Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works recently divulged some information about the SR-72 programme to build a successor to the iconic SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. Continue reading
Category Archives: Research
MIT Gas-Powered Drone Remains Aloft for Five Days
In the event of a natural disaster that disrupts phone and Internet systems over a wide area, autonomous aircraft could potentially hover over affected regions, carrying communications payloads that provide temporary telecommunications coverage to those in need. Continue reading
VOLIRO – The Omnidirectional Hexacopter
The Voliro hexacopter has been developed, assembled and programmed as a student project at ETH Zurich. Continue reading
Calgary Research on Vision-Based Navigation for Drones
Dr. Mozhdeh Shahbazi, professor of geomatics engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering, is working on developing autonomous navigation technology for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs.) She anticipates the technology will be used in a next-generation breed of ‘intelligent’ drones that will aid in everything from search and rescue to aerial evidence collection for law enforcement.
Aquatic Fixed-Wing Drone from Canada
The University of Sherbrooke in Canada has gotten creative, and come up with a very clever design for a fixed wing drone called SUWAVE (Sherbrooke University Water-Air VEhicle) that uses lakes as landing pads. It crash lands in them, recharges with solar power, and then takes off again with a brilliant hinged propeller. Continue reading
UAS-Based Change Detection of Glacial Transition Zone
Glacier-related applications of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in high mountain regions with steep topography are relatively rare. This study makes a contribution to the lack of UAS applications in studying alpine glaciers in the European Alps. Continue reading
NASA Selects Three Aeronautics Teams to Explore an Autonomous Future
Three teams of NASA researchers who have dreamed up potential solutions for pieces of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) puzzle have received the nod to officially begin formal feasibility studies of their concepts. Continue reading
White Paper: Dysfunction in UAS Regulatory Safety Decision Making – Analysis and a New Paradigm
In this paper by Suzette Matthews, Esq. and Frank L. Frisbie, P.E., the authors postulate that the absence of an articulated paradigm and decisional standards for determining whether a particular UAS operation will be “reasonably safe” for performance over the non-consenting public is the most significant barrier to certification/operating approval for commercial UAS. Continue reading