UAS VISION
an independent online news service for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems world
This video was taken inside the Quadrotor Thunderdome in Zurich, aka the Flying Machine Arena at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, part of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute for Technology, Zurich).
The Defense Department has awarded General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GASS) in Poway $39.8 million for continuing development of the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), a high-energy weapon that will eventually be incorporated into tactical aircraft and unmanned aircraft.
Microdrone at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.
An $11.4 million collaborative research project led by the University of North Dakota on unmanned aircraft called the Limited Deployment of Cooperative Aircraft Project could assist North Dakota in becoming a future national test site for unmanned aircraft, UND officials said.
Georgia Tech Research Institute officials were gathered on May 12-13 for another examination of a foreign-made unmanned aircraft system built with off-the-shelf commercial parts.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Atlantic (SSC Atlantic) call on innovators of every kind – scientists, engineers, citizen scientists and dreamers to collaborate on the UAVForge Challenge and win $100,000.
UAS from Norway (left), the United States (centre), and Russia (right) with the flight teams in Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, Norway. Photo Credit: Kjell-Sture Johansen/Norut
An international research team, including scientists from NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab in Seattle, completed a series of unmanned flights over the Arctic on April 30.
The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, has been working on getting groups of the robots to fly together in formation. Just like with a formation of fighter jets, there’s a leader robot in each squad along with several follower robots. The followers have just two jobs: follow the leader, and preserve the shape of the formation.