Watch: DARPA Flies 'Smart' Black Hawk Helicopter With No Pilot On Board

Watch: DARPA Flies 'Smart' Black Hawk Helicopter With No Pilot On Board

BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY, FEB 10, 2022 - 09:20 PM

For the first time the famed Black Hawk helicopter has flown entirely unmanned as part of an experimental project by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Lockheed Martin.

The project, which has been in development for six years, is called ALIAS - or the "Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System" - and proved successful after days ago a UH-60 Alpha-model Black Hawk helicopter performed its first flight with no human pilot on board.

The maiden flight included the helicopter taking off and landing successfully with no human pilot. It also navigated simulated aerial obstacles in between.

Lockheed Martin published footage of the historic flight to its website this week, describing... "Sitting on the runway in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one of Sikorsky’s pilots in an S-70 Black Hawk helicopter flips the optionally piloted cockpit switch from two to zero, exits the aircraft and walks across the runway." 

The helicopter is seen completing "a pre-flight check list, starts its engines, spins up its rotors and takes off with no crew onboard," according to the press release. "All of it happens fully autonomously."

So far it's completed two test flights over Fort Campbell, Kentucky with no person inside the cockpit. The aircraft is monitored at a remote station from on the ground. 

The helicopter literally has a simple switch that enables autonomous flying, as Defense News described:

There’s a switch in the helicopter called the "210 switch," Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky Innovation, told reporters during a Feb. 8 virtual press briefing. The switch indicates how many pilots are present in the aircraft; for the first time before the flight, it was turned to zero.

For 30 minutes, the ALIAS Black Hawk flew without anyone inside over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Feb. 5 and then again on a shorter flight on Feb. 7.

The ALIAS technology has cost some $160 million so far, with Lockheed touting that "This unique combination of autonomy software and hardware will make flying both smarter and safer."

As AI becomes more advanced, we can imagine that in the not-so-distant future ALIAS will be combined with instant AI-driven battlefield decision-making, in a worrisome 'Skynet' type scenario which skeptics of DARPA and its creepy AI-robot projects are frequently warning about.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/watch-darpa-flies-black-hawk-helicopter-no-pilot-board

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more