Nixie - Wearable autonomous camera & the future of the AP role.

[Eclipse]

Introducing Nixie: the first wearable camera that can fly

Based on the lack of a single real photo of the device, my suspicion is that it is still in
heavy prototype stage and may not even exist as an actual product, yet.

However, this is just a derivative of existing technology which already exists today,
and the doorway to more general use in CONUS was swung open by the FAA last week
when it cleared the first 6 of what will undoubtedly be countless movie production companies
to use UAVs for movie shoots.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/25/faa-drones-movie-making/16164439/



FAA approves drone use for TV and movie production

For now, commercial use still requires a pilot certificate, line-of-sight, and daylight only shoot.

Today

But SAR/DR isn't commercial use, is it? So that door is open already.

"Line of sight" - "I can still see it, can't you?  It's right over there."

And of course, any commercial company that does go though the certification process,
whatever that is (and I would hazard that we'll see a UAV certificate soon enough) will
be constantly looking for revenue sources, and SAR/DR will be high on their list
as low-hanging fruit.  If you don't think EMAs will be telling us that "Aerial Mob's already
been here and done..." you don't understand the landscape, and that assumes your
wing ever does those missions to start with.

It's over, folks.  The writing is bright neon on the wall and it's only a matter of time.
Mark the calendar, within 5 years the idea of waiting 1-24+ hours to put up a $350,000
airplane with three human beings in it to take photos with a DSLR and then take another
1-3+ hours to process and get them to the customer will be long gone and laughable.

Right now, today, I can buy a Gimbled rig and a GoPro for under $1500 without even trying hard.


In the time it takes to drive the aircrew to the airport, I could drive to a DA, do a full aerial survey
in HD, and send the photos to the customer.  That's today without even trying hard.

Right now, today, for less then the cost of three airplanes, CAP could equip every unit in the country
with a full kit to turn them into aerial recon responders.  Considering the shrinkage of the program,
I would hazard every real GT could have one in their go-kit.   

Those fancy DSLRs are going to wind up next to the L-Pers and the RADMON equipment in the closet.
EMAs don't need 4K resolution beauty shots of their flooded roads, they just need clear photos to
tell them where the trouble spots are and where people need help.

It honestly pains me to view this as true, but if CAP doesn't either find some way to get ahead of
this train which has not only left the station but is mile down the road, or find a supplemental
set of missions fast, things are going to get dark and quiet quickly.

The challenge is the establishment and inertia inherent in both CAP's pseudo-governmental / military
existence, coupled with plenty of reticence on the part of the pilot community to give up the yolks.

If CAP started today on an initiative to move towards a meaningful infrastructure and training program
for using UAVs for SAR/DR, we're looking at 2020 before it's of any real value beyond the same anecdotal
and circumstance successes of things like ARCHER and GIIEP. (GIIEP, which CAP is only now
doing anything with, and at the benevolence of the Guard, is already 10 years old, and the Guard is
moving away from it)

There would need to be a full year, maybe two,  of "discussions", then the nerds will fight over manufacturer
and standards (and there need to be standards).  A funding request would take at least another fiscal cycle,
and then you're got two years+ of curriculum development, deployment, training, and customer acquisition
(in an organization with a SE-focused membership trendline).

Anyone involved in getting radios deployed or programmed knows how "well" CAP works with Logistics.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not sitting static and waiting for CAP to decide to get in the game.

This situation speaks to the very heart of CAP's long term viability as an organization purporting to provide
ES services, and is the reason so many of my fellow silver-oaked friends and colleagues are concerned about
CAPs future, to the point that many are simply disengaging.

While CAP has focused on gold medals, NCO programs, and making an increasingly louder noise about
a decreasing number of missions (i.e. the last buggy whip manufacturer), the rest of the SAR/DR and
technology world has continued on down their road at an increasing pace and distance, due, not in
small part to its lack of administrative overhead and the weight of the internal schizophrenia CAP's paramilitary /
volunteer / corporate "jack of all trades / master of none" paradigm continues to hamper itself with.

How these are not the primary highly-public focus of every eagle and star is beyond me.

[NIN]

In the time it takes to drive the aircrew to the airport, I could drive to a DA, do a full aerial survey
in HD, and send the photos to the customer.  That's today without even trying hard.

Not buying that you can survey, in that time, more than a CAP plane could.

Line of sight? Come on. You're going to survey some dude's flooded cornfield. All 20 or 30 acres of it.

Not a hundred miles of coastline that's torn up from a storm surge.  Not 200 sq miles of flooded river valley in one sortie.

You better have a lot of rechargeable batteries on hand.

[Eclipse]

You can find videos easily that show autonomous UAVs with a 2-mile+ range dated 2009.
And again, this isn't replicators and transporters, this is technology already long proven mature and
robust.  The only issue is cost and regulation, both of which will change in this favor in the 5-years I posit.

Battery life is really the limiting factor today, and that's changing as we speak.

Line-of-sight will go away long before the 5-year timeline - FPV (First Person View) is actually a lot safer
then line-of-sight, and with a good combo of GPS and terrain mapping, it'll go out and back with a mouse
click - that literally already exists today.

Musk is predicting an autonomous Tesla in 5-6 years - that's a lot harder then autonomous flight as there's
a lot more unpredictable on the ground then in the air.

[Eclipse]

The other thing you have to consider when discussing these kinds of radical shifts is
that technological advance is no longer linear, it's exponential, and no longer controlled
by large companies, one nation, or even governments.  This Nixie, for example, was made
in "some dude's garage".

For all intents and purposes, 20 years ago there was no "internet", at least to the general public,
today it topples regimes and governments fear it enough to restrict it.

I've had a converged device in my pocket since around 2000, and a PDA before that, but for much
of the world, smartphones weren't born until 2007, now 5 year olds carry them to school (literally).

Any place there is market pressure to reduce cost, and at the same time bring an enhanced product,
barring outside intervention, there's only one way a tech trend can move. In this case, like in most of
the rest of society, "people" are expensive and messy.  Eliminate the people part of flying and the world is your oyster.

As it stands, there are toys today which could do most of CAPs AP job most of the time.
The rest is just trivial scale.

[JeffDG]

Line-of-sight will go away long before the 5-year timeline - FPV (First Person View) is actually a lot safer
then line-of-sight, and with a good combo of GPS and terrain mapping, it'll go out and back with a mouse
click - that literally already exists today.

Line-of-Sight is about see-and-avoid deconfliction in the National Airspace System.  Until the UAVs develop an autonomous Sense-and-Avoid, then Line-of-Sight will remain.

[Eclipse]

Can't argue that, though 5 years is a long time and they already have UAVs with 360° fields of view, and
sadly, as indicated by the other article I posted, having a human being at the controls doesn't
eliminate the issue of deconfliction, and further, since we're talking SAR/DR, then CAP
just puts up a TFR in the DA and there is no conflict risk with other aircraft.

We do that today all the time.

Assuming it hasn't been done already, someone is going to, very soon, put one of those MK4s or similar
on a drone, home directly to a beacon, and broadcast location.  If I could think of it just typing
here, then odds are it's already being done at ham fests today.

[RiverAux]

CAP's role in aerial DR is also under threat from satellite imagery (which has some major pluses in favor of it as opposed to a bunch of individual photographs).  And never mind the cheap drones, don't forget that the National Guard is fast being equipped with the heavy duty stuff and they need something to fire those puppies up for in order to justify their existence. 

I think we've still got aerial SAR for missing airplanes in our pockets for now since that often covers areas so huge that drones just can't do the job.  However, it won't be long that as soon as we've got it narrowed down to a relatively small area they probably will replace the planes with NG drones.