On Friday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD, will launch a giant drone-hunting blimp over Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds just east of Washington D.C. The system includes a 242-foot balloon (technically called an aerostat because it’s connected to the ground) that can stay up for a month at a time and a radar to detect — among other potential threats— drones.
Author Archives: The Editor
Northrop Grumman Gets $657M Global Hawk Contract for South Korea
Northrop Grumman Corp has won a $657.4 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to provide South Korea with four RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft, the company and the Defense Department announced on Tuesday.
Parrot Invests $2M in Sensing Solutions for Precision Agriculture
MicaSense, a sensor and information company has raised $2M in Series A funding from Parrot. MicaSense delivers a fully integrated hardware solution for agricultural remote sensing from any unmanned aerial platform, tightly coupled with cloud-based analytics to provide crop health information to growers. The funding will enable MicaSense to expand its engineering and manufacturing capabilities to support a growing network of customers worldwide.
US Navy’s Robo-Shark
The American military does a lot of work in the field of bio-mimicry, stealing designs from nature for use in new technology. After all, if you’re going to design a robot, where better to draw inspiration than from billions of years of evolution? The latest result of these efforts is the GhostSwimmer: The Navy’s underwater drone designed to look and swim like a real fish, and a liability to spook the bejeezus out of any beach goer who’s familiar with Jaws.
EMSA Picks Life Ray for European Maritime Surveillance System
The new unmanned aerial system AR5 Life Ray, developed by technological Group TEKEVER, was selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) to create the first European maritime surveillance system composed of UAS. Continue reading
Israel to Issue RFI for Personal UAS
Israel’s military is preparing to issue a request for information (RFI) for a so-called “personal UAS” for use by infantry soldiers.
L-3 SCM to Provide Communications Link for Desert Hawk III
L-3 Southern California Microwave (L-3 SCM) has announced that it has been selected by Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems and Training (LM MST) business to provide its MICRO Secure Digital Data Link (MICRO SDDL) as the secure command & control and ISR communications backbone for the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) digital Desert Hawk III DDL small unmanned aircraft system (SUAS) platform.
NASA Begins Flight Testing of Shape-Shifting Wings
NASA’s green aviation project, together with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and FlexSys, Inc, is one step closer to demonstrating technology that could make future airliners quieter and more fuel-efficient with the successful flight test of a wing surface that can change shape in flight. Continue reading