Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/I4eIXPNOOnI The title caught my eye, and the inventors’ credentials impressed me. Both are from the Defense sphere, and if they applied for a patent, this is a worthy invention. Basically, it’s a standalone module that you can attach to any friendly drone, and that module can sever […]
Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/M_laLT42Zhg Straight out of science fiction and into British Secretary of State for Defence’s patent portfolio, this drone flies like a dragonfly, “a drone having an elongate fuselage and four wings arranged to provide lift by flapping.” It’s the size of a Corona cigar with a camera on […]
Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/Cej_FLso3TM The first thing you need to keep in mind is that this invention was funded by, and can be used by the US Navy without paying a royalty. What does this invention do? Flying drones have panels or lights attached to them, and coordinate their positions with […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]