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Category: drones

Davos, US military branches, Time Magazine, etc. are all talking about the Robotic Battlefield.

Automated systems have already reshaped modern warfare, most notably with the widespread use of drones in conflict. Now, experts predict that advances in artificial intelligence could further change how we fight battles.

The new frontiers of warfare are not without ethical questions. Many have already challenged whether the United States should use unmanned drones to kill terrorists.

In this poll ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, TIME asks key questions about how readers think artificial intelligence will change warfare. TIME Executive Editor Michael Duffy will present the results in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21.

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A laser set to begin live-fire tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, in January uses rare earth minerals. It was developed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of Poway, Calif., the company that produced the revolutionary MQ-1 Predator drone. Its precise power levels are classified, but Michael Perry, the company’s vice president for laser programs, said the experimental weapon’s beam is in the 150-kilowatt class. That’s more than 100 times the power needed to heat an electric oven to 350 degrees.

The General Atomics laser is five times more powerful than the only laser the military has fielded, the 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System, a fiber laser the Navy developed that has knocked down small drones and crippled small boat swarms in tests at short range. That laser was installed on the USS Ponce, an Afloat Forward Staging Base deployed to the Middle East, in 2014. This past October, the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a $53 million contract to develop a more powerful shipboard laser.

Bulk lasers use slabs or strips of rare earth minerals — ytterbium, for example — as their gain medium. Fiber lasers “gang” fiber-optic cables together as the gain medium.

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Just How Much Did ‘Back to the Future’ Get Right about October 2015? 2:19.

In “Back to the Future Part II,” Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel from 1985 to October 21, 2015, to find a world filled with flying cars, hoverboards and self-drying jackets.

Those predictions didn’t exactly pan out, although people are working on each of those concepts. (Screenwriter Bob Gale did get a lot of things — from drones to fingerprint scanners — right, as he told TODAY earlier this year.)

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Amazon says drones can deliver packages weighing up to 5 pounds within 30 minutes.

“In time, there will be a whole family of Amazon drones,” says narrator Jeremy Clarkson, the former BBC “Top Gear” cohost who is working on a similar show for Amazon. “Different designs for different environments.”

Amazon isn’t alone in the race to create a drone-based delivery service. Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, said earlier this month it would be offering drone deliveries by 2017, and Walmart said in October it had applied for permission to test delivery drones.

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“Amazon delivered a lovely update on its ‘Prime Air’ project today — almost exactly two years after it showed the first iteration of its drone.”

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We’ve seen Project Wing, the air-delivery service from Google, tap NASA to help sidestep reams of bureaucratic red tape and get off the ground before, and it looks like the service could soon launch in earnest. The outfit’s laying the groundwork right now and says that its goal is having the commercial flights up and running in 2017, according to Reuters. The company is one of several working with the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a registry for drones and eventually dedicated air traffic control system. The former would ideally be in place by this December 20th, making sure operators are aware of rules on where, when and how to fly their aircraft.

Google’s David Vos told the audience at an air traffic control covention that his company would want low-altitude space (14,500 feet and below), coincidentally dubbed “Class G,” reserved for UAVs to fly over cities. Rather than continuously doing the hokey pokey to get past the FAA, this is a crucial step to getting more commercial drones in the air. Whether or not that’s a good thing is entirely up to you.

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