China: Drone Cargo Tested

[ccd]

China: A drone cargo was tested without pilots

A drone cargo was tested in China and there was no pilot on-board. The aircraft flew during 26 minutes, he took off and there was not problem to land safely. It was capable to move 1,5 tons of loading.

End of cargo pilot job ?

[Meatservo]

Nope. Moving 3000lb of cargo on a 26min flight between two airports is my idea of the easiest, most boring job I can imagine. The robot probably costs more than ten years of salary for this job. Robots are probably going to take all the fun, challenging jobs, like cropdusting and flying spaceships. The crappy-paying, boring jobs, unfortunately, will probably always be done by people.

[TailwheelPilot]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQI5LCMURno

This 'drone' is a PAC P750XL modified to be unmanned. Presumably it would not be overly difficult to modify the systems to similar aircraft (ie Caravan, Twin Otter, Y-12, King Air, etc). My gut says that this would be quite easy to use in some places (ie China) where GA is nearly non-existent and the airspace is controlled/restricted while other areas (ie Canada) are less likely to happen for a while yet because GA is already established and there are GA pilots available (admittedly becoming harder to attract and retain). This works to China's advantage since this could give them the ability to continue improving the UAV model in real-world operations and easily make them a world leader in the field.

Just read this article: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomac ... -sea-makes that says a similar thing: use the AT200 (P750XL UAV) to deliver cargo to Chinese installations in the South China Sea where there is minimal traffic before dealing with all of the technical challenges (ie ATC, see-and-avoid - although I wonder what will happen when one flies by a US aircraft carrier and cannot respond to an interception...). One to five hours flying time (not sure how much cargo a P750XL would be able to carry...) and it supposedly can land on dirt tracks or grass fields on islets where there is no airstrip. Air dropping cargo is a planned function for future models for islets that do not have anywhere to land.

[complexintentions]

Nope. Moving 3000lb of cargo on a 26min flight between two airports is my idea of the easiest, most boring job I can imagine. The robot probably costs more than ten years of salary for this job. Robots are probably going to take all the fun, challenging jobs, like cropdusting and flying spaceships. The crappy-paying, boring jobs, unfortunately, will probably always be done by people.

Yep. The irony of technology taking over jobs from humans is that it makes human labour more plentiful, which in turn makes it...cheaper.

[confusedalot]

I think everyone can see that drones are by far the premier moving vehicle; as long as the drones do not hit anything else on their mission.

I would actually like to see drone trucks all over the world. How come this has not happened yet?

Technology is great, the dreams have not quite yet met reality. We should be traveling in all sorts of nifty vessels by now. i wake up in the morning and I see bus drivers, train drivers, taxi drivers, boat/ship drivers, and yesss.....airplane drivers.

How come???

[Spokes]

I don’t think drone trucks are that far away. The google self driving cars already have a safer driving record than human driven cars. Drone surveillance and cargo hauling already happens in war zones. It will come, just a matter of time. Eventually no one will give it a second thought. It will simply be part of the environment.

[Meatservo]

I don’t think drone trucks are that far away. The google self driving cars already have a safer driving record than human driven cars.

I don't know about that. I have never had an accident, either. If everyone else paid the same amount of attention to their driving as the "Google car" handlers pay to their project and its extremely controlled test environment, there would be better stats all around. This is just "Lying with statistics" because if you chose a similar number of human-driven cars and put them through the same paces to amass "data" as the Google ones have been through, you'll probably get a different number, especially if each human driver was being evaluated using the same criteria. There isn't enough data yet to pronounce fully automated vehicles "safer" than anything. There was a semi-comedic attempt to train a dog to steer a car, too. And the dog, in a closed track of course, already has a "safer" driving record than most humans. Except me, of course. I've never had an accident either.

