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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday October 24 2015, @01:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-off-my-lawn dept.

On a sunny morning in October 2014, Christopher Schmidt strolled onto the grassy fields of Magazine Beach, a public park along the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. To get a better view of the fall scenery, he launched his drone, a DJI Phantom quadcopter equipped with a camera.

Then he saw it: a juvenile red-tailed hawk circling nearby. Within seconds, it swooped down — wings outstretched, tail flared, talons open — and flipped the drone midair. Mr. Schmidt cut the propellers, and the bird flew off, apparently uninjured. The drone dropped to the ground, undamaged except for a slight bend in its plastic landing gear.

Mr. Schmidt, a 31-year-old software developer, posted a drone's eye video of the encounter on YouTube. It has been viewed about five million times. And it is hardly the only evidence of conflict between animals and so-called unmanned aerial vehicles.

In other videos, ospreys, magpies, sea gulls and geese pursue and attack drones in flight. With a hop and punch, a kangaroo knocks one to the ground. A cheetah chases, leaps and swipes at one. A pugnacious ram head-butts a drone that hovers too low. And a particularly defiant chimpanzee at a zoo in the Netherlands whacks a buzzing intruder out of the sky with a branch.

Drones do seem to trigger a primal reaction, and not just in humans. Why?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:12PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:12PM (#254032) Journal
    The definitions you mention neglect that the human operator or whatever has to be present on the vehicle in order for it to be manned. That's just the way it is.