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 […]

Smokey the Drone Will Catch You Speeding

Helping automate airborne law enforcement, Palo Alto Research Center has secured a patent to catch speeders using drones. The invention resides in an algorithm called Point-Motion-Pairs (PMP) that establishes reference points on an automobile, calculates their rate of change, and snaps a photo of the license plate. This invention can be used not only on drones, but stationary cameras and cameras suspended on law enforcement helicopters. The algorithm examines the reference points, frame by frame, […]

Death From Above: Drone Delivers Mercenaries

The kind of mercenaries you need to maintain your Organic Farm certification. Suppose you farm something expensive and exotic, and have an infestation of bugs that likes to eat your inventory. Release the drones! This patent application talks mainly about targeted delivery of fertilizer and pesticide pellets, but it also mentions “beneficial insects”. The insect angle is more interesting: there is always something that eats whatever is eating your plants. The enemy of my enemy. […]

Falling Drone Damage Limited Thanks to Autorotation

Autorotation landing for a drone means a softer impact at crash.

Draganfly Propellers Remove Easily, Folding Drone Ensues

Clockwise prop for the clockwise motor, counterclockwise prop for the counterclockwise motor Patent.

Disney’s “Flixel” Drone will Replace Fireworks

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 a swarm of Flixels. It might feel like piloting the Millennium Falcon through a flaming asteroid belt. Here is an […]

Balanced Gimbal with Props, Rather than the Inverse

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 the orientation of the props, away from the edges of the machine, and its seemingly minimalist framework, which is claimed […]

Aquacopters Presents a Waterproof, Indestructible Drone

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 made of Kydex, so you know it’s got ‘tude. There is also known the Game of Drones (gameofdrones.com), which lets […]

Parrot’s Bebop Prop Patent

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 Bebop (http://www.parrot.com/ca/products/bebop-drone/) and it is fabulous. This invention at hand offers the following advantages: 1) Weight distribution of the prop […]