Posted by Melbourne RPV on January 08, 2004 at 01:45:15:
Appart from the ignorance of histories lessons there also seems to be an ignorance of the basic rules of inventions among UAV developers.
Nessecity is the mother if invention.
Did you create a UAV because someone expressed a need for it to be done ?
Or did you create a UAV as proof of a concept alone ?
If it was as proof of concept and you dont have anyone expressing a need to use it.
Why did you prove the concept ?
Now that you have proven the concept it seems it has not created a need where one did not exist before.
We have UAV's in plenty now.
Just released another I note, at a paltry US$10,000.
The guys are the RR forum have one that can shoot paint balls that is less usefull than teats on a bull, try a rocket launch off it and find out about Newtons law and Mass.
CSIRO has one it announced recently, the most un airworthy rc heli Ive ever seen flown, it is allegedly a UAV. Sometimes I guess.
As far as I can tell it flies manually in the video they provide, as a flier of helis it is easy to see the human control of the heli flying up to power lines, not flown by machine. Not even FMA co-pilot system.
Aerosonde, another lot who ignored history are throwing the effort to attract the military, seemingly because there is little viabilty in the civil sector.
So where are all these UAV operating.
In the military, and ?
Not like people of all job descriptions dont know what a UAV is, they have been around for donkeys years, and if they wanted one 10 mins on the internet these days they will find plenty, for land sea or air.
So why havent they all bought them and used them for all these proposed uses of UAV I see often put forward ?
Is that perhaps because they dont need them.
Do you know where things get sold that are of no use to most people.
On late night TV advertisments.
Demtel for example sell a numerous range of products that are of no use to anyone.
The sales premise is basic, even though you have no use for the product, if you buy one now, you get an extra one free.
Not one useless object, but two, for the price of one.
You must be saving money, right?
Other things that are the fruits of inventions that failed are grabbed from the scrap heap of history at the last knock and fashioned into colorfull semi transparent bath time toys for the kiddies, made in the Republic of China in copious quantities..
Maybe you are thinking that your skill and a big fist of cash, or fist full of tax payer funded grants, will dazzle everyone into using it that doesnt need to use it now.
Why not look to history for a lesson.
The biggest failure in unmanned vehicle concepts in Australia was created by the same team of people who create the most successfull UAV in Australia.
You all know the name of the successfull UAV and cite it as point in case of UAV, but not the failure that was scrapped, it is ignored and the reasons it failed also ignored..
The failure they created came after the one that made them famous in UAV.
They scrapped it and moved back onto the UAV program realising that the UAV was born by nessecity, the one that was never used and was a failure was created to serve the mere proof of concept.
They had all that technology and ingenuity in the UAV that was a huge success and why wouldnt they beleive they could make use if it in other ways.
They beleived that the proof of a concept given would create a need for their project once completed and proven to work.
They completed it, and it worked and worked very well.
They had already been accepted as leaders in UAV technology and had already sold UAV to overseas military clients.
But nobody wanted it, no-body purchased it, and in fact no-one ever asked them to build such an unmanned craft.
The thing just wasn't of any use to anyone like the UAV was.
So they scrapped it and went back to what they knew was actually needed, a new type of UAV as UAV's where usefull and the old design was due for an update, for the lack of nothing else to do with autonomous craft that anyone needed.
The only problem there was that there was very limited potential uses for UAV.
So they ran up a pile of concepts to see if they would ..fly.
Small cameras and all sorts of other attachments, did all the hard testing but found the major issue was not so much the proving of the concepts, just the fact no one needed UAV for those tasks.
All the potential uses where all military, when they decided to see how it could apply civily they again came up against all the old issues of public acceptance.
Public acceptance had began quite well and continued post war for some time but dropped off pretty soon after a civilian was killed by a UAV in a sleepy village in the UK.
After that UAV to the public was highly unpopular and as above it was the primary factor in all their civil proposals.
In the end it just wasnt feasable to do it in the civil enviroment.
It presented too much trouble, socially, politically, and all to do what, things no-one ever needed a UAV to do.
Not worth it, they saw the writing on the wall.
They moved onto the next UAV that was simply built to fill a need the military requested from them following the continued success of the original UAV that was still doing the old job it always did..
The new UAV was of course a success, didnt set any real milestones like the original one but you would still all know the name of that UAV.
All of you involved in UAV would have simply seen all this as one successfull UAV that came from them and ran for many years, then another one from them much later that ran for a considerable working life also.
The list of UAV trials for them is long and the failures are all but 2 projects.
If you are all going to cite the success of that UAV, the Jindivik and the success of GAF with UAV then you cannot ignore the rest of the picture and cannot continue to pluck out all the good stories and sweep all the failures under the carpet.
Stating you can over come all the issues by simply tweaking a few existing technologies and adding some additional items will fix it all, you are utterly fooling yourselve to beleive that is all it will take.
That is complete ignorance of the history of the very UAV that many of you point to as a proof of concept in a working application.
Next time you say Jindivik UAV was a total success, remember to say also that the Jindivik Hovercraft was a total stinker. It worked great, but it was of no use.
And you beleive you thought of it all first.
UAV is old hat and done on both sides.
There is no UAV revolution just around the corner, in fact for all the non technical reasons, like nessecity is the mother of invention, means there is only limited uses for them in the future a long way down the road.
Same as there was in 1980.