Hasta La Gadget!

Before quadrocopters become Skynet’s roaming recon fleet, they’ll begrudgingly entertain us, and in a recent promotional enterprise, a swarm braved the London “spring” to remind us of the imminent launch of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Over the weekend, drone masters Ars Electronica Futurelab sent a party of 30 LED-tagged AscTec Hummingbirds halfway to Hoth, and used the relative darkness of Earth Hour to set an approximately 300-foot high Star Trek logo twinkling over Tower Bridge. A video of the event can be found below, complete with epic music and movie cut-scenes sure to send even the most Vulcan of trekkers to sickbay with hysteria. If anyone behind the promotion is reading — please, whatever you do, just don’t give them phasers.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Ars Electronica (1), (2)

So, here’s a situation: you’d love to your iPhone or iPad to control your UAV collection, and you’re pretty obsessed with collecting as many of these UAVs as possible. Aside from undoubtedly landing yourself on an FBI watch list, you’ll probably also be interested in helping the folks at Fighting Walrus Radio turn their dreams into reality. In a nutshell, the project seeks to fund an iOS hardware peripheral that operates with both Lightning and Dock Connector-equipped products — turning ’em into “a mobile ground station for your personal unmanned aerial vehicle.” It’s built to report your UAV’s critical flight systems and log flight data within a one mile range, and it’s compatible with all MAVLink drones as well as the Parrot AR.Drone. Also, it’s called the Fighting Walrus Radio. For those that need a bit more convincing, there’s a demo video just after the break, while to-be customers can hit up the read link.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Indiegogo

The pilot of Alitalia Flight #608 yesterday spotted a small, black drone hovering around JFK International airport yesterday. The drone is about 3 feet wide, has 4 propellers, and was hovering around an altitude of 1,750 feet. The Alitalia airplane was about 3 miles away from landing on runway 31R when the unidentified drone came within 200 feet of it. This all occurred around 1:15 p.m.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently looking for more details regarding the unidentified drone and its operator. The drone is said to look similar to the Aeryon Labs “Scout” modeled drone in the picture above. John Giacalone, the Special Agent in Charge, stated, “The FBI is asking anyone with information about the unmanned aircraft or the operator to contact us. Our paramount concern is the safety of aircraft passengers and crew.”

This brings up the security concerns that the Government Accountability Office warned Congress about last year. A report submitted by the GAO stated that pushing for drones to become commonplace in the U.S. airspace could result in issues in privacy, security, and worse, GPS jamming and spoofing. One major issue brought up is that a lot of drones don’t have “elaborate on-board detection systems” which are supposed to help them avoid crashes in the air. Serious problems could incur if drones are allowed to be in the same airspace as airplanes.

The FBI is encouraging anyone with information about the unidentified drone to call them at 212-384-1000. Anyone with a tip will remain anonymous. Air traffic controllers have already warned other planes near the JFK International Airport about the drone spotting, but none have come across it yet. The FAA set a limit for drones, and remote-controlled airplanes, controlled by hobbyists to be only flown at a maximum of 400 feet, so whatever this drone was doing wasn’t legal.

[via Wired]

Unidentified drone spotted near JFK International Airport is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

There are plenty of drones hovering overhead, but I have to say that mounting one of these ultra-high resolution cameras on one will make them very useful for Big Brother. Pretty soon, they’ll be able to spot what you’re having for breakfast from 20,000 feet in the air.

The highest-resolution surveillance system in the world was developed by DARPA and it’s called the ARGUS-IS. It features a camera that’s got a whopping 1.8 gigapixel resolution. The camera was designed to be used with drones like the Predator, and the ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance – Imaging System) can spot a six-inch object within a ten square mile radius from 20,000 feet in the air.

The high-res cam doesn’t reveal facial features, but you can easily spot details like birds flying around and the color of somebody’s clothes.

The meta-camera is made up of a 368 sensors, which are just like the ones found in smartphones, but the ARGUS-IS uses its robust processing power to assemble these images into one giant image. The combined cameras can stream around 1 million terabytes of video, which is 5,000 hours of HD footage per day.

The images you see here were captured back in 2009, so one can only imagine the image resolution they could capture with today’s improved digital camera tech.

[via ExtremeTech]

Drones have often been used in war theaters, but that doesn’t stop this little military drone from being pretty cute. It was deployed by the British Army in Afghanistan and it measures only four inches by two inches.

The PD-100 Black Hornet Nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is small enough to fit in the palm of a child’s hand, and comes with a tiny camera that will allow soldiers to use it to surveil what happens on the ground before entering hostile areas.

It’s small enough that it can even peek around corners before turning. The drone has an autonomy of up to 30 minutes at a time, and has a range of about half a mile. Here’s some video of an earlier prototype of the PD-100 in action:

[via Animal NY]