Hi All,
I would like to build a prototype of an autonomous ground based vehicle - likely based on an RC car. My intention is to make a delivery vehicle that follows a GNSS waypoint mission while featuring IR/lidar obstacle avoidance. This would be used outdoors with a range of about half a mile. Minimizing development time is most important to me. I donβt need it to be scalable to production. I noticed that both P4X and Ardupilot have basic support for this use case. Iβm looking for any guidance on which one of these options I should use. Or is there a better open source ROS based option Iβm missing? Thanks!
In playing the games and reading a fair amount of the literature, it strikes me how combat-related robots are seemingly completely absent on the battlefield.
I know that the UNSC was loosing large amounts of industrial capabilities and resources as colony-after-colony got annihilated by Covenant fleets, which would make large scale production of drones more difficult over time, perhaps, but these drones I'm talking about were absent even at the Battle of Reach, which is odd, since Reach was essentially the capitol of the UNSC's Military Industrial Complex.
Considering that mankind is fighting a long war of attrition to stave off extinction at the hands of the Covenant, and that even in the earliest stages of that war, they were loosing huge amounts of manpower against the enemy, why doesn't the UNSC replace or at least heavily supplement their remaining frontline forces with large amounts of unmanned combat machines, to help preserve the fighters that they've got left?
Even in modern times, many official militaries (and even some insurgent groups) are making increasing usage of both small and large forms of remote-controlled drones. Predator UAV's deliver airsrikes without putting real pilots at risk, simple GoPro Drones can be used to perform aeriel recon, new forms of UGV's are being used to crawl around to help sniff out or even diffuse hidden mines and IED's (and some UGV's even support remote-operated Machine Guns), and so on.
I can only imagine that with 500+ years to work on such technologies even further, that these innovations would only improve in quality, variety, and cost-effectiveness... Following this tren, one day you might even get automatons capable of replacing many naval crewmembers to keep sailor bodycounts low, or remote-controllable Longswords to keep pilot/airwing casualties lower, and so on.
Especially if you have reliable Dumb-AI's/Smart AI's to control most of them for you. If you can bring along a few dedicated military AI's to each battle, one would expect that the UNSC ought to have entire swarms and clouds of combat bots holding off Covenant forces whilst the flesh-and-blood soldiers just consolidate near civilian survivors and completely focus on protecting and evacuating refugee convoys and so on.
So what gives?
