predator drone

When I hear the phrase "knock-off Chinese products", I usually think of either the bootleg DVDs I get on the subway or the cheap electronics I get in Midtown. But a new report in Defense Professionals notes that the Chinese military has channeled that same skill for replication towards closing their UAV technology gap. By simply copying US technology, China has created a stock of advanced drones, and gained the technical knowledge to create some interesting native UAVs as well.

[ Read Full Story ]

In this video, exclusive to PopSci.com, Captain Adam Brockshus narrates a Hellfire missile strike on a group of insurgents in Afghanistan. As a Predator instructor pilot, Brockshus was called into the Ground Control Station to oversee a former student who was taking his first shot in combat.

Click on for an inside look at how the hundreds of attack missions using unmanned aircraft are executed.

[ Read Full Story ]

Any pilot will tell you that flying is the easy part, it's landing that's hard. That adage is especially true for robotic planes like the Predator and Reaper drones. While the UAVs can follow a pre-programmed flight path, they still need a human to bring them safely down to the tarmac. And that means a lot of UAVs crashing due to human error.

[ Read Full Story ]

The long-awaited robot-led holocaust may happen any day now. That seems to be the finding of a secret conference of the world's top computer scientists, roboticists, and artificial intelligence researchers. The clandestine meeting focused on topics surrounding advancements in robotics and how they could quickly spiral out of human control. This includes the danger that robots could autonomously kill humans -- a danger than conference participants believe may already exist.

[ Read Full Story ]

As unmanned drones become a larger part of how America makes war, fully autonomous fighting robots seem less a possibility than an eventuality. But how do we ensure that these future autonomous weapons conform to the ethics we would expect from a human combatant?

[ Read Full Story ]

A typical scene from the conflict in Afghanistan, where for the first time space-specifically, more than one hundred orbiting military satellites-has been a centerpiece of the war machine: A soldier on the ground spots a Taliban target. With a lightweight, handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver known as a "plugger," he uses the constellation of GPS satellites to calculate the longitude and latitude of his mark and phones in the coordinates, via satellite, to an air base in Florida.

[ Read Full Story ]