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Roboti, dronovi i slične skalamerije

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Gaff:

Game of Drones


Paintball Drone Gunship - a DIY Combat UAV from Game of Drones

Meho Krljic:
http://youtu.be/wE3fmFTtP9g
 
http://youtu.be/P0s7aRUIoTw

Meho Krljic:
Holi šit. Jeste li vi bili svesni da su Rusi u Zimskom ratu sa Finskom, pre nego što su se pokačili sa Nijemcima, koristili - robotizovane, na daljinu kontrolisane tenkove??? Nisam ni ja  :-? :-? :-? :-? :-? A mislio sam da je Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater suha fikcija.  :cry:


Tale of the Teletank: The Brief Rise and Long Fall of Russia’s Military Robots


--- Quote ---Seventy-four years ago, Russia accomplished what no country had before, or has since—it sent armed ground robots into battle. These remote-controlled Teletanks took the field during one of WWII’s earliest and most obscure clashes, as Soviet forces pushed into Eastern Finland for roughly three and a half months, from 1939 to 1940. The Finns, by all accounts, were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, with exponentially fewer aircraft and tanks. But the Winter War, as it was later called (it began in late November, and ended in mid-March), wasn’t a swift, one-sided victory. As the more experienced Finnish troops dug in their heels, Russian advancement was proving slow and costly. So the Red Army sent in the robots.
Specifically, the Soviets deployed two battalions of Teletanks, most of them existing T-26 light tanks stuffed with hydraulics and wired for radio control. Operators could pilot the unmanned vehicle from more than a kilometer away, punching at rows of dedicated buttons (no thumbsticks or D-pads to be found) to steer the tank or fire on targets with a machine gun or flame thrower. And the Teletank had the barest minimum of autonomous functionality: if it wandered out of radio range, the tank would come to a stop after a half-minute, and sit, engine idling, until contact was reestablished.
Notably missing, though, was any sort of remote sensing capability—the Teletank couldn’t relay sound or audio back to its human driver, most often located in a fully-crewed T-26 trailing behind the mechanized one. This was robotic teleoperation at its most crude, and made for halting, imprecise maneuvering across uneven terrain.
What good was the Teletank, then? Though records are sparse, the unmanned tanks appear to have been used in combat, including during the Battle of Summa, an extended, two-part engagement that eventually forced a Finnish retreat. The Teletank’s primary role was to throw fire without fear, offsetting its lack of accuracy with gouts of flame.
On March 13, 1940, Finland and the USSR signed a treaty in Moscow, ending the Winter War. It was the end of the Teletank, as well—in the wider, even more brutal conflict to come, the T-26 was obsolete in practically every way, lacking the armor and armament to stand up to German tanks, or even to antitank weapons fielded by the Finnish. With no additional units built after 1940, the T-26 was a dead design rolling, and the remote-controlled version was just as doomed.
For a few months, nearly three quarters of a century ago, Russia led the world in military robotics. It’s a position the country would never hold again, as both Soviet and post-breakup forces have all but abandoned the development of armed ground and aerial bots. Even as recently as 2008, during its conflict with Georgia—triggered, in part, by the downing of Georgian reconnaissance drones—Russian drones were all but absent, and its air strikes were entirely manned. While Russia hasn’t shied away from open warfare, it hasn’t made robots a battlefield priority.
Until recently, that is. A number of Russian-based aircraft makers have won contracts in the past few years to build combat drones, including a 5-ton model originally slated for testing this year, and a 20-ton model planned for 2018. Military officials now hope to have strike drone capability by 2020.
And while there’s no evidence that it will ever be deployed, Russia is, in fact, home to a gun-wielding ground drone. The MRK-27 BT, built by the Moscow Bauman Technical University and first unveiled in 2009, is a tracked weapon platform, armed with a machine gun and paired grenade launchers and flame throwers. Most likely, it will go the way of MAARS, SWORDS, MULE, and other imposing ground combat bots—which is to say, nowhere. So far, the Teletank is an anomaly among robotic weapons, a precursor with no real descendants. Or none, luckily, with any confirmed kills.

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Meho Krljic:
I zvanično FAA je zabranila (Amazonu) komercijalno korišćenje dronova za isporuku robe:


FAA grounds Amazon’s drone delivery plans


--- Quote ---The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon.
The revelation was buried in a FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft."
The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred.
The agency has promised that it would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015. But for now, the agency is taking a hard line against the commercial use of drones, and it's unclear whether that policy would change.
Brendan Schulman, the New York lawyer who convinced a federal judge to declare that the FAA is illegally enforcing a commercial ban on drones, lashed out at the FAA's latest attack on them. "It's a purported new legal basis telling people to stop operating model aircraft for business purposes," he said.
In Monday's announcement, published in the Federal Register, the FAA named Amazon's December proposal as an example of what is barred under regulations that allow the use of drones for hobby and recreational purposes. The agency did not mention Amazon Prime Air by name, but it didn't have to.
Under a graphic that says what is barred, the FAA mentioned the "Delivering of packages to people for a fee." A footnote added, "If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose."
Amazon has had its fingers crossed that the agency would change course. But for now, the online shopping behemoth realizes that its delivery methods won't include drones anytime soon, despite the FAA's announcement Monday. "Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations," Amazon has said.
The FAA document, which comes amid some dangerous incidents involving ground-operated drones, contained a small laundry list of examples of what types of commercial applications are barred, including:
 
