[coolantman]

I was just wondering what interesting products you guys were working on these days. I had a customer that just finished building 500 parts for a new machine gun the military is working on.

What interesting things are you guys doing?

-Coolantman

[tobyaxis]

The New Unmanned Drones are being done in this area.

[coolantman]

what exactly is an unmanned drone? or should i already know?

[RP Designs]

The Predator is an example of an unmanned drone. Basically any vehicle which operates without a person on board is an unmanned drone although the term usually references aircraft.

[tobyaxis]

what exactly is an unmanned drone? or should i already know?

Unmanned Fighter Aircraft Flown by Remote Control.

[tobyaxis]

Here is a link to the X45 Drone.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002005.html

[coolantman]

Looks like one bad ass machine!!

[jcoats]

I saw some flicks on youtube some time back of a guy doing a drone, he took it off and landed it as a RC plane, but he sent it on a 'mission'. It flew several mile down a road, turn around a GPS coordinate and come back. It was a long, mostly boring video, but the technology and the thought that it was mostly off-the-shelf stuff, not 'new research' here.

Basically a microcomputer, full fledged RC plane that the micro could control, gyro for stabilization, GPS. The 'mission program' was loaded prior to flight.

The actually landing and takeoff are a bit more complicated than flying, so the did it 'manually' by having it act as a 'regular' RC plane.

[ImanCarrot]

Hmm, does anyone else have a little flicker of unease about a PC controlling something intentionaly dangerous and allowing it to make autonomous decisions?

I mean, how many people do you know who haven't seen "Windows encountered an unhandled exception error at: blah, please tell us about this problem"? usualy accompanied with the blue screen of death...

[jcoats]

I have a natural (and IMHO healthy) distrust of anything that is 'windows' based.

But there are lots of folks that run Mach to control CNC machines of various commercial and home-brew types with luck.

Personally, I don't want a 'Windows' derivative running my pacemaker.

So, being skeptical, I still like EMC as a good open source alternative. Yes, it isn't as user friendly, but it seems to be as, if not more, robust and reliable.

Not that there is not a good and valid reason for closed source, but sofar I have not seen the reliability from Windows products and ability for the 'little guy' to get something fixed in a timely manner.

Just my personal prejudice on the topic.