UAS VISION
an independent online news service for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems world
A Chinese engineer obsessed with the idea of reinventing the airship has unveiled an ‘indestructible’ inflatable plane that can be folded up and put in a suitcase when not needed. He says his plane could be used for a variety of missions and, what’s more, it won’t break if it falls out of the sky. Continue reading
Sentinel Air is planning to co-develop an airborne wireless sensor that can detect mobile phone signals belonging to disaster victims. The company has teamed up with European disaster relief firm Disaster Tech Lab to develop and test the sensor, which will be mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made by Sentinel Air.
In collaboration with Lockheed Martin, a team of research students and staff from Warsaw University of Technology successfully demonstrated the first phase of flight test and integration of unmanned aircraft platforms with an autonomous mission control system. Continue reading
With sensors covering his head, University of Texas at San Antonio graduate student Mauricio Merino concentrates hard as a camo-colored drone hovers with a soft hum in the middle of a campus research lab. For now, fellow graduate student Prasanna Kolar stands nearby to operate the unmanned aerial vehicle through a cell phone app — gently commanding it left and right. But the goal is to create a process for a human to control the movements of groups of drones with only a thought, said Daniel Pack, chairman of UTSA’s electrical and computer engineering department.
The prospect of delivery UAS brings with it a few notable issues. Beyond visions of colliding rotor blades and unsolicited package drops lies another problem: the huge amount of computational power needed to take into account real world uncertainties, such as strong winds, limited battery life and navigational errors, in order to provide a reliable delivery service. This has been the focus of new study from MIT, with a team of researchers devising a new algorithm said to massively reduce the level of computation required, enabling the drone to monitor its “health” in real time. Continue reading
North Carolina State University researchers have developed methods for electronically manipulating the flight muscles of moths and for monitoring the electrical signals moths use to control those muscles. The work opens the door to the development of remotely-controlled moths, or “biobots,” for use in emergency response.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Airborne Sense and Avoid (ABSAA) Radar Panel is a stepped-notch antenna array that marks a substantial advance in the fabrication of wide-bandwidth radar systems for use aboard unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Continue reading
The professor heading up the project, Inna Sharf, is a mechanical engineer at McGill University’s Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory. Sharf’s team has been tasked with a new project to create autonomous landing UAS software. Continue reading