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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
And it has solar panels, and it repels pests so they don’t build nests, and it can be used to advertise, and it can make fart noises. OK, maybe not the last one, but this windowsill does nifty stuff that we’ll need once drones start home delivery. It’s going to happen any day now, but […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Autorotation landing for a drone means a softer impact at crash.