Lets have a thread about highly portable drones capable of deploying guided munitions. Not much info out on the subject, so any contributions would be appreciated.
wired.com
>Raytheon, the defense giant, has been working since 2009 on what it calls a Small Tactical Munition – as the name suggests, it's a bomb tiny enough to attach onto the military's fleet of small to medium drones like the Shadow. Weighing 12 pounds and standing 22 inches, the guided munition has the potential to expand the drone war dramatically, giving battalion-sized units that fly small drones the ability to kill people, like the remote pilots who fly the iconic Predators and Reapers do.
Small drone munitions
Bentley Cook
Carson Anderson
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Jonathan Collins
bump in hopes this takes off
Blake Stewart
I think it would be easier to just put small explosive charges like a hand grenade on fast quadcopters. Skilled pilots could fly them through complex terrain and strike enemies behind cover.
A racing drone only costs about $300. Scale it up and put an explosive on it and It would probably still cost less than $500. That's a tiny fraction of the cost of a guided munition.
Have the pilot fly one and detonate at the enemy. Boot up another and repeat over and over. It would be like intelligent mortar fire that can go around corners and through windows.
Juan Wood
thats true, but i like the idea of having a bit of standoff. It would take alot more than a shotgun to defend against a pgm.
Cooper Butler
Give these things decent AI and they dominate urban combat through sheer numbers
Nathaniel Campbell
Yeah but then all the extra sensors weight it down and make it 100X more expensive. A human controlled quadcopter is just a battery, a $20 flight controller, 4 motor speed controllers, and 4 motors. The video system is literally just a tiny little camera and a video transmitter.
AI would need tons of extra sensors that tell it altitude, speed, distance to target etc. We are still a long ways away from having AI that can fly like a human with the only information it has to use is a simple video feed.
David Kelly
i understand where your coming from. I bought a bebop 2 and i became extremely profficient with it in no time at all.
Landon Myers
>accelerometer/INS
>camera
For sub-kilometer ranges, that's good enough; update the INS from the launcher's GPS prelaunch. For precision, tack on a LED based short-range lidar.
Most of that is already present, and its all cheap.
IMO the difficulty with drones is power. They'll need some kind of land-based carrier to recharge from and be stored in - maybe a charging rack on a humvee.
Gabriel Gomez
What about some kind of solar panel on top for some in flight charging. Might help to extend loiter time
Carson Powell
A charging setup in a vehicle would be very simple. I built my own charging setup out of a used 1000W server power supply and it runs to a dual channel charger that then splits out into 8X parallel charger boards for each channel.
I can charge 16 batteries at a time, 8 per channel. That lets me have the two channels at different voltages for different battery types etc. It would easily fit in a backpack and still have room for 20 batteries and the controller etc.
Isaiah Wright
The amount of solar power hitting the surface area of a drone is insignificant. The weight of the panel can't even be offset. It would decrease flight time. The cost of carrying the panel would be more than the power provided by the panel.
Asher Kelly
You grossly overestimate the power output of solar cells user
Nicholas Foster
thanks for the clarification.
Anthony Powell
How do you think a gas powered drone would fare?
Luke Turner
Too much mechanical complexity for a quadcopter.
Jack Richardson
how about a flying wing?
Leo Long
If it was a fixed wing plane it would probably be superior to electric. There is more energy pound for pound in fuel than there is in the best batteries. Plus with fuel you expend it so you get lighter as you fly while with a battery you are still carrying 100% of the weight even when you only have 10% charge left.
But gas engines can't work on a quadcopter. They don't have the RPM precision for control. A quadcopter is making hundreds if not thousands of tiny adjustments in RPM to all 4 motors to stay in control.
My racing drones do 8,000 adjustments a second and they are becoming obsolete. The hot new shit does 16K and 32K a second for extra smooth control. That means the electric motor for each propeller is adjusting it's speed every fraction of a revolution of the propeller. The props spin at about 30,000 RPM. so 500X a second. 8K adjustments a second at 500 revolutions a second = an adjustment every 16th of a revolution of the propeller. A gas motor can't do that.
There are some experimental drones that carry a gas motor that spins a generator to make power for the electric motors but they haven't really caught on. I don't think it is worth all the complexity.
TLDR:
Fuel burning engines are better for fixed wing and helicopter style drones.
Electric is better for multirotors due to control requirements.
Xavier Reed
interesting info. Im very new to drones. I have a bebop 2 that has been very useful for figuring out some terrain in my area. Next on my list is a parrot disco fixed wing. Have any reccomendations for a fixed wing drone. the only feature im deadset on is flight planning.
Daniel Richardson
I've never built a fixed wing before. But there are some really cool foam flying wings that are crazy simple. Just 2 servos for the 2 control surfaces and a single motor for propulsion. And since the body is foam it's dirt cheap. If you crash it you will probably only snap the foam and that is only a few bucks for more.
I should build one since I already have the controller and FPV goggles. That's the expensive part.
Alexander Thompson
i have 2 pairs of fpv goggles. i honestly havent used them once. I really like the skycontroller 2
Sebastian Thomas
Your not very good at pretending to be an authority user. Lurk more post less?
Jaxson Foster
loiter time on that badboy?