[Diadem]

I don't know about that. I have never had an accident, either. If everyone else paid the same amount of attention to their driving as the "Google car" handlers pay to their project and its extremely controlled test environment, there would be better stats all around. This is just "Lying with statistics" because if you chose a similar number of human-driven cars and put them through the same paces to amass "data" as the Google ones have been through, you'll probably get a different number, especially if each human driver was being evaluated using the same criteria. There isn't enough data yet to pronounce fully automated vehicles "safer" than anything. There was a semi-comedic attempt to train a dog to steer a car, too. And the dog, in a closed track of course, already has a "safer" driving record than most humans. Except me, of course. I've never had an accident either.

Google's cars don't drive in controlled test environments. As of June 2015 they had driven 1.6 million kilometres on public roads, and as of July 2015 they were involved in fourteen accidents; thirteen were caused by drivers of other vehicles, and one was caused by a Google employee who was manually driving the car. Since then, one of the autonomous vehicles sideswiped a bus while attempting to avoid sandbags. Do you really believe that if you drove 1.6 million kilometres you would have a better record than that? Google cars are objectively safer. Computers don't get distracted, computers don't speed, and computers have quicker reaction times than humans by orders of magnitude. Automation is the single most important thing we can do to improve safety on the road and in the air.

[Meatservo]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa. But whatever. Take how many kilometres I HAVE driven, and multiply that by how many "Google" or "Waymo" cars there are, and I'll betcha "meatservos" come in ahead of "googles" every time in terms of safety.

Hundreds of humans have had accidents on test tracks, too. But driving dogs have had ZERO accidents on test-tracks. Therefore, dogs must be safer drivers than humans.

https://youtu.be/4zl8vl5lQnY

[confusedalot]

I don't know how many out there have worked for engineering companies but here goes..

Did two stints as a full flight simulator evaluator, and it is quite an eye opener as far as technology goes. We all think that our products are error free, and that is the biggest misconception ever.

The errors in the flight simulator world number in the thousands, per simulator. Nice high tech product, but far from perfect, worse still, every individual simulator is a different animal, just like every different house is a different animal, and no two simulators have the same problems.

The point I am trying to make is that people are erroneously placing way too much faith in tech. Tech also have their issues, and many of them to boot.

The sandbag versus bus situation is only one of many things that can go wrong, and why in this world would such an error escape the rigors of the tech world? Easy, human error. By the actual designers. Human error also exists in the tech world, even if the engineer types will try to hide or shoot down the very concept.

Ready for much of automation in this world, not quite ready for everything automated is my take...........

[Diadem]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa. But whatever. Take how many kilometres I HAVE driven, and multiply that by how many "Google" or "Waymo" cars there are, and I'll betcha "meatservos" come in ahead of "googles" every time in terms of safety.

Hundreds of humans have had accidents on test tracks, too. But driving dogs have had ZERO accidents on test-tracks. Therefore, dogs must be safer drivers than humans.

https://youtu.be/4zl8vl5lQnY

Your anecdotal "evidence" is not proof of anything if you can't quantify it. I know people who've never been in accidents either, but that's because they barely drive, and I know people who've had an accident every year they've been driving. One person is not representative of the population; I don't know exactly what Google's fleet is now, but it's at least 23, with one at-fault accident in five years in 3.5 million miles driven, according to the company's safety report: https://waymo.com/safetyreport/. According to this article http://mashable.com/2012/08/07/google-d ... yHrSXXdgqE the average accident rate of US drivers is one every 165000 miles.
It doesn't matter if you and your friends don't crash your cars, it doesn't matter if you and your co-workers don't crash planes, because other drivers and pilots do crash. I don't expect autonomous vehicles of any kind to be 100% accident-free, but if they're even 1% safer than human operators, and they're a lot safer than that by a long shot, then they should be in operation as soon as possible. I don't want to have a distracted driver cross the centreline and hit me head-on, or a pilot to lose situational awareness and have an air-to-air with me; I don't care how good a driver or pilot you are, you can't avoid other people's stupidity, and the best way to prevent those accidents is to remove control from those people in the first place.
Now please, if you have actual evidence that shows that humans are ever safer than computers in the operation of vehicles, present it to us. Not that humans can be safe, or that computers can never have errors, because this isn't a binary situation where computers have to function 100% effectively or we won't use them; show us that the use of computers won't improve our safety even marginally compared to letting humans perform the same tasks.

