the use of balloons and potentially developing more specialised capabilities to shoot them down more predictably or with lower cost. the flip side is that, you know, this is not a new technology, and spy balloons are something that have been used significantly by most powers over the years. particularly during the cold war, they were played around with. there are difficulties with them, which is that it s harder to control exactly where they go, even if they have limited propulsion systems on board. so, while balloons are a niche, they re probably not revolutionary in that sense. mm it s more a political challenge and also something that you wouldn t necessarily want to have no answer to in case someone started getting much more creative with what they might try and then do if you had no answer to it, and just let it go unchallenged. so, what are the security risks? in one word, escalation. spying happens all the time, but the first rule of espionage is don t get caught,
which is that it s harder to control exactly where they go, even if they have limited propulsion systems on board. so, while balloons are a niche, they re probably not revolutionary in that sense. mm it s more a political challenge and also something that you wouldn t necessarily want to have no answer to in case someone started getting much more creative with what they might try and then do if you had no answer to it, and just let it go unchallenged. so, what are the security risks? in one word, escalation. spying happens all the time, but the first rule of espionage is don t get caught, because when you do, it can turn into a problem. the us learnt this a couple of times. there was a major incident in 1960 where soviet air defences shot down an american spy plane flying at high altitude within its territory during the cold war. and more recently, in 2001, a us surveillance plane which was flying on the edge of chinese territory was forced
interest in certainly tracking the use of balloons and potentially developing more specialised capabilities to shoot them down more predictably or with lower cost. the flip side is that, you know, this is not a new technology, and spy balloons are something that have been used significantly by most powers over the years. particularly during the cold war, they were played around with. there are difficulties with them, which is that it s harder to control exactly where they go, even if they have limited propulsion systems on board. so while balloons are a niche, they re probably not revolutionary in that sense. mm. it s more a political challenge and also something that you wouldn t necessarily want to have no answer to in case someone started getting much more creative with what they might try and then do if you had no answer to it, and just let it go unchallenged. so what are the security risks? in one word, escalation. spying happens all the time, but the first rule of espionage
tractors and combines. the aim is to bring products to the market and also help everyone from insurers to the government understand how to make the robot future work. here s our rural affairs correspondent david gregory kumar. we re here in newport, in shropshire, and this field has been planted and then harvested by autonomous vehicles, what you might like to think of as robots. and now behind the man in charge, and that is kit. what are these vehicles? what are they doing? so we ve got a tractor trailer and a combine harvester, essentially small scale machines that you d find on any farm in the uk. but these drive themselves. so we ve got systems on board that take all the controls that an operator would normally do, and we do them autonomously. so they re out in the field following routes, cutting the crops. so we first met you back in 2016. it was like one hectare. you were basically trying to raise crops using these machines. how much have things changed since then? well, in terms
the robot future work. here s rural affairs correspondent david gregory kumar. we re here in newport in shropshire, and this field has been planted and then harvested by autonomous vehicles, what you might like to think of as robots, basically. and now the man behind is in charge and that is kit. what are these vehicles, what do they do? we have got a tractor trailer and a combine harvester, essentially small scale machines that you would find on any farm in the uk, but these drive themselves so we have got systems on board that take all the controls that an operator would normally do, and we do them, you know, autonomously. so they are out in the field, following routes and cutting the crop. we first met you back in 2016, it was like one hectare