Tag: drone
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 […]
Windowsill Chills Beer or Warms Drone-delivered Pizza
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 there are inherent city problems such as theft and public safety, as there would be mounds of boxes in the […]
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 […]
Anti-drone-jacking Software, Courtesy of a DARPA Contractor
You know that crop-dusting drone you have dusting your crops? I bet that sucker could carry a couple of nasty objects too, and it’s neat that you can feed GPS waypoints into its nav interface to have it fly anywhere you want. It’s not the plot of a movie if Insitu Inc. gets this patent. Citing some staggering statistics about the cost-effectiveness of drones (a chopper costs over $200/flight-hour to operate, a drone costs a […]
Disney’s Flying Eye Will Eavesdrop and Talk Back
Title: “Aircraft, Methods for Providing Optical Information, Method for Transmission of Acoustic Information and Method for Observing or Tracking an Object” US Patent Application Publication No: 20150078620 Filed (PCT): April 19, 2013 Published: March 19, 2015 Details: Did you know that Disney has a worldwide network of research facilities? Their Zurich branch has access to 21 Nobel laureates via the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH). As it happens, Disney Research and ETH are […]