A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside has developed a highly reliable and accurate navigation system that exploits existing environmental signals such as cellular and Wi-Fi, rather than the Global Positioning System (GPS). The technology can be used as a standalone alternative to GPS, or complement current GPS-based systems to enable highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof navigation. Continue reading
Category Archives: Research
Bio-Inspired Algorithm for Online Visual Tracking
Tracking of targets within aerial footage is becoming increasingly important, for example, as the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to expand (UAVs are now being used in film production, mining, news media, and agriculture). Moreover, the world’s security agencies are gathering enormous amounts of UAV video data, from which they are looking for events of interest, e.g., suspicious vehicles. Continue reading
Budgerigars Help Boeing Study into Collision Prevention
Research revealing birds avoid crashing into each other by veering right may help develop technology to stop mid-air plane collisions. The Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland teamed with Boeing Defence Australia for the first study of its kind, which used budgerigars. Continue reading
General Atomics Unveils Mechanical Arm for DARPA Gremlins UAS Program
General Atomics, which builds the iconic Predator, has rolled out its offering for DARPA’s Gremlins program, blandly called the Small Unmanned Air Vehicle (SUAS). The goal: Build drones — and equally critical, a launch and recovery system — that can take off from a manned aircraft, conduct a mission and come back aboard the plane. Continue reading
Navy Awards Unmanned Carrier Aircraft Concept Contracts to Boeing and Lockheed Martin
The US Navy has awarded contracts to two contractors to refine concepts for the future MQ-25 unmanned carrier-based aerial refuelling aircraft.
A Camera That Can See Unlike Any Imager Before It
By making a detector’s pixels smarter than ever, DARPA aims to lay the foundation for multi-purpose imaging sensors that behave like many types of eyes at once.
University of Pennsylvania – Aggressive Flight 2017
This video presents an autonomous 250 g quadrotor performing aggressive maneuvers using a qualcomm snapdragon flight and relying only on on-board computation and sensor capabilities. The control planning and estimation tasks are solved based on the information provided by a single camera and an IMU. Continue reading
US Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental Now Open
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has announced that the Defense Department is expanding its technology startup DIUx, or Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental to Austin, Texas. DIUx was created to get new tech into the hands of our troops faster by changing the entire way DoD approaches innovation. Continue reading