A new American patent succeeds in elegantly solving problems arising from dissection on a moving track and dealing with a situation of jamming signals transmitted from an aircraft carrier
The development of the aviation industry, since the first flight of the Wright brothers, has undergone several significant evolutions. The next evolutionary stage where most of the development is concentrated is the automatic performance by computer systems. It is true that there are various autopilot products, but not all of them can handle extreme situations. One of the better examples is an automatic landing on an aircraft carrier.
Landing on an aircraft carrier, unlike landing on a ground runway, entails many risks. The computer performing the landing must take into account a large number of external variables, for example the movement of the aircraft carrier which is affected by the wind directions and their strength, and the movement of the waves which causes the ship to sway from side to side and can cause it to jump while the plane lands. It is true that a lot of computing power is required, but in today's airplanes, enough money is invested in order to deal with the above type of use.
By nature, military systems must take into account more extreme situations such as disruptions in the signals transmitted between the ship and the aircraft, whether the disruption is intentional or whether it originates from a malfunction. Adding additional systems to the plane will indeed increase flight safety, but they will come at the expense of other military systems and increase the weight of the plane.
James d. Waid (James D. Waid) together with his colleagues submitted an application for registration of a patent which deals with communication disturbances in automatic dissection, by using a simple secondary system based on GPS. The autopilot computer that performs the landing receives information from GPS satellites on the route and thus completes information regarding the location and movement of the aircraft and the aircraft carrier.
If there is an even more extreme case in which no signal is received from the ship nor from the GPS satellites, the system uses the latest information received for the purpose of analyzing the situation in order to determine the probability of a safe landing on the aircraft carrier, if there is a low probability the autopilot cancels the landing and the pilot is required to make a landing manually.
The process does not offer a technological innovation that breaks boundaries, but at the same time it provides an adequate solution to two problems - dissection on a moving track and dealing with a situation of disturbed signals. The solution is another milestone in the journey to free the pilot from performing technical operations.
10 תגובות
long live the "small" difference
Automatic landing methods based on GPS DGPS have been used in Israel in UAVs for 10 years. The subject was also tested at the time for an unmanned helicopter for a ship. It seems to me that the innovation is nonsense. The subject is technically known and has been implemented in several projects already in the past. True, not for fighter planes.
The aircraft carrier oscillation problem can be divided into two:
A]. Identifying its exact location, in relation to the global axis system. This change is mainly due to the operation of the propellers and the effect of the currents of water and wind. B]. Identifying the state of deviation of the aircraft carrier from the horizontal position, as a result of the influence of the waves.
It seems to me that the patent, i.e. the use of GPS satellites refers mainly to a]. but less effective in solution b]. However in any case b]. is a less significant problem and hardly noticeable in the large aircraft issues.
Dan Solo:
Many times a patent looks simple in retrospect, but if it solves a problem that was a known problem that people tried to solve for a long time without success, then the retrospect does not correctly reflect the inventive innovation.
I think that's the case here.
I didn't know that they were able to register a patent on Perpetum Mobile (and obviously they couldn't have done it if they had used this term because there is a blanket decision not to examine patents of this type at all). Not all people at the patent registrar are Einsteins, but from my experience I know that they try to make the registration difficult and try to show a connection or logical derivation even from things that are not related at all.
In the last year, a number of laws were passed that make it very difficult, as mentioned, to register trivial patents whose entire purpose is to block the performance of simple tasks. This is part of the war against those entities that function as "patent trolls".
Michael,
I got it, it's true that I guessed based on the article, now I flipped through the patent.
The patent is completely genuine, it definitely meets the reasonable engineer's 5 minute test (the experienced engineer will pull it out right away).
And I insist that today a patent is registered on stupid things, including the use of the Tab key in the browser, a status bar with a growing bar, depending on the progress and tens of thousands of other nonsense to make patent agreements between the big corporations and block the small companies.
By the way, did you know that there have been cases, in recent years, in the USA, where patents have been registered on Perpetum Mobile? (It wasn't called that in the patent documents, of course).
Dan Solo:
Accept my apologies on one issue - actually there are details because the patent can be seen.
This does not make it trivial but it is true that there is information here
Dan Solo:
It's very simple to locomotion.
Especially when there is no detail and all the steam is based on fictional facts.
Patent registrars today are stricter than before and it is not possible to register a patent for any nonsense.
A patent is registered for every nonsense.
As I understand from the design, it's just a simple algorithm for predicting the ship's position by interpolating on previous position samples.
Tired of these patents already, in the field of software it has long since reached the point of absurdity.
The issue is not the fluctuations, the plane's computer handles the fluctuations and adjusts itself.
As the news shows, the big problem is, "dealing with a situation of jamming signals transmitted from aircraft carriers", and the patent offers a simple solution.
But it is not explained how the oscillation of the ship itself is overcome.
good week
Sabdarmish Yehuda