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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Autorotation landing for a drone means a softer impact at crash.
Clockwise prop for the clockwise motor, counterclockwise prop for the counterclockwise motor Patent.
With the wrangling over whether it’s safe to fly a drone through fireworks (http://www.wired.com/2015/07/youre-thinking-flying-drone-fireworks/), Disney thought about the idea from a different angle. Their patent application mentions how dangerous fireworks can be, and a swarm of drones with lampshades is not. If you thought about flying your Phantom through fireworks was ballsy, try it with […]
The principle of a gimbal gets a new twist with this invention: The camera hardware is tethered on a balanced “bridge” straddling the flying hardware, and looks essentially like a teeter-totter. The part that does all the flying can move freely, and the bridge is balanced horizontally to maintain a steady shot. Further advantages are […]
If there is anything I’ve learned from my failures to land, it’s the fragility of cheap consumer drones. Aquacopters to the rescue! This thing is basically a sealed fortress, waterproof and shockproof. It can fly in bad weather, land and take off in water, and still take more punishment. The specification says it can be […]
Parrot, the French company that gave us the precursor consumer drone, has filed for a patent application on propeller mounting means. I know first-hand the frustration of seeing a prop fly off a spindle in mid-air, where it goes nobody knows, but it’s somewhere in the lawn. The bird in question is the new Parrot […]