Category: Software

In-Flight Sandbox for Foreign Software

It should come as no surprise that there will be an app store for drones soon. Third-party software may bring new and unexpected uses for the Inspire1 or the Solo. An unforeseen software glitch can be an issue. “An example issue is that a UAV can receive data or instructions from an unreliable program executing on the UAV. The unreliable program can provide erroneous data that can cause the UAV to be lost, damaged, or […]

Intelligent Drone Communication, by Raytheon

Raytheon is no slouch when it comes to technology, and this is no exception: communicating with a drone for military applications is of prime importance. After all, that’s why you launched the UAV in the first place. The need for improved communication are ever-present: “Satellite transponders for military and/or commercial use are oversubscribed and expensive to put in place and maintain. Current RF transponders lack intelligence. Users of low power transmitters must therefore communicate with non-intelligent transponders […]

Drones Navigate RFID Highway

As more and more UAVs clutter the sky, navigation becomes a real issue. Delivery by drone sparks some of these questions: how do you prevent collisions? Optimize efficiency? Keep track of inventory? Certainly, GPS-borne navigation is the flavor du jour, but it’s not the only nav protocol. Along comes Azure Sky Group LLC, and their patent application for radio frequency identification (RFID) method. RFID is nothing new, and most new credit cards have a chip that works on RFID. […]

Boeing Counters Contingencies for Smaller Drones

So you’re operating a UAV, and the engine quits. Is it certain death for your drone? Boeing says ‘no’. According to their patent application, “Larger UAVs and manned aircraft often have redundant systems for communication (e.g., SATCOM) and navigation (e.g., inertial navigation) that enable them to respond to jamming and other contingencies without losing communication and navigation. That is, they have many spectral degrees of freedom. On the other hand, small UAVs typically cannot tolerate the weight, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Privacy-centric Image Processing Obscures the Innocent

With more drone surveillance comes more privacy issues. This patent application tries to mitigate the deleterious consequences to balance out the benefits and convenience of this new technology. Just like Google Maps fuzzes out faces and license plates, this invention aims to block out irrelevant data from surveillance footage taken not only by drones, but by CCTV cameras and manned aircraft. This may be more of a PR patent than anything else, since it’s hard […]

Video Analysis Software to Identify Salient Events

In the world of UAV surveillance, the running joke is that the average operator chair has absorbed 17,000 farts. This punishment is a testament to the amount of man hours watching video screens with nothing happening, just to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. What if there is a better way, to have a computer parse out the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff? IBM has proposed a solution in its […]