Google has acquired Titan Aerospace, the drone startup that makes high-flying robots which was previously scoped by Facebook as a potential acquisition target (as first reported by TechCrunch), the WSJ reports. The details of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the deal comes after Facebook disclosed its own purchase of a Titan Aerospace competitor in U.K.-based Ascenta for its… Read More
Turns out, those drone hunting permits
A few months back Amazon unveiled Prime Air. Its a service that aims to deliver goods purchased through the online marketplace within half an hour, and to do so, it would employ drones. Sure, Amazon Prime Air is an optimistic idea, one that can’t quite literally take off right now due to various legal and technical issues. Until those are resolved, the service is grounded. But the company has been working hard in the meantime. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that they are already in the design phase of seventh and eighth generation delivery drones.
Amazon Working On Eighth Generation Of Delivery Drones original content from Ubergizmo.
The Federal Aviation Administration has filed an appeal in the case against "commercial drone" pilot Raphael Pirker, accused of reckless operation of what’s basically an R/C aircraft near the University of Virginia campus in 2011. Um, does this look reckless to you?
Robots may be taking our jobs throughout agriculture and industry, but the the duty of defacing architecture is likely to remain in the hands of humans for the immediate future if this semi-autonomous spray-paint drone is any evidence.
Facebook recently laid out its ambitious plans of using drones to spread the internet in far flung areas of the world. This novel idea can also improve internet connectivity in conflict zones where infrastructure is under constant threat of being reduced to rubbles. Looks like the military has also been thinking along the same lines. DARPA’s Mobile Hotspots program aims to give unused drones from the war in Iraq a second life by transforming them into aerial Wi-Fi hotspots.
Instead of the well known Predator drones, which are actually quite lethal, DARPA is using the much smaller and less-deadlier RA-7 Shadow drones. They will be retrofitted with equipment, though their 185 pound and 11 feet long constitution makes it hard not to overload them with heavy equipment.
Therefore the tricky part is to be able to actually fit the required equipment on the drone. DARPA researchers are believed to have developed small antennas that operate on the millimeter wave band, at an extremely high frequency. The antennas are coupled with special amplifies that boost the signal while only generating half as much noise as conventional amplifiers.
The pod that researchers have developed for this equipment is said to weigh less than 20 pounds. A RA-7 Shadow with one of these pods could remain airborne for nine hours at a stretch, but we’ll only know for sure once field testing begins after DARPA actually starts hooking up the drones with the pods.
DARPA Gives Drones Second Life By Turning Them Into Wi-Fi Hotspots , original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Military, drones, 
The dystopia created in this animation by Simon Russell is a world I hope to never be a part of: drones littered across the sky, surveillance cameras pointing every which way and for some reason, dubstep. It doesn’t all make sense but Russell’s imaginative take on the look of futuristic drones and cameras are perfectly chaotic and crazy. Some floating orb drones look like mini Death Stars while other cameras are like machine guns.
It’s looking increasingly likely that our skies will be clouded with drones in the future. Hiring a drone to do some work for you could one day be as easy as getting a ride from Uber, which you should find equal parts incredible and terrifying.
DJI has been making remote-control quadcopters for years. Originally, you had to strap your GoPro to it, but last year DJI introduced the Phantom 2 Vision, which had its own integrated camera system. It was pretty sweet, but every tiny turn you took your video shook enough to scramble your viewer’s brain.
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From where a drone operator’s sitting, one blurry blob of pixels
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