Comment by 0_____0
6 months ago
It's basically the FREE POINT square on the bingo card at this point. When someone builds a cool robot that they don't know what to do with, it's inevitably for SAR. I've worked on a couple of them myself.
6 months ago
It's basically the FREE POINT square on the bingo card at this point. When someone builds a cool robot that they don't know what to do with, it's inevitably for SAR. I've worked on a couple of them myself.
Can't forget having to signal away from military. Accessible drone AI can be used to stop petty crime, man the borders, catch drug smuggling boats & ofc, kill people effectively. These uses are drenched in politics, so have to signal something more palatable.
Truly accessible drone automation software is instant unicorn status. It would've been acquired by Anduril or Dji before it saw the light of day.
We live in an interesting time where the 1st world's biggest problems (illegal immigration, drug smuggling, obesity, effective transportation, solving crimes, infinite energy) are already solved from a technical standpoint. But we artificially limit their use due to dystopian vibes.
Good! The "vibes" are real. We don't live in Star Trek, we live in Black Mirror. We dont have a world where Superman would exist, we would have Homelander.
The ability for an authority to have perfect knowledge of who is in every area of a city, and conversely to have instant access to where every person is, is terrifying.
At no point in human history has society been built on expecting perfect, uniform enforcement of laws and that has gone from "beyond wildest imagination" to technically doable in two generations.
Surely this is sarcasm. None of the things you list are solely technical problem, or even technical at all. They are all political problems.
The politics that you claim artificially limit solutions are simply a set of politics different than your own.
The 1st world’s biggest problems start with the climate change they are causing.
It even has an xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2128/
I'm mind-blown at how relevant that is here
Oddly, the example in the comic is an absolutely awful example of the phenomenon described in the caption. A robot that can induce targeted lightning strikes has obvious military applications. Screw search and rescue.
Or perhaps it’s a meta comic about dual use :)
A lot of the claimed s&r applications are really a thin cover for military gear.
I remember trying to mentor a hardware startup on an event, and we just couldn’t find the common language with the girl that was pitching it. I just couldn’t see how the cases would justify the market.
Only later on I figured out that the cases were absurd, and all of them really a cover for military applications.
Finding survivors in a forest = finding partisans, is the most common one.
To be pedantic, the comic doesn't mention _targeted_ lightning strikes.
> robot that can induce targeted lightning strikes has obvious military applications
Rescue victims are just the co-operating category of hidden people.
The hookshot also is a weapon in OoT.
At this point, xkcd must be like Simpsons. They already did everything.
I'm starting to suspect that google is behind xkcd, i.e. running some generative AI script behind the scenes whenever someone looks for a comic.
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Free business ideas, because I want this to exist:
Use drones with IR cameras:
* Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours
* Do wildlife surveys for conservation and management departments
* Pest management for farmers
Suprisingly your first idea is illegal in some states. For example it is illegal in Texas.
https://www.skysenderos.com/blogs/thermal-drone-deer-recover...
It'd be impossible to limit the use of drones to just recovery, some people would use them for tracking down the animals which is a horrible idea to allow.
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> * Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours
They tried this exact thing with the kentucky freeway shooter using both helicopter based FLIR system and IR camera equipped drones and failed. Eventually the dudes body was found by a group of ... as far as i can tell, wilderness youtubers working with a police search party.
Even the dogs didn't find him.
Launch from car while stuck in some random traffic jam: learn the cause of the jam and how long it is.
A good idea unless it becomes popular.
I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.
Just get cb radio
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There was a recent story about a medivac helicopter not being able to land to help accident victims because someone had parked their drone over the wreck to check it out/get clicks.
Mobile maps apps already do this pretty well.
Launch while parking with an unfamiliar trailer or in an unfamiliar area.
This may not be legal, per the FAA.
I've worked on 2 (and also for SAR). Not many people working in that field still and there's very little open data.
Thermal is really good in the UK because the ground is rarely that warm. You can easily see a person hiding among rocks, for example. It's basically Cops. In equatorial Africa you can only use it at dawn/dusk (or overnight) because the ground is so hot.
If you google “thermal drone for hunting” you will find some YouTube videos about people solving the first problem.
Pest management is a heck of a good idea. The province of Alberta is officially rat free - if Alberta doesn’t have something like this I bet they would be interested. Especially if it could do double duty for wildlife surveys.
Stick a .22 on a drone with a thermal camera for pest management and that will be one of the most "American Dynamism" startups ever built.
The problem is that night-vision-y technologies are heavily controlled and price inflated. Only few are willing to buy QCIF 30Hz cameras at $500 from AliExpress or from legitimate resellers at $2k.
Tardy add-on: after reading TfA this is not a case of cool robot becomes SARbot. This is a suite of specific tools meant to find people in the mountains. Come on y'all, you can't let me get away with middlebrow dismissal like that!!!
Just don't fill the drone with explosives SAR.