[confusedalot]

Tell me why my computer constantly gets updates and patches for errors. Once again, the confidence in tech does have some merit, but it is far from the perfection that many believe.

[Cliff Jumper]

No one said it was perfect.

It's just a rate.

If people kill 99 people for every million miles driven (made up) and computers kill 98, then computers are safer.

Rates obviously do vary with sample size, but the sample size is getting larger every day.

[Diadem]

Tell me why my computer constantly gets updates and patches for errors. Once again, the confidence in tech does have some merit, but it is far from the perfection that many believe.

Humans don't get updates and patches for errors. Humans make mistakes constantly. Computers are far more accurate, respond far faster, and make far fewer errors than humans. It doesn't matter that computers aren't perfect, it just matters that they're better than humans. Why is it all or nothing with computers, but humans can screw up over and over and you're okay with them being in the cockpit?

[Meatservo]

Dogs, too. By your own metrics, dogs are safer drivers. Demonstrably. Why is it OK to have humans in the cockpit when we could have dogs?

Bullshit aside, as I'm sure you know, computers don't actually "do" anything. All the actions taken by computers are actually actions that are "done" by a human, at some point in the past, in anticipation of a particular confluence of events. The only thing a computer can do is recognize, (if you want to call it "recognition", which I don't because it implies "cognition" which is beyond the scope of any if/then/else parameters of computer ability) anyway all a computer can do is sense an event and react to it in the way that it was instructed to react by a human who, at some point in the past, anticipated that event.

So they're not better at things than humans. Let's make that clear. The extent of a computer's ability is to mechanically process input faster than a person. Any activity that requires actual interpretation and thought is beyond the scope of machine logic. There are those who believe that flying is one of those activities. Driving is different. The main source of danger i. the driving world is the erratic behaviour of other drivers, and the erratic behaviour of sandbags apparently. Until the other drivers are as utterly predictable as a computer, the danger will still be there. I consider automated driving to be an "all or nothing" situation. The risks in flying are different and require forethought and recognition, which are beyond the scope of a computer in anything other than the most benign environment.

[GyvAir]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa.

I’ve read enough of your posts in the past to be pretty sure you’re just fishing for an argument, but I’ll bite anyway.

Yes, you may be among the best drivers in the world... right now. But, what about when you're a little older? When your reaction times start to slow, senses start to fail you and your judgement starts to fail you as well? Including your judgement as to when it's time to give up driving. What if you know it’s time to give up driving, but you don’t want to? You might be pretty happy to be able just jump in your favorite seat in the AutoCar and let it take you to the grocery store or your bridge game or wherever.
As Diadem stated already, it's not about the best, most responsible and able drivers on the road. It's about the average driver. The average driver that has rear ended the Google fleet cars 8 times as of 2015. Even the most attentive of defensive drivers don't generally have a lot of options for avoiding being rear ended.

As far as the abilities and reliability of the systems goes, this is young technology. It will only improve with time and experience. Yes, it’s limited now, but this is not the final version. Even the “autopilots” being marketed now and in the next few years will be quickly outdated with much more capable and reliable versions almost immediately. Software and hardware is going to constantly evolve for the better, guaranteed.

People saying now that self-driving cars aren’t going be a big part of personal transportation in the near future (with all their advantages and disadvantages) is like saying back in the early 80s that the personal computer is just a fad that will never really catch on.

[GyvAir]

Driving is different. The main source of danger i. the driving world is the erratic behaviour of other drivers, and the erratic behaviour of sandbags apparently. Until the other drivers are as utterly predictable as a computer, the danger will still be there. I consider automated driving to be an "all or nothing" situation.

