Recent tests of the U.S. Army’s Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPADS) have been trying new navigational software—developed by the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., and other companies—to achieve GPS-style accuracy with images alone.
Category Archives: Research
Amphibious LoonCopter in Drones for Good Competition
A team of Engineering students at Oakland University has created an amphibious multi-rotor drone prototype and they’re headed to Dubai for an international competition and a chance at a $1 million prize. Continue reading
Skybender: Google’s Secret 5G Internet Drone Tests
Google is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air. In a secretive project codenamed SkyBender, the technology giant built several prototype transceivers at the isolated spaceport last summer, and is testing them with multiple drones, according to documents obtained under public records laws. Continue reading
Route-Planning Software for Obstacle Avoidance
In a pair of projects announced last week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) demonstrated software that allow drones to stop on a dime to make hairpin movements over, under, and around some 26 distinct obstacles in a simulated “forest.” Continue reading
Fireproof Aerial Robot System (FAROS) from Korea
This video demonstrates the FAROS (Fireproof Aerial RObot System) for fire disaster. The drone can climb the wall to pass through narrow and smoky area. It has a 2D-LiDAR sensor for self-localization. Its pose estimation result is visualized on V-REP simulator. Continue reading
Autonomous Landing on a Moving Car
An unmanned, electric, autonomous aircraft travelling at 75 kilometres per hour lands gently on the roof of a moving car. For the first time, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) have successfully demonstrated a technique developed for this purpose.
Coyote Flies into Hurricanes for NOAA
Coyote
Raytheon Company is providing its enhanced Coyote Unmanned Air System to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for hurricane tracking and modelling, giving researchers an unprecedented perspective from inside storms that build in the Atlantic Ocean. The Coyote is a small, expendable UAS that can be tube-launched from a host vehicle on the ground or in the air. Continue reading
Belgian Drone Mixes Plane and QuadCopter Technology
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.