT units start and stop quickly). Sometimes is exceeds demand, and the surplus can be sold to the general market.
Just because we cannot *completely* change to renewable energy in one step is not an excuse for not moving towards that target. Same with electric cars: sure, right now they are not suitable for all purposes, but from personal experience they cover *most* of the requirements already.
I'd rather have NUCLEAR than solar. MORE POWER!
And fusion energy (potentially) allows us to have virtually unlimited fuel, assuming you can make it fuse with 1H and not require 2H or 3H or something else.
The 1H+1H->2H fusion reaction has very little mass defect, but doesn't really consume any energy, so it should be possible to have 'breeder' fusion along with 2H+2H->4He fusion for power. Until then, we can use a centrifuge to separate out the heavy water and still be cost effective (and have LOTS of fuel available).
In any case, i just want the cost of energy to be lower, so if solar is actually cheaper [not because of gummint taxes and regulations and subsidies, either] then use it. Otherwise, burn dinosaurs and ancient plants. And nuclear fission, too. Whatever costs the least, doesn't force rolling blackouts or 'conservation' or any other inconvenience, etc..
After all, why should MODERN people in 1st world countries live like they're in 3rd world countries? if you run out, MAKE MORE (note: this does NOT mean 'pollute everything' so you anti-tech fascists can't say it now, bleah). And tell the enviro-wackies to GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY and stop blocking construction projects.
"Last time I looked, HydroElectric dams produce a shit load of power"
For some places like Norway yes, but for the UK no. As I post this the UK is currently generating 212Mw of hydro electric power which is 0.6% of our electrical consumption. The UK is not geographically well positioned from a renewable energy perspective.
As for reliability of hydroelectric in general, there have been problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
"HydroElectric dams produce a shit load of power and are pretty darned reliable."
And are cost effective. /me likes hydro power.
But good luck getting one built, these days. Enviro-wackos will red-tape your project into non-existence.
Wait until the enviro-wackos start objecting about solar farms and windmills. No, wait...
https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds
[the only thing that will make enviro-wackos happy is if we ALL STOP using electricity and fossil fuels, period, and live like LUDDITES and/or Amish - except for them - because they're "the elite" and are "special" and it's OK when THEY "do whatever", it's just the REST of us that have to be inconvenienced, stopped, controlled, whatever]
> Non-fossil' Renewable power sources are very poor. They deliver low amounts of power, which is easily disrupted. No engineer in their senses would use them -
Engineers use renewables all the time. Regarding solar power, at one end we have low power untethered devices - calculators and wristwatches - and at the other we have roof-mounted solar panels and grid storage. Even fossil fuels are subject to the same demand spikes that requires grids to be overbuilt - and that grid storage has long been used to mitigate (e.g pumped hydroelectric storage).
If an engineer was tasked with designing, for example, a remote sensor, solar would be on his shortlist
"..'Non-fossil' Renewable power sources are very poor. They deliver low amounts of power, which is easily disrupted. No engineer in their senses would use them - unless it was to obtain subsidies from a government bemused by Greens..."
o'rly?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40198567
I also bought into solar power for my home. It made a big difference to our electricity bill due to the wife being at home and doing things like washing and ironing etc with plenty of sunlight to help power things.
You really should try and educate yourself a bit more before you spout such crud.
Considering the following:-
"Autonomous drones are desirable because if we're going to use drones to do things like deliver packages, it would be grand if they could avoid obstacles instead of flying on known-safe routes. Autonomy will also help drones to monitor environments, spy on people and develop swarm intelligence for military use.
But experts have raised concerns about baking AI into drones, on grounds that they'll become better at delivering lethal payloads."
Maybe Amazon could add a new service when it has finally got drone delivery to work.
I think if delivery drones do become a thing, there will (eventually) be strong and complicated legislation to control them as they present so much scope for naughtiness.
well, once amazon deploy death-raining drones, they can immediately sell certified, selling death-raining anti-drone umbrellas. Those, in turn, will require death-raining anti-drone umbrella-proof-penetrative death-raining drones, which, obviously, will require a new-gen death-raining anti-drone umbrella-deployed anti-death-raining drone nano-missiles (or, simply, anti-drone nano-drones). This is, after all, how human species takes steps in their never-ending quest for self-betterment, aka progress.