As someone who drives across the GTA on the 401 all too regularly, I would be far less concerned by a few thousand current technology self-driving cars on the highway around me, than the fleet of 100% meat-driven cars that I currently have to contend with.

[Meatservo]

I’ve read enough of your posts in the past to be pretty sure you’re just fishing for an argument, but I’ll bite anyway.

That particular statement is an example of a logical fallacy known as "ad hominem". The trouble with this kind of conversational strategy is that it pretty much negates everything that you have to say afterwards.

If you've read my posts in the past, you may have noticed I have a propensity for picking apart the logical errors in the statements that people make.

So the Google fleet keeps getting rear-ended. That's interesting. A repetetive undesireable outcome to a particular circumstance. Seems like a statistically significant number of drivers were expecting the car in front of them to do something which it then failed to do.

[GyvAir]

Seems like a statistically significant number of drivers were expecting the car in front of them to do something which it then failed to do.

Their response to it failing to meet their expectations was to drive into it?

I've never rear ended anyone. The few times when I came closer than I care to admit to rear ending someone was due entirely to allowing my attention to be drawn to things not relevant to the task at hand - driving - nothing to do with the car ahead doing something unexpected, or failing to do the expected. I expect cars to stop in front of me. I expect them to sometimes stop suddenly and without warning or reasons immediately apparent to myself. However, being human, I sometimes look away longer than I should.

However, I have been rear ended numerous times, usually by people with their heads buried in their phones. A couple times by people assuming that because traffic had moved forward 20 feet, it would continue to move forward.

I’m not sure what the Google cars could do to be immune to the above scenarios, except perhaps make sure they are only being followed by other Google cars that would be paying 100% attention 100% of the time and making logical decisions and reactions based on fact, rather than expectation and desire.

[Meatservo]

That's funny... I've never been rear-ended. I'm assuming it's partly because of my predictable driving behaviour. Sometimes for instance, I keep on going when the light turns yellow, because I know that I would otherwise have to stomp on the brakes to make sure I stop on the line before the light turns red, or else end up fouling the intersection. I wonder what the humans who are directing the reactions of the google-bot have directed it to do in this situation. Judgement is utterly beyond the scope of an automated system, therefore there must be a set of rules in place. I wonder if these rules are entirely realistic. I mean, It shouldn't be the responsibility of human drivers to anticipate the lack of flexibility on the part of a cam-driven automaton.

[GyvAir]

I mean, It shouldn't be the responsibility of human drivers to anticipate the lack of flexibility on the part of a cam-driven automaton.

Why not?

It's currently the responsibility of human drivers to anticipate and react to the all the other automation encountered on the roads today. The lack of flexibility on the part of the automation should only make it easier to predict what will happen and how we should react. Automation isn’t going to be subject to the pressure of knowing you’re on the verge of being late and deciding that a deep, deep shade of yellow will be OK this morning, or reacting differently at intersections where you suspect a red light camera might be in action, versus one you know there is little risk of being ticketed at.

That's funny... I've never been rear-ended. I'm assuming it's partly because of my predictable driving behaviour. Sometimes for instance, I keep on going when the light turns yellow, because I know that I would otherwise have to stomp on the brakes to make sure I stop on the line before the light turns red, or else end up fouling the intersection.

I’ve never once been rear ended due to stopping suddenly, aggressively or in any way that shouldn’t have been easily anticipated by the driver behind me.

[Meatservo]

Well, hopefully whatever the future holds will be acceptable. I'm going to bed. It's been interesting.

[Cat Driver]

I'm going to bed.

Don't get rear ended.

[complexintentions]

Dogs, too. By your own metrics, dogs are safer drivers. Demonstrably. Why is it OK to have humans in the cockpit when we could have dogs?

Bullshit aside, as I'm sure you know, computers don't actually "do" anything. All the actions taken by computers are actually actions that are "done" by a human, at some point in the past, in anticipation of a particular confluence of events. The only thing a computer can do is recognize, (if you want to call it "recognition", which I don't because it implies "cognition" which is beyond the scope of any if/then/else parameters of computer ability) anyway all a computer can do is sense an event and react to it in the way that it was instructed to react by a human who, at some point in the past, anticipated that event.

