Month: July 2015
UAS-In-A-Box Adapts to Various Missions
When you leave your base for the field and plan to use a long-range drone, you pack a long-range drone. It will have characteristics of a UAV designed for long, continuous flight and will be able to stay up for a while. However, it will have the maneuverability of a bucket of gravel. What if your mission parameters change in mid-stream, and you need a drone with way more pep, agility, and a smaller girth? […]
Micro-Drone Rolls, Flies, Gathers Intel
Although this looks like a toy called the “Sky Walker”, this drone is far from it. The Applicant, l’INSTITUT SUPERIEUR DE L’AERONAUTIQUE ET DE L’ESPACE, funded by the French Ministry of Defense, has invented a little drone to gather recon inside buildings. It was built as a “multi-mission microscale aerial vehicle. It comprises elements allowing a microscale aerial vehicle to move or roll across a surface, in particular on the ground, and making it capable […]
When Pigs Fly – NOWs Replace SOWs and COWs
Notwithstanding our technological prowess, Mother Nature has a sinister sense of humor, and stuff happens beyond our control. When disaster strikes, it is crucial to establish a communication grid as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bandwidth-hungry networks help coordinate search and rescue, law enforcement and recovery personnel. Sure, there exist “cellular on wheels” (COWs) and “system on wheels” (SOWs), which are carted on trucks into hotspots, but what if there are no roads, or personnel […]
Boeing Introduces Remote Charging Stations
Suppose you are tasked with inspection and maintenance of a pipeline. Sure, you can send out a team of engineers with camping gear to march up and down the pipeline, looking for rust and leaks. Or, you could have one drone flying back and forth doing the same job. The latter sounds like an impossible task, given that a drone’s battery lasts between 15 and 20 minutes. “Not on my watch”, said Boeing’s Spanish branch. […]
First Successful FAA Drone Delivery? There’s a Google Patent for That
Today will go down in history: a new distribution channel has arrived. While it is not as glorious as the Inter-Webs, getting deliveries by drone is kind of a big deal. What took 90 minutes of arduous driving now takes 20 by a little flying machine. Emergency supplies, fresh medicine, and not to forget, warm pizza and cold beer, are all within a closer, more palpable and environmentally-friendly reach. Australian drone manufacturer Flirtey was the […]
Robust Communication Protocol Improves Drone Experience
So you have your expensive drone in the sky and want streaming video to your pilot, the camera operator, the client’s tablet and the client’s girlfriend’s laptop. That’s a lot of signal for the drone to transmit, not to mention the signal it expects to receive from the pilot. Not all signals are the same. Thus, DJI has applied for a patent for “cyclically repeating time division multiplexing”, an oscillation of “I’m listening” and “Here […]
Drone-Based Communication Network Provides Blazing Speed
You know those action movies where the good guy is deep inside hostile territory, and has a real-time video ‘face to face’ meeting with the General? That may be feasible with classified military tech, but in the the civilian world, that would require a satellite link. That means shoddy bandwidth, crappy video quality and a 240ms lag, so you might as well say “Over” after every sentence. Radionor’s (http://www.radionor.no/) invention will bring movie fiction closer […]
Samsung Surveillance System Uses Tower-Tethered Drones
Today, if you want to keep an eye on a large area such as a parking lot, your only solution is tower-mounted surveillance cameras. Some of these cameras can swivel, some are fixed. There will always be surveillance blind spots unless an extraordinary amount of money is spent (some may say ‘invested’) on equipment. Samsung Techwin has a proposed solution: the cameras are actually drones. They are parked on the tops of surveillance towers, keeping […]
Spy Drone Echolocates to Map Room in 3-D
Bats do it, subs do it, and vision-impaired people do it too. So why can’t a drone echolocate? This little drone can, and will give you an accurate layout of any enclosed space in three dimensions. The secret lies in the drone’s ‘sonar bubble’, generated by shooting ultrasonic waves from ‘sonar lobes’ that overlap, giving a stereo data stream to the controller that generates a “3-D spatial imaging of the physical environment in which the […]
Windowsill Chills Beer or Warms Drone-delivered Pizza
And it has solar panels, and it repels pests so they don’t build nests, and it can be used to advertise, and it can make fart noises. OK, maybe not the last one, but this windowsill does nifty stuff that we’ll need once drones start home delivery. It’s going to happen any day now, but there are inherent city problems such as theft and public safety, as there would be mounds of boxes in the […]