Just enough to target and destroy all the shagging pigeons cluttering up the roof tops and chimneys around here. Oh, and clear out all the predatory gulls in places like St Ives which attack grockles for their pasties. Oh, and........I think the list might be longer than first anticipated.....
Whatever it is I have no idea of its size. And that's why we have the El Reg Standards Bureau -
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/Reg+Standards+Bureau
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
Unfortunately, from what I know of silicon chips, its size is smaller than a nano-Wales, so we need a new standard unit for smaller sizes. "Royal Mail Definitive Stamp" (Machins) might fit the bill but that's perhaps too British-centric to be a Universal El Reg Standard.
"Size of the hole in a CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray disc" might be an internationally acceptable alternative. Not sure of such a unit's name though.
"Size of the hole in a CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray disc" might be an internationally acceptable alternative. Not sure of such a unit's name though.
How about an od-hole? :) (Optical Disc)
There is, unfortunately, a notable variable relationship in size to similar component measures for donkeys (left-pondians) or bottoms (everyone else).
I'd seen many a US coin used for scale next to a specimen in National Geographic (often next to a high contrast ruler) long before I first held a US coin in my own hand.
I've also known people to use 1p and 2p coin when weighing out small quantities of herbs, but that's a different matter.
That won't be a problem with this drone, as Loquercio told El Reg that the prototype only works in limited experiments
And I bet the usual suspects, such as governments will NOT be interesteed, nosir.
p.s. when I say "governments", I mean those democratically elected who only ever want the drones to blow up the bad people! Evil Regimes (yesterday evil regimes / future / potential valuable partners), please look elsewhere, e.g. alixpress, etc.
Yes because children prior to 2015 never ever got into trouble, sat in silence and did everything perfectly.
Let me guess in those days, politicians were honest, criminals said "it's a fair cop guv'nor" and everywhere smelt of roses and had a beautiful soft focus.
Or is it you've just turned into a grumpy old man?
maybe we should think about once again creating small people that can control themselves without the need for human guidance.
Once they get to the stage that they can control themselves, in all pertinent aspects that is, they're not at all small any more, and the process will have taken the better part of two decades and a shitload of money.
Never mind that they still won't be equipped with an off switch.
Hi there, I'm one of the authors of the paper and the underlying work (mainly for the architectural and software deployment part).
No idea where the "military use" thing comes from - certainly not from our work as anybody who actually read the paper.
For what's worth, the drone is a few grams heavy, its potential for massive destruction quite doubtful, the noise it emits makes it decidedly non-stealthy, and the funding that has paid for this research comes from public non-military research grants on deep learning, real-time autonomous systems and robotics (as explicitly stated in the paper, and copied below). Its autonomous intelligence is at the moment limited at going around without being utterly stupid and hitting things (which is in itself quite nice) -- not murder or espionage.
Look at big, nasty drones flying hundreds of meters / kilometer above your head if you fear being bombed or spied (for the latter, your smartphone could also suffice). We position this UAV as a nano-robot for tasks such as search & rescue in emergency situations, in which case all of its limitations are not so critical, while the advantages are really useful.
Ciao :)
Funding statement from the paper:
This work has been partially funded by projects EC H2020 HERCULES (688860), by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant 162524 (MicroLearn: Micropower Deep Learning), by the Swiss National Center of Competence Research (NCCR) Robotics and by the SNSF-ERC starting grant.
"No idea where the 'military use' thing comes from"
For what it's worth, the only mention of military in article is a general reference to autonomous drones, not any one in particular (such as the tech discussed in the paper). Also, we imagine small self-flying drones will be used for spying rather than direct damage.
C.
"Autonomy will also help drones to monitor environments, SPY ON PEOPLE* and develop swarm intelligence for military use." (* = My emphasis)
“In the future, I see them working similar to flies. Despite not [having an] elegant flying patterns - flies crash a lot - they can reach any place they need.”
Brilliant! This is the future Orwellian dystopia for me!
Same thing as in the reply above. The work has nothing to do with military / espionage use, it's tiny, inoffensive, and noisy enough that it would really be difficult to use it to spy anyone. But, as argued in the paper, this thing has *plenty* of other usages that are absolutely inoffensive :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