* Determining whether crops need to be watered that are grown as part of a commercial farming operation
* A person photographing a property or event and selling the photos to someone else
* A realtor using a model aircraft to photograph a property that he is trying to sell and using the photos in the property's real estate listing
* Receiving money for demonstrating aerobatics with a model aircraft. Last week, the National Park Service barred all drone flights from its parks. Regulators' attacks on the commercial use of drones have included everything from drone journalism to a nonprofit search-and-rescue outfit using drones.

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Meho Krljic:
Robot makes people feel like a ghost is nearby




--- Quote ---In 2006, cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of the University of Geneva in Switzerland was testing a patient’s brain functions before her epilepsy surgery when he noticed something strange. Every time he electrically stimulated the region of her brain responsible for integrating different sensory signals from the body, the patient would look back behind her back as if a person was there, even when she knew full well that no one was actually present.
Now, with the help of robots, Blanke and colleagues have not only found a neurological explanation for this illusion, but also tricked healthy people into sensing “ghosts,” they report online today in Current Biology. The study could help explain why schizophrenia patients sometimes hallucinate that aliens control their movements.
“It’s very difficult to try to understand the mechanisms involved in something so strange,” says cognitive neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who was not involved with the study. “It’s very encouraging, very impressive, the way this team is making science out of this question.”
Ghosts and apparitions are a common theme in literature and religion. In real life, patients suffering from schizophrenia and epilepsy sometimes report sensing a presence near them. After studying such cases, Blanke found some striking similarities in how epilepsy patients perceive these eerie “apparitions,” he says. Almost all patients said the presence felt like a human being positioned right behind their back, almost touching them, with malicious intentions. Patients with brain damage on the left hemisphere felt the ghost at their right side, and vice versa.
To pinpoint the brain regions responsible for such illusions, Blanke and colleagues compared brain damage in two groups of patients. The first group, mostly epilepsy patients, all reported feeling ghostly presences near them. The other group matched them in terms of the severity of their neurological illnesses and hallucinations, but didn’t perceive any ghostly presence. Brain imaging revealed that patients who sensed the “ghosts” had lesions in their frontoparietal cortex, a brain region that controls movements and integrates sensorimotor signals from the body—such as the “smack” and pain accompanying a punch—into a coherent picture.
The researchers suspected that damage to this region could have disrupted how the brain integrates various sensory and motor signals to create a coherent representation of the body. That may have led the patients to mistakenly feel that someone else, not themselves, were creating sensations like touch.
So the team built a robot to test their theory on healthy people. The machine consisted of two electrically interconnected robotic arms positioned in front of and behind a participant, respectively. The smaller arm in front had a slot where participants could insert their right index fingers and poke around. The poking motion triggered the bigger arm at the back to poke the participants at different positions on their backs, following the movement of their fingers. During the experiments, the participants wore blindfolds and headphones so that they would concentrate on what they felt. They were told that only the robot was poking them at the back, but unbeknownst to them, the back-poking was sometimes synchronized with their finger movements, and sometimes delayed by half a second.
When the participants reported how they felt, a clear pattern emerged. If the back-poking was in sync with the participants’ finger movements, they felt as if they were touching their backs with their own fingers. But when the back-poking was out of sync, a third of the participants felt as if someone else was touching them. The sensation was so spooky that two participants actually asked the researchers to stop the experiment.
To verify the response, the researchers conducted another study in which four researchers stood in the room. Participants were told that while they were blindfolded and operating the machine, some experimenters might approach them without actually touching them. The researchers told participants to estimate the number of people close to them at regular intervals. In reality, no researcher ever approached the participants. Yet people who experienced a delayed touch on their back felt more strongly that other people were close to them, counting up to four people when none existed.
The researchers suspect that when participants poked their fingers in the finger slot, their brains expected to feel a touch on the back right away. The delay created a mismatch between the brain’s expectations and the actual sensory signals it received, which disrupted how the brain integrated the signals to create a representation of the body, and thus created the illusion that another human being was touching them.
The findings could help scientists understand the hallucinations of schizophrenia patients, Blanke says. Scientists have long hypothesized that patients hear alien voices or feel that they are not controlling their own bodies because their brains fail to integrate bodily signals properly.
The researchers are now building an MRI-equipped robot system to study what exactly happens in healthy people’s brains when they feel the ghostly presence and to test how schizophrenia patients would react to the mismatched pokes.

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