Researchers in Belgium have devised a prototype delivery drone which they say could rival the likes of Amazon Prime Air and Google’s Project Wing. The University of Leuven team behind VertiKUL 2 (KUL is the acronym for Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) say the drone combines the ability of quad-copters to take-off and land vertically with both the speed of conventional aircraft and their capacity to fly long distances.
Category Archives: Research
One-Eyed Bug Vision Helps Drones Land
In an effort to build—and control—ever smaller drones, researchers have been looking at how insects navigate. Insects use a technique called optical flow, based on the apparent speed of objects passing by in their field of vision. In fact, humans use optical flow to give us a sense of how fast we’re going when we’re driving. Continue reading
NRL Tests Cooperative Soaring Concept for Sustained Flight of UAV Sailplanes
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in collaboration with the Air Vehicle Intelligence and Autonomy (AVIA) Lab at Pennsylvania State University (PSU), completed testing of cooperative autonomous soaring algorithms used to keep unmanned sailplanes aloft for sustained flight duration’s — demonstrating the concept of shared soaring data between two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in flight. Continue reading
Multiple-Scenario Unmanned Aerial System Control
Drones Can Avoid Collisions by Sharing Knowledge
The Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory is just one team of more than 130 working with NASA to solve how to manage drone traffic. The traffic-management system, which will be under development for the next few years, will help drones communicate with each other and avoid potential collisions. Continue reading
Evolutionary View Planning for Optimized UAV Terrain Modeling
A team of researchers at the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, Brigham Young University have just published a paper that addresses the deficiencies in data collected by UAV missions flown using manual pilot control. These are heavily dependent on the skill and judgment of the operator or the weather conditions that make precision flying more difficult.This can often lead to gaps between the collected images or areas where insufficient images are captured for 3D reconstruction. Continue reading
Spanish Research Project to Help UAS Land on Ships
The Spanish Ministry of Defence has engaged ship numerical modelling specialist Siport21 to develop systems that will predict vessel movements in advance so that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can land on them safely. Continue reading
Twitter Gets Drone Patent
Twitter was granted a patent last week for an unmanned aerial vehicle which can be controlled by users and take pictures and videos.