Nov 23
Northrop Grumman’s newest infomercial about its unmanned autonomous air, land, and sea vehicles feels like one of those typical foretelling montages that you see in dystopian sci-fi movies.
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Oct 28
The MQ-1 Predator UAV is one of America’s most prolific and productive drones, having notched more than a million hours of flight time since its introduction in 1994. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for continued improvement to the platform. In fact, General Atomics has also been hard at work with a slightly less deadly version that can fly for twice as long.
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Oct 17
After the end of hostilities in WWII, France and Germany have become surprisingly close. The two nations are stalwart proponents of expanded European Union integration and are regularly referred to as the EU’s "twin engine." But on the issue of unmanned aerial platform, the two simply cannot agree. So while France and its cohorts are developing the nEUROn, Germany is building the stealth Barracuda.
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Sep 15
Nowadays, we often hear about unmanned aerial vehicles aka UAVs or drones in the news as next generation weapons of war. The researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab want to dispel that notion and show people that this new technology can be used in more positive ways. For example, as tour guides.
The SkyCall project uses a Wi-Fi network, a mobile app and quadcopters equipped with GPS, a camera and other onboard sensors to create smart tour guides. A prototype of SkyCall is already being tested at the labyrinthine grounds of MIT. To summon a drone, the user uses the call feature on the SkyCall app. When your friendly guide arrives, the user enters the alphanumeric code for his destination (I don’t know how he gets the code in the first place though). The guide will then start moving at a leisurely pace.
The drone will even talk about landmarks along the way and can be stopped by the user through the app. The drone also uses GPS to detect if the user has fallen behind a certain distance and will wait and then alert him through the app.
The SkyCall: why ask people for directions when you can build a sophisticated network of satellites and robots to guide you through life? As someone who is socially inept, I’m only being half sarcastic. I’d love to have a drone buddy to guide me around and perhaps even protect me.
[MIT SENSEable City Lab via Dezeen]
Sep 08
300ft Drone-Powered Hack Foresees A Future Stuffed With Eye-In-The-Sky All-Seeing Apps
Posted in: Today's Chili
Hackathon hacks can lead to fully fledged apps and companies. Other times they are intended to be nothing more than a great hack. 300ft is certainly that: a neat hack, built overnight at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF hackathon, which pulls in “close to live” aerial imaging from UAVs (aka drones) so the user can check how busy a prospective outdoor leisure location is before heading out.
The hack team behind 300ft deployed a fleet of drones over “the most popular places in San Francisco” — such as the marina and the piers — to pull in up-to-date imagery (hours old, rather than a real-time stream) to flesh out their app.
“You can dig into any one of these [several San Francisco locations] and view the latest data we’ve collected, oftentimes just a few hours old,” said 300ft hack team member Mark McSpaddan, also director of technology at travel technology company Sabrelabs, presenting the hack on stage (see video below). “Each image has time, geolocation and thanks to Weather Underground’s API weather data as well.”
The 300ft app is a neat hack in another sense, neatly combining aspects of the work done by the respective companies of the duo behind it, McSpaddan and Bret Kugelmass, co-founder of UAV imaging service startup Airphrame – with the former providing the travel tech, and the latter company delivering the eye in the sky capability.
300ft isn’t intended to become a business in its own right. But its creators are confident that services relying on real-time aerial imaging are very much coming down the pipe. Just don’t expect drones to be delivering pizza or tacos or burritos any time soon. “The pizza drone story is a completely unreasonable use of the applications of drones,” Kugelmass told TechCrunch in a backstage interview. “Same with the tacos, same with the burritos. That’s not happening.”
“It might happen at some point, but that’s in the distant, distant future,” he added when pressed. So sorry guys, no pizza-on-your-head deliveries just yet.
“This was just a great hack,” Kugelmass continued, discussing what the team had done with 300ft. “Airphrame’s business is separate. Sabre’s business is separate, this was just a great chance to come together and explore what’s possible in the future… UAV technology will be used for things other than the transport of heavy goods at first.”
