VideoOne of the problems -- outside of the obvious -- with a significantly damaged aircraft is that pilots often overreact and add to the situation. In other words, when a plane gets nailed by something like a missile, the person at the wheel panics. DARPA and Athena's Damage Tolerance and Autonomous Landing Solution adds a full flight automation and backup system that uses a plane's internal inertial navigation system and GPS systems to land safely by automatically adjusting to the new configuration -- a physics computation that a human is in no condition to deal with during such a crisis. In a recent unmanned flight test, Rockwell Collins showed off the tech with a scaled-model F-18 in which nearly half a wing is blown off and then landing the plane safely.
Misplaced wings no sweat for DARPA's new system
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Zed Snardbody
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Misplaced wings no sweat for DARPA's new system
Engadget.com
The Zen of Not Fucking Up.
Wow, that's impressive. Now I want to see them do a full-scale test, with damage that is less "clean".
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Drooling Iguana
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"These deadly rays will be your death!"
- Thor and Akton, Starcrash
"Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.... We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
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Sea Skimmer
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They’ve been working on software for a while, the original idea was to use it on commercial airliners to deal with deal with control failures due to hydraulic or other problems, it’s a step beyond mere fly by wire. Basically planes flight control computer ceases to give a shit about linking the specific movements of the controls the pilot is making to specific movements of the flight control surfaces. If a control surface fails the pilot keeps flying normally, and the computer looks at what controls he’s moving to decide what direction the pilot is trying to fly in. Then it uses all the flight control surfaces that still work to make the plane do what the pilot wants. A skilled pilot could do this himself, but its very hard, to say the least, to say use the elevators to compensate for the loss of the rudder.
Adapting the programming to work fully autonomously as was done in this test is just the next step along.
Adapting the programming to work fully autonomously as was done in this test is just the next step along.
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