Training drones to fly fast, around even the simplest obstacles, is a crash-prone exercise that can have engineers repairing or replacing vehicles with frustrating regularity. Now MIT engineers have developed a new virtual-reality training system for drones that enables a vehicle to “see” a rich, virtual environment while flying in an empty physical space. Continue reading
Author Archives: The Editor
Insitu Flies ScanEagle3 in First Public Demo
At Insitu‘s Onward event at the CEDEA test range near Mazagón, on the Andalusian coast, The Register was able to observe the second ScanEagle 3 prototype, which was on its third demo flight – the two previous were restricted to potential customers only. Continue reading
FAA Modifies Restrictions on Drones over DoD Facilities
At the request of the Department of Defense, and Federal security and law enforcement agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been using its existing authority under Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations § 99.7 – “Special Security Instructions” – to address the potential threat posed by malicious drone operations by establishing Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) specific airspace restrictions over select, national security sensitive locations. Continue reading
GA-ASI Gets $206M MQ-9 USAF Retrofit Contract
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., Poway, California, has been awarded a $206,009,932 firm-fixed-price, fixed-price-incentive, and cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to retrofit 122 MQ-9 Block 5 aircraft. Continue reading
Russia’s Altius MALE UAV Development on Track
The work on the Altius heavy unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a combat load of up to two tons is planned to be completed within a year, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said. The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the information through its Facebook page. Continue reading
Ultra Low Power Deep-Learning-powered Autonomous Nano Drones
A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance. Although computer vision has improved rapidly thanks to machine learning and AI, it remains difficult to deploy algorithms on devices like drones due to memory, bandwidth and power constraints. Continue reading
Automatic Classification of Trees with UAV RGB Images and Deep Learning
Automatic classification of trees using remotely sensed data has been a dream of many scientists and land use managers. Recently, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been expected to be an easy-to-use, cost-effective tool for remote sensing of forests, and deep learning has attracted attention for its ability concerning machine vision. Continue reading
Croatia Relaxes Drone Laws
Drones and companies using drones for video and photo footage has been a boom business is Croatia over the past few years. However, due to extremely tight restrictions put in place by the Croatian Civil Aviation Agency (CCAA) more and more calls have been coming from drone users to relax some of these rules. Continue reading