Airphrame, which was founded more than a year ago, already has commercial customers for its UAV-powered aerial imaging capabilities although Kugelmass said it’s not currently disclosing customer names on confidentiality grounds. He did confirm that Airphrame’s customers are “commercial sector” entities though, not government agencies.
So, even though the 300ft hack itself isn’t going anywhere after today it likely anticipates a future wave of apps and services that will make commercial use of UAV technology. Military tech does have a habit of trickling down into commercial products, so expect to see more apps leveraging drone-powered near real-time aerial imaging capabilities in the not too distant (but potentially slightly dystopic) future — especially as the cost of the necessary hardware continues to come down.
Returning to the 300ft hack, it started as “some sketches and some things we had experimented with”, said McSpadden. “And then yesterday Bret sent his Airphrame crew out and they gathered a tonne of data [including the Americas’ Cup boat race].”
McSpadden added that one possible use-case for a drone-powered app in the travel sector could be to provide hotels with an information service they offer their customers, telling them which beaches are the least crowded, for instance. “A concierge with that kind of knowledge would be much more valuable,” he added.
Sep 04
In 1915, nearly two decades after patenting the world’s first radio-controlled boat, famed Serbian-America inventor Nicola Tesla imagined fleets of unmanned aerial combat vehicles being sent to war instead of pilots. Little did he know, the US Navy was already hard at work on that very same vision.
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Aug 27
America’s fleet of surveillance and attack drones are far older than most people realize. While the unmanned platforms have certainly come into the spotlight since the start of the War on Terror, they’ve actually been dutifully getting shot out of the sky on behalf of our national interests since World War I. And one of the most impressive—and impressively named—of their ranks was the Ryan Firebee.
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Aug 19
3D Robotics has made it pretty clearly that it’s all about the maker community. But what about those who can’t tell their Arduino from a Raspberry Pi? The Chris Anderson-run company today announced the release of Iris, an out-of-the-box, user-friendly quadcopter experience. The drone can be controlled with an Android device (iOS coming soon), including single button takeoffs and landings. There’s an ARM Cortex-M4 processor and a built-in data radio on-board, the latter of which will help you check out flight paths in real-time. There’s also a spot for a GoPro Hero3, though that, naturally, will cost you ($400) extra. The configurable copter starts at $730. It’s set to ship on September 16th.
Filed under: Robots
Via: Quadcopter
Source: 3d Robotics
Aug 01
Turbulence. A minor bother for us, but a huge issue for enlisted seamen. So-called “ducts” in the lower atmosphere can wreak all sorts of maritime havoc; trapping radar and causing radio comms to travel further than expected and into the hands of the enemy. The Office of Naval Research‘s Ocean Battlespace Sensing Department (rad name, right?) isn’t satisfied with using balloons to keep track of the ducts anymore, and is deploying drones instead, including Insitu’s ScanEagle shown above. The result should be a greater understanding of how atmospheric conditions affect radar and communications, which could ultimately provide a tactical advantage — at least while we wait on those 100-kilowatt lasers.
[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]
Filed under: Alt
Jul 31
Insitu’s Scan Eagle X200 and AeroVironment’s Puma (above) are the first UAVs to snag FAA approval for commercial operations, and they’re set to take to the skies later this summer. Prior to this, the only way the private sector could fly an unmanned vessel in US airspace was with an experimental airworthiness certification — and that cert prohibits business activities. It’s worth noting that these craft weigh less than 55 pounds and measure four and a half feet long; they aren’t Predator drones, by any means.
Come August, a “major energy company” will use the X200 to patrol the Alaskan coast, keeping an eye on ice floes and migrating whales where the firm is doing petroleum exploration. Plans for the Puma sound slightly more action-packed, as it’s expected to support oil spill emergency response-crews and watch over wildlife in the Beaufort Sea. See, this is how it all begins: First we start trusting them with our lives, then it all takes a turn for the worse.
[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]
Filed under: Transportation, Alt
Via: Gizmodo
Source: FAA
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