Category: Military application

MedEvac! The Drones are Here

Ripping a page out of science-fiction, Boeing has filed for a software patent to protect the concept of drones rescuing personnel trapped in a hostile environment. The wounded soldier will hitch a ride on a UAV back to safety, thus sparing the lives of the brave search-and-rescue souls. The well-written application states “Due to unforeseen circumstances, personnel may become stranded in an unfamiliar and/or hostile location. Such personnel typically need to be rescued and/or retrieved […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Raytheon Patent Cherry-picks Relevant Data

It is no secret that human eyes have to watch hours upon hours of video footage to catch a glimmer of game-changing data. It’s a mundane, inefficient activity, performed by people with sophisticated technical skills who could be doing better things. If there was only a way to isolate just the important video of bad guys doing their bad things, stopping them would happen quicker, with fewer innocent casualties. Raytheon has patented a solution: “The […]