So they're not better at things than humans. Let's make that clear. The extent of a computer's ability is to mechanically process input faster than a person. Any activity that requires actual interpretation and thought is beyond the scope of machine logic. There are those who believe that flying is one of those activities. Driving is different. The main source of danger i. the driving world is the erratic behaviour of other drivers, and the erratic behaviour of sandbags apparently. Until the other drivers are as utterly predictable as a computer, the danger will still be there. I consider automated driving to be an "all or nothing" situation. The risks in flying are different and require forethought and recognition, which are beyond the scope of a computer in anything other than the most benign environment.

A brilliant summation. And I savoured every moment of your dog satire!

The problem is people keep trying to extrapolate technological advances of the past into the future. It just doesn't work that way. It's like we're back in the 50's with everyone ooohing and aaahing about technology. Rubes, really. Quick everyone, line up to get your $1,400 iPhone X so you can get your face scanned endlessly for the convenience of...unlocking your phone! hahah!

Until truly self-aware machines exist (ugh), the best option in many scenarios (i.e. particularly in life-threatening ones) will continue to be critically-thinking humans augmented by fast, computationally powerful, but ultimately dumb machines. A good example of this is chess. The top players in the world are not humans, not computers, but humans augmented by computers. Hmmm. A more mundane example of this is...well, aviation.

Yes, the tech will continue to develop at a breakneck pace. Yes, it will replace jobs, many of them, or at least certain functions of certain jobs, or very much improve the ability of humans to do THEIR jobs. (Gee, that sort of sounds like pilots and airplanes)! But even the most sophisticated, elaborate algorithms will always be algorithms, containing all of the imperfections of their programmers. It's hubris to think otherwise. And then there's the fact that the more complex systems become, the more they are subject to error and unintended consequence, with those errors often hidden until a crisis uncovers them, with no warning. Not exactly a great model for something with such large consequences for errors as aviation.

“We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

The Coming Software Apocalypse

I do warn that the linked article will definitely exceed the attention span of the average AvCanada reader by a large margin...

[Shady McSly]

For other uses, see Software (disambiguation).

A diagram showing how the user interacts with application software on a typical desktop computer.The application software layer interfaces with the operating system, which in turn communicates with the hardware. The arrows indicate information flow.
Computer software, or simply software, is a part of a computer system that consists of data or computer instructions, in contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data. Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own.

At the lowest level, executable code consists of machine language instructions specific to an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU). A machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also (indirectly) cause something to appear on a display of the computer system—a state change which should be visible to the user. The processor carries out the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed to "jump" to a different instruction, or is interrupted (by now multi-core processors are dominant, where each core can run instructions in order; then, however, each application software runs only on one core by default, but some software has been made to run on many).

The majority of software is written in high-level programming languages that are easier and more efficient for programmers to use because they are closer than machine languages to natural languages.[1] High-level languages are translated into machine language using a compiler or an interpreter or a combination of the two. Software may also be written in a low-level assembly language, which has strong correspondence to the computer's machine language instructions and is translated into machine language using an assembler.

History

Main article: History of software
An outline (algorithm) for what would have been the first piece of software was written by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century, for the planned Analytical Engine. However, neither the Analytical Engine nor any software for it were ever created.

The first theory about software—prior to creation of computers as we know them today—was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem).

This eventually led to the creation of the twin academic fields of computer science and software engineering, which both study software and its creation. Computer science is more theoretical (Turing's essay is an example of computer science), where as software engineering focuses on more practical concerns.

However, prior to 1946, software as we now understand it—programs stored in the memory of stored-program digital computers—did not yet exist. The first electronic computing devices were instead rewired in order to "reprogram" them.

Types

Topics

Design and implementation

Industry and organizations

See also

References

External links