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
Category Archives: Research
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
Lockheed Martin & Warsaw University of Technology Partner to Demo UAV Optimization Tools
The Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) and Lockheed Martin successfully demonstrated their UAV optimization technologies using aerial command and control (C2) of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
US Army Tests Chemical, Biological Sensor Integration
ECBC joined with technology developers from private industry and other Army and joint organizations to test a new integrated system of chemical and biological agent sensors Aug. 15 through 26 at Dugway Proving Ground’s West Desert Test Center in Utah.
Boeing’s Phantom Eye to become Museum Exhibit
Boeing’s hope that the Phantom Eye high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) might be returned to the skies has been ended with the disclosure by the US Air Force (USAF) that the sole prototype is to be sent to a museum instead.