구글, 비밀 개발한 무인기 시험비행 성공 Inside Google's Secret Drone-Delivery Program VIDEO
source theatlantic.com
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구글이 2년간 비밀리에 개발해 온 무인기의 시험 비행에 성공했다.
구글 비밀연구소 '구글X'가 개발한 무인기가 호주 퀸즐랜드에 있는 두 농장 사이에서 사탕, 물, 의약품 등의 물건을 나르는 시험 비행에 성공했다고 영국 BBC 방송 등이 28일(현지시간) 보도했다.
이번에 시험 비행을 성공한 무인기는 날개 길이가 약 1.5ｍ고 자체 무게는 8.5㎏, 물건을 실었을 때 무게는 약 10㎏ 정도다.
이 무인기는 사전에 입력된 목적지를 향해 스스로 날아갈 수 있어 조종사의 원격 조정을 받아야 하는 기존의 대다수 군용 무인기와 차별된다.
또 4개의 프로펠러가 달려 헬기와 같이 활주로가 없이 이륙할 수 있고 공중의 한 지점에 머무를 수도 있다.
이번 시험비행이 호주에서 이뤄진 것은 다른 나라에 비해 무인기에 대한 규제가 느슨하기 때문인 것으로 전해졌다.
'프로젝트 윙'으로 이름 붙은 구글의 무인기 개발계획은 무인기를 통해 지진, 홍수 등이 발생해 고립된 재난 지역에 구호품을 신속하게 전달하는 것을 최종목표로 삼고 있다.
이 프로젝트의 차기 대표인 데이브 보스는 "무인기가 도입되면 응급구조 서비스에 완전히 새로운 차원의 도구와 해결책을 더할 수 있다"고 기대했다.
구글은 이날 블로그를 통해 "역사적으로 상품을 운송하는 방식에 중대한 변화가 생기면 경제가 성장할 큰 기회가 마련됐고 소비자의 삶은 편해졌다"며 "무인기가 상품 운송의 새 장을 열 것"이라고 밝혔다. 구글은 몇 년 안에 무인기를 통한 택배 시스템이 준비되기를 기대하고 있다고 AFP 통신은 전했다.
앞서 아마존은 무인기를 이용 30분 안에 상품을 배달한다는 계획을 세우고 지난달 미국 연방항공청(FAA)에 서한을 보내 야외 시험 운용을 허가해 달라고 요청했다.
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A zipping comes across the sky.
A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than a seagull. It glides towards Parfitt, pitches upwards to a vertical position, and hovers near him, a couple hundred feet in the air. From its belly, a package comes tumbling downward, connected by a thin line to the vehicle itself. Right before the delivery hits the ground, it slows, hitting the earth with a tap. The delivery slows, almost imperceptibly, just before it hits the ground, hardly kicking up any dust. A small rectangular module on the end of the line detaches the payload, and ascends back up the vehicle, locking into place beneath the nose. As the wing returns to flying posture and zips back to its launch point half a mile away, Parfitt walks over to the package, opens it up, and extracts some treats for his dogs.
The Australian test flight and 30 others like it conducted in mid-August are the culmination of the first phase of Project Wing, a secret drone program that’s been running for two years at Google X, the company’s whoa-inducing, long-range research lab.
Though a couple of rumors have escaped the Googleplex—because of course Google must have a drone-delivery program—Project Wing’s official existence and substance were revealed today. I’ve spent the past week talking to Googlers who worked on the project, reviewing video of the flights, and interviewing other people convinced delivery by drone will work.
Taken with the company’s other robotics investments, Google’s corporate posture has become even more ambitious. Google doesn’t just want to organize all the world’s information. Google wants to organize all the world.
During this initial phase of development, Google landed on an unusual design called a tail sitter, a hybrid of a plane and a helicopter that takes off vertically, then rotates to a horizontal position for flying around. For delivery, it hovers and winches packages down to the ground. At the end of the tether, there’s a little bundle of electronics they call the “egg,” which detects that the package has hit the ground, detaches from the delivery, and is pulled back up into the body of the vehicle.
Standing with Parfitt as he received dog treats from a flying robot was Nick Roy, the MIT roboticist who took a two-year sabbatical to lead Project Wing. In all the testing, Roy had never seen one of his drones deliver a package. He was always at the takeoff point, watching debugging information scroll up the screen, and anxiously waiting to see what would happen. “Sergey [Brin] has been bugging me, asking, ‘What is it like? Is it actually a nice experience to get this?’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t know. I’m looking at the screen,’” Roy told me.
So, this time, as he prepared to end his tour of duty at Google X and return to MIT, he watches as the Wing swoops and delivers. Recalling that moment, he struggles not to sound too rapturous or lose his cool technical objectivity. “Once the package is down and the egg is back up, the vehicle gains altitude, and does this beautiful arc, and it’s off again,” he said. “That was delightful.”
The parting between Roy and Google X seems amicable. When Astro Teller, director of the lab, described it to me in an interview in Mountain View, he literally patted Roy on the knee. “Nick was super ultra-clear with us from day one, despite lots of pressure from me,”—Teller pat Roy on the knee—“that he was going to leave after two years.” But the timeline was good, Teller maintained, because it gave the project shape and a direction.
In the two years, Roy’s goal was simple: figure out if the idea of drone delivery made sense to work on. Should Google pursue creating a real, reliable service? Was it possible? Could a self-flying vehicle be built and programmed so that it could take off and land anywhere, go really fast, and accurately drop a package from the air?
The answer, Roy and Teller say, is yes. They have not built a reliable system Google users can order from yet, but they believe the challenges are surmountable. Now, Google will begin growing the program in an ultimate push to create a service that will deliver things people want quickly via small, fast “self-flying vehicles,” as they like to call them.
Teller has found a replacement for Roy in Dave Vos, a 20-year veteran of automating flying machines, who sold his drone software company, Athena Technologies, to Rockwell in 2008. Where Roy got to play what-if and why-not, Vos must transform the Wing into a service that real people might use.
“What excited us from the beginning was that if the right thing could find anybody just in the moment that they need it, the world might be radically better place,” Teller said.
There are already dozens of Googlers working on the project, concocting everything from new forms of the vehicle to the nature of its delivery mechanism to the user experience of the app for ordering drones. There will be more recruits soon. Google will enter the public debate about the use of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles. Regulators will start hearing from the company. Many packages will be dropped from the sky on a tiny winch from a robot hovering in the air. This may sound crazy. This may be crazy. But Google is getting serious about sending packages flying through the air on tiny drones. And this is how that happened. * * *
Of course Google wants the world to believe in delivery by drone as part of the natural progression of technological society to deliver things faster and faster. This is how the world works, according to Google co-founder, Sergey Brin.
Imagine Brin in 2011. Perhaps he’s wearing a Google Glass prototype and a long-sleeved technical t-shirt, maybe even Vibram FiveFinger footwear. He is rich beyond all comprehension, a billionaire many times over. In his 39th year on Earth, he has decided to grow a beard, wisdom-enhancing salt-and-pepper sprinkled around his chin.
While Larry Page runs the mainline cash cow Internet advertising business, Brin (or Sergey, as everyone at Google X invokes him) is building a second, much wilder company inside the envelope of the old one. Over the next few years, he will unveil self-driving cars, Google Glass, help acquire eight robotics companies and a high-altitude, solar-powered drone maker, and do whatever else Google is doing in secret.
And one day in 2011—before any of us had seen these new ideas—he is talking with Astro Teller, whose goatee is more salt than pepper, and they make an observation about the world. |
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