Remote thermal detection

Well, the point of my comment about the possibility of integration over time and space is that integration can accomplish a trade of resolution for increased range. So, I think there's basis for hoping the same hardware might give better range as a thermal detector. That said, bugs are pretty small and radar and lidar operate to an r^-4 law -- a tough nut to push against..

On Friday, September 30, 2016 at 9:52:33 AM UTC-7, Dan Marotta wrote:
Didn't the article say something like 100 or 200 meters range? Is that
enough to go through the OODA loop effectively? How wide an area will
be scanned? The wider the area, the sooner a thermal can be detected,
but the more power required to scan the area. How much power is
required vs. how much can the ship provide? Lower power means a
narrower field of view until you're basically blundering into thermals
as on a blue day (not considering observation of ground features).

I think it'll be a long time coming and, when it arrives, it will remove
all challenge from soaring thus further reducing the participants.

On 9/30/2016 9:05 AM, Steve Koerner wrote:
On Friday, September 30, 2016 at 7:22:36 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Thursday, September 29, 2016 at 10:50:59 PM UTC-7, Craig Funston wrote:
Motion of particles in the air
Not saying you are wrong, but what lidar unit can detect particles in the air? And from the CEO “I can see what you’re doing with your fingers at 100 meters,� is a statement with obvious intentions to decieve and confuse. "Seeing" is not a word I would associate with lidar, particularly real time. And a 30 hz lidar unit (did they mean 30 khz on their website?) "see's" nothing. Lidar gives you dots in space and their relative relation to each other and the lidar source, then those dots need to be interpreted to give the needed information. Maybe they are doing amazing interpretation, hard to tell from the website. But a 30 hz (or even a 30 khz) lidar gives very, very few data points, particularly from a moving car. So the system is interpreting something from that data to give information of some type, but this is nothing like seeing or vision as we would typically think of it. But it sounds good.
Not to be confused, the self driving car is on it's way and will dramatically change transportation, but that's not really a lidar issue.
And, more to the point of the thread, seeing thermals would change the sport, but would it lessen the fun in any way?
I interpret that what they are meaning by 30 Hz is a scene update rate of 30 Hz. That would actually seem much faster than needed for the glider application and would therefore offer a potential for integration over time to improve energy gathering. Remember also that the glider application has no need of resolving individual bugs. We're interested in net signal over a largish volume of space which again provides an integration opportunity over az, el and r.

--
Dan, 5J

On Saturday, October 1, 2016 at 6:23:06 PM UTC+13, Steve Koerner wrote:
That said, bugs are pretty small and radar and lidar operate to an r^-4 law -- a tough nut to push against.

Yup. There's the problem. If you can scan the laser around, then the detection side is 'only' an r^-2 challenge but even so.. We already have lasers which are powerful enough but the big issue is detecting enough light from dust/bugs set against a bright background at a big enough distance (1-2km) and in a short enough time (100ms) to be useful. The people using LIDAR to map air currents around wind turbines use big-aperture (30 - 40cm) reflecting telescopes to capture enough incoming light. Wing pod, anyone?

Then imagine if every glider had them and imagine the cross-talk issues from all those lasers frantically scanning. Having said that, the vehicle lidar could be set up quite easily to detect big objects in a themal, like gliders circling within 1-2km and it could then give a warning on a HUD... oh, wait...

DH
TX