Wars of Law

unexpectedtech:

When University of Virginia engineering students posted a YouTube video last spring of a plastic turbofan engine they had designed and built using 3-D printing technology, they didn’t expect it to lead to anything except some page views.

But executives at The MITRE Corporation, a McLean-based federally funded research and development center with an office in Charlottesville, saw the video and sent an announcement to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciencethat they were looking for two summer interns to work on a new project involving 3-D printing. They just didn’t say what the project was.

Only one student responded to the job announcement: Steven Easter, then a third-year mechanical engineeringmajor.

“I was curious about what they had to offer, but I didn’t call them until the day of the application deadline,” Easter said.

He got a last-minute interview and brought with him his brother and lab partner, Jonathan Turman, also a third-year mechanical engineering major.

They got the job: to build over the summer an unmanned aerial vehicle, using 3-D printing technology. In other words, a plastic plane, to be designed, fabricated, built and test-flown between May and August. A real-world engineering challenge, and part of a Department of the Army project to study the feasibility of using such planes.

Three-dimensional printing is, as the name implies, the production or “printing” of actual objects, such as parts for a small airplane, by using a machine that traces out layers of melted plastic in specific shapes until it builds up a piece exactly according to the size and dimensions specified in a computer-aided drawing produced by an engineer.

In this case, the engineers were Easter and Turman, working with insight from their adviser, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor David Sheffler, a U.Va. Engineering School alumnus and 20-year veteran of the aerospace industry.

It was a daunting project – producing a plane with a 6.5-foot wingspan, made from assembled “printed” parts. The students sometimes put in 80-hour workweeks, with many long nights in the lab.

“It was sort of a seat-of-the-pants thing at first – wham, bang,” Easter said. “But we kept banging away and became more confident as we kept designing and printing out new parts.”

Sheffler said he had confidence in them “the entire way.”

The way eventually led to assembly of the plane and four test flights in August and early September at Milton Airfield near Keswick. It achieved a cruising speed of 45 mph and is only the third 3-D printed plane known to have been built and flown.

During the first test, the plane’s nosepiece was damaged while the plane taxied around the field.

“We dogged it,” Easter said. “But we printed a new nose.”

That ability to make and modify new parts is the beauty of 3-D printing, said Sheffler, who works with students in the Engineering School’s Rapid Prototyping Lab. The lab includes seven 3-D printers used as real-world teaching tools.

“Rapid prototyping means rapid in small quantities,” Sheffler said. “It’s fluid, in that it allows students to evolve their parts and make changes as they go – design a piece, print it, make needed modifications to the design, and print a new piece. They can do this until they have exactly what they want.”

3D printed drones - scientifically impressive but how will they feature in our dystopian future?

(via howstuffworks)

dronejournalism:

A funny, if revelatory, post about how the FAA shut down a for-fun Parrot AR Drone shootout in Washington DC.

“As silly as it seemed for the FAA to keep us from flying a few toy planes around a park on a Sunday afternoon, I understand the basis of their anxiety. Drones are the future. And we’re really not ready for them.

As it happened, even after we moved the Smackdown to Virginia, just outside the restricted zone, our hopes of intense aerial combat were dashed—not by regulators, but by hackers.

With the help of some expert computer coders, Wittes’s 11- and 14-year-old children got into the competing drones’ wi-fi networks and disabled their controls. The human pilots, who were steering their ill-fated aircraft with an iPhone app, found themselves cut off from their drones or unable to control them once they (barely) got off the ground. The Wittes kids delighted in their digital shenanigans, which, they explained to more than one baffled adult, were quite simple really: The competitors had all left their networks open and undefended.”

Hahahahahah

“What I do know is that our government, our police forces, our neighborhoods are wholly unprepared for this. That’s okay, they have some time. But it is coming.” I agree with basically everything in this article except those two last sentences. This is already here. The time to act is now.

This is about as dual use as it comes

dronejournalism:

I can think of a whole lot of reasons why this is impractical, but the idea is going to get a lot of attention.

Associated today with the theatre of war, the widespread domestic use of drones for surveillance seems inevitable. Existing privacy law will not stand in its way. It may be tempting to conclude on this basis that drones will further erode our individual and collective privacy. Yet the opposite may happen. Drones may help restore our mental model of a privacy violation. They could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the twenty-first century.