In the United States, automated vehicles are increasingly being used to do jobs that are unpleasant or unsafe for humans.
“The great use of UAVs at this point has been in the dull, dirty, and dangerous environments,’’ said Joshua Downs, a human factors specialist at Boeing Co. and technical leader of the Boeing-MIT research project.
“It could be a situation where the environment itself is toxic to a person, like what’s happened in Japan as a result of the earthquake.’’
These remotely operated aircraft are being used for tracking wildlife, scanning the skies for developing tornadoes, patrolling the border, and getting video footage after or during disasters - for example, to gauge the spread of forest fires in the Southwest.
“The whole idea is that you just need to get a little bit of imagery from an angle you couldn’t otherwise reach,’’ Cummings said. “By having your own vehicle you can really survey the world in a much more realistic way.’’
Unmanned aircraft almost always surpass humans in terms of performance because they don’t suffer from fatigue.
For the project, Cummings and her students are using a quadcopter - a mini-helicopter with four rotors - called the Ascending Technologies Hummingbird, which can fly up to 30 miles per hour.
They purchased the prefabricated vehicle online for $4,000 and added a $50 miniature camera so they could see the world from the UAV’s point of view.
The iPhone application takes advantage of an accelerometer built into the phone. Operators can move the phone up, down, left, or right, as if it were a joystick, and the vehicle moves accordingly. For less fine control, you can type in the GPS coordinates of the destination. Operators can watch video or look at snapshots taken by the onboard camera on the iPhone screen.
