The validity of the FAA’s new drone registry is under challenge in federal court. The hope for these hobby flyers is that if the challenge is successful, they – including children as young as 13 – won’t have to file their names and home addresses in a public database. Many hobby flyers have held off on registering their drones, concerned about the public availability of their information. Continue reading
General Atomics Gets $338M Air Force and Air National Guard Operations Contract
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., Poway, California, has been awarded a $338,231,976 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for Predator (MQ1) and Reaper (MQ9) unmanned aerial systems contractor logistic support. Continue reading
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
Russia Introduces Obligatory Drone Registration
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that obliges all private owners of unmanned aircraft weighing over 250 grams to register them with the Federal Air Transport Agency. Continue reading
Drone Camera Crashes Near Skier on Live TV
The world’s best Alpine skier was nearly taken out by a drone camera in the middle of a slalom run recently. Continue reading
Drone Closes Heathrow Airport Runway
A drone was the cause of Heathrow Airport’s runway closure at the weekend. It closed for several minutes after the drone was spotted in the airspace of Britain’s busiest airport. Continue reading
Smallest Quadcopter with Streaming WI-FI Video
The Axis Aerius is considered to be the smallest RC quadcopter you can buy, even smaller than the company’s new Vidius drone. But that’s because Axis has managed to fit a live-streaming wi-fi video camera inside the new Vidius, giving pilots a first-person view of their flights. 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