After what happened in the Iran Election 2009, I really do wish the west would be able to get its act together in Afghanistan, and trust me these two are related! Here we will present how airships could have actually helped the political life and hence the daily well being of people both in Afghanistan and Iran and how they can do so in the future.
The ruling clergy in Iran has been promising a prosperous Iran ever since its conception. Not only have we not reached that prosperity, but also the living and working quality of life in Iran has fallen behind countries that were once less developed like south Korea turkey and Malaysia. Prosperity in neighbouring countries whose administrations have become democratic can heavily undermine the promise of prosperity in Iran and grossly educate people on the pros of a democratic government. I have to add a note here that many people in Iran really haven't realized that and some even still believe democracies to be devious systems.
Afghanistan could have been a great informative example for Iranians because of its similarity to Iran in terms of demography and because of a strong tie between the people of the two nation. Given that I believe both the Iraq and Afghanistan war were justified, although the Iraq war went well1, the state of Afghanistan is now in a mess and this chance for eduction is currently being lost. lets face it, the international community in Afghanistan has failed both militarily and socially.
The Airships, had the technology been available, could have changed the odds in both fronts. In the military aspect, Al-Qa'ida has been active mostly in small villages and rough mountainous regions. Autonomous Airships could have provided a great surveillance option to the authorities over the movement of forces on dirt roads and on the mountains. They could have traced every single vehicle in specific regions and they could have spotted human activities in unknown mountainous hideouts.
From the social aspect, communications and mass media (here radio and TV mostly) play a massive role in educating the public, neither of which existed in Afghanistan, and neither of which is easy to provide for in a country with no infrastructure. Airship could have been a viable solution for providing communications and mass media for the type of small communities that exist in Afghanistan.
We can see in Iran how the success of the campaign in Iraq is putting pressure on Iranian authorities and this is evident by the sort of propaganda they are trying to feed us about the current situation in Iraq (apparently the Iraqis are all dying!). Had better technology been used, Afghanistan would have been the same nightmare to the Sepah dwellers in Tehran.
All is not that bad though, we have got plenty of time to develop these technologies to meet economical communication demands in the world and war demands in upcoming conflicts.
1--- In my opinion, the Iraq war was as successful as it could ever be. In a country with so many Ideologies that prescribe murder for the opposing Ideology, you actually can not try to set things right without some of those madmen killing civilians. Furthermore I am sure that the country will flourish in 5 to 20 years time as already their civilian death toll from violence is far less than the death toll from road accidents in Iran.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Even longer duration high altitude airships
Lockheed Martin has been recently exploiting the idea of using high altitude airships to perform long duration surveillance and communication relays here. Using very light photovoltaic panels, they plan to power an airship, eliminating the need to carry fuel on board. This allows the airships to stay airborne for a longer time. Currently they are planning to have systems that stay aloft for a minimum of a month.
It seems that their main problem for an even longer duration is the helium leakage. Although with modern materials they seem to have overcome the majority of the leakage problem, but there is still so much that the ships have to land once in a while (as far as I could figure, it was a month or two) to refill their helium.
One good Idea to extend the airships airborne duration is to replace the helium as it is lost, and although there is no source of helium in the stratosphere, we should be able to gather hydrogen at that height.
Before I go any further I would like to point out that by making the take-off and landing completely autonomous we can make the whole procedure very safe. I believe that the safety concerns of using hydrogen in unmanned aerial vehicles, although valid, have been too exaggerated, especially if the use of the H-gas would enables vehicles to stay aloft for literally years.
To obtain hydrogen we must first gather water from the air. This can be done using a cold plate in contact with the air. Much like the walls of a refrigerator the plate, when in contact with water molecules, will trap and solidify the molecules resulting in a layer of ice. Afterwards by heating up the plate the water can be collected and electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be used to replace the lost gas.
Now all that remains is a question of numbers. For example whether the 15 KW solar systems on these demonstrative high altitude airships will be able to replace the lost gas? With 237 kj for one mol of hydrogen (20 liters at 1 atmosphere) I reckon it would be a close cut. Maybe I'll munch up the numbers next time. But I reckon that a wie bit larger airship can be set up to do this.
It seems that their main problem for an even longer duration is the helium leakage. Although with modern materials they seem to have overcome the majority of the leakage problem, but there is still so much that the ships have to land once in a while (as far as I could figure, it was a month or two) to refill their helium.
One good Idea to extend the airships airborne duration is to replace the helium as it is lost, and although there is no source of helium in the stratosphere, we should be able to gather hydrogen at that height.
Before I go any further I would like to point out that by making the take-off and landing completely autonomous we can make the whole procedure very safe. I believe that the safety concerns of using hydrogen in unmanned aerial vehicles, although valid, have been too exaggerated, especially if the use of the H-gas would enables vehicles to stay aloft for literally years.
To obtain hydrogen we must first gather water from the air. This can be done using a cold plate in contact with the air. Much like the walls of a refrigerator the plate, when in contact with water molecules, will trap and solidify the molecules resulting in a layer of ice. Afterwards by heating up the plate the water can be collected and electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be used to replace the lost gas.
Now all that remains is a question of numbers. For example whether the 15 KW solar systems on these demonstrative high altitude airships will be able to replace the lost gas? With 237 kj for one mol of hydrogen (20 liters at 1 atmosphere) I reckon it would be a close cut. Maybe I'll munch up the numbers next time. But I reckon that a wie bit larger airship can be set up to do this.
I actually came here to make a post on an Idea that I had, but though I'll give an update on my work first:
I used webots and imported maps from yahoo into a large flat piece of land with the provided blimp. I moved the blimp around and captured images with camera. Then I started testing my system with the provided images, trying to localize the blimp on a map taken of google. Note that the two different map sources means using images from different times.
So I started testing my localization scheme and that's when start it started to change. First the particle filter was too slow and I replaced it with an EKF (from opencv). But then the EKF would easily accumulate errors with wrong matches. Now I have switched to Multi hypothesis EKF(this I had to write myself) and its working ok, but the whole thing is underestimating the height of the vehicle.
I am guessing that the source of the underestimation is the input of the EKF update. What I am doing is literally I am feeding an average of several estimates for the input of the EKF update step. As for the height, I keep an estimate of the logarithm of the height. Since the height estimates are very inaccurate, as I am currently using the size of the features to obtain the estimates, averaging the logarithm gives a lot more pull to lower estimates than to higher estimates.
So what I will be doing now is changing the MHEKF to keep my height estimates in their original units...
I used webots and imported maps from yahoo into a large flat piece of land with the provided blimp. I moved the blimp around and captured images with camera. Then I started testing my system with the provided images, trying to localize the blimp on a map taken of google. Note that the two different map sources means using images from different times.
So I started testing my localization scheme and that's when start it started to change. First the particle filter was too slow and I replaced it with an EKF (from opencv). But then the EKF would easily accumulate errors with wrong matches. Now I have switched to Multi hypothesis EKF(this I had to write myself) and its working ok, but the whole thing is underestimating the height of the vehicle.
I am guessing that the source of the underestimation is the input of the EKF update. What I am doing is literally I am feeding an average of several estimates for the input of the EKF update step. As for the height, I keep an estimate of the logarithm of the height. Since the height estimates are very inaccurate, as I am currently using the size of the features to obtain the estimates, averaging the logarithm gives a lot more pull to lower estimates than to higher estimates.
So what I will be doing now is changing the MHEKF to keep my height estimates in their original units...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)