As pollinators, bees are hard to beat. Still, that hasn’t prevented researchers from working on a high-tech alternative: drones that blow soap bubbles to transport pollen to a flower. It’s a “really cool” approach, says Henry Williams, a roboticist at the University of Auckland, who was not involved in the work. But some biologists are skeptical that drones will ever be an effective replacement for bees. Continue reading
Category Archives: Research
US Army Researchers Find New Ways to Test Swarming Drones

UAS outfitted with both a marker strobe (inset) and a traditional survey prism used to evaluate the accuracy of the motion-capture system
The U.S. Army has implemented a one-of-a-kind outdoor system to test swarming drones–with a capacity of more than 1,500 times the volume of a typical testing facility. Continue reading
$3.9M EU Project for Drone Swarms to Inspect Infrastructure
A new Danish-led research project will allow swarms of advanced, autonomous drones to keep a watchful eye on bridges and railways and report if something needs to be repaired. Continue reading
Improving Drone Collision Avoidance with Stereo Cameras

Three drones were used as target drones in the experiments in order to evaluate the generalization capability of the model to different drone modalities
Recently, a team of researchers from Madrid Polytechnic University, MIT, and Texas A&M University produced real-world results in active collision monitoring and avoidance by building an integrated system of a simple camera and data processing setup well suited for smaller drones. Continue reading
Efficient Large-Scale Multi-Drone Delivery using Transit Networks
Researchers from Stanford University have devised a way for hundreds of drones to use the bus or trams in an effort to redesign how packages are distributed in cities. Should such a solution ever scale, it could reduce delivery van congestion and energy usage while extending the distance a drone can travel to deliver a package. Continue reading
EU Wastes Another €1.6M on Bubbles for Drones
We were surprised to discover this bizarre Spanish language press release buried on the website of a university in the tip of Spain. (See Google translation below). Continue reading
Bringing Drone Operations into Perspective
‘Global UAS OPS’ is now online. This is an international survey on drone operations (current & upcoming) and is available in English, French & Spanish. The support & reference documents in these languages are also available. Contributions from all countries outside of Europe (see below) are welcome. Continue reading
Age of Autonomy: Q2/20 Drone Industry Update
The Aerospace & Defense sector for Canaccord Genuity, a global investment bank, has just published a follow-on report to its ‘Age of Autonomy’ whitepaper on unmanned systems.




