navy robots helicopters

It’s tough being a pirate these days. Facing off with Navy SEALs and missile cruisers on their home turf of the high seas is tough enough for small-arms wielding pirates in diminutive watercraft. Now, the Navy isbringing in the robots . The Office of Naval Research has plans to imbue its Fire Scout unmanned, ship-launched helicopters with electronic brains capable of identifying the small boats generally used by pirates.
Computer vision of this kind is generally pretty difficult, as object recognition is a really tough computational task. But the pirate-hunting Fire Scout will have an additional piece of technology on its side: LIDAR . This “laser radar” technology bounces laser pulses off of surrounding objects to quickly and accurately render a 3-D image of its environment, even at a distance.