Tucson Mystery Drone

That was my caveat, you need a good telemetry system. It's obvious to me that the operator is not doing so with direct sight of the vehicle.

There is open-source, look-around software for remote pilots, it's been pretty good for the last fifteen years or so.

Now, full-scale helicopters are not particularly maneuverable when it comes to changing orientation in a hurry, due to gyroscopic effects. A pilot also can't change his vector in a hurry at high speed, and a small model-sized craft will ALWAYS be able to out-maneuver a full-size craft simply because of much smaller mass & moment-arms. I can see a small remotely controlled vehicle being very hard to maintain a visual lock on from a helicopter, even with state-of-the-art night vision goggles. NV units have notoriously narrow fields of view.

So I'm not in awe of this quite yet, I know people who have worked on R/C projects with Burt Rutan and they are masters of remotely-piloted vehicles. I still think it's remotely piloted, not autonomously controlled, and by a human. Until we learn more anyway.
 
GoneWestUtah said:
That was my caveat, you need a good telemetry system. It's obvious to me that the operator is not doing so with direct sight of the vehicle.

There is open-source, look-around software for remote pilots, it's been pretty good for the last fifteen years or so.

Now, full-scale helicopters are not particularly maneuverable when it comes to changing orientation in a hurry, due to gyroscopic effects. A pilot also can't change his vector in a hurry at high speed, and a small model-sized craft will ALWAYS be able to out-maneuver a full-size craft simply because of much smaller mass & moment-arms. I can see a small remotely controlled vehicle being very hard to maintain a visual lock on from a helicopter, even with state-of-the-art night vision goggles. NV units have notoriously narrow fields of view.

So I'm not in awe of this quite yet, I know people who have worked on R/C projects with Burt Rutan and they are masters of remotely-piloted vehicles. I still think it's remotely piloted, not autonomously controlled, and by a human. Until we learn more anyway.
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It would be awesome if some R/C hobbyist souped up a commercially available system. The performance exhibited is well within the capability of tactical battlefield drones such as the RQ-7, however.
Such drones can be rail launched and net recovered, so their ground based support footprint can be surprisingly small.

Helicopters, at least armed attack helicopters like the Apache, have become the aircraft of choice for shooting down drones. The Israelis have shot down a number this way.

 
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