Futurist Foresight
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Posts tagged "uavs"
A wonderful microdrone.
Robotics researchers unveiled an electronic housefly on Thursday, one that can hover in air, flapping its wings to steer in a first demonstration of controlled artificial-insect flight.
A new look at older military tech given a modern use.
Image Credit Wikimedia Commons
“In the wake of budget cuts, the US Navy is turning to older technology in the war on drugs. As the Associated Press reports, last week the Navy began testing two new tools to monitor and capture drug smugglers in the Caribbean: the blimp-like aerostat, which has previously been used for surveillance in Iraq and Afghanistan as well to monitor the US-Mexico border, and a drone that’s launched from the deck of a ship by hand. While both are relatively older technology, they’ve been outfitted with radar, cameras, and sensors that reportedly expand a ship’s radar range from five miles to around 50 miles.” - The Verge
An innovative civilian use for drones.
Matternet wants to replace the postal system with drones
Snip from Huffington Post:
Imagine a world where drones fly the skies — but the drones aren’t for warfare. Instead they’re delivering packages, leapfrogging traditional infrastructure to create a world connected by tiny, nonviolent drones. In the U.S., such drones could replace the aging postal system; in developing countries, the drones could connect rural communities to markets, alleviating poverty and delivering badly needed supplies and medicines. […] A case study done by the Matternet team in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho in southern Africa, showed that the entire 140-kilometer capital could be connected by a drone network for $900,000. “In contrast, the cost to build a 2 kilometer winding road is a million dollars,” Santana said. For cash-poor countries with little infrastructure like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the cost difference is crucial, and the infrastructure Matternet provides — a whole network, rather than one road — could be lifesaving, she added.
A super small drone.
The mini drones can see over walls and around corners (credit: U.K. Army)
“A tiny remote-control helicopter is being used for surveillance on the front line to detect enemy threats to British troops.
British troops are using a nano drone just 10cm long and weighing 16 grams on the front line in Afghanistan to provide vital information on the ground, Sky News reports.”
An infographic look at civilian drone usage.
UAVs: Japan to develop missile-detecting drone
“Tokyo (AFP) Nov 4, 2012 - Japan is planning to develop an unmanned drone that could help detect a North Korean nuclear missile attack and to counter China’s military buildup, a report said Sunday.
The defence ministry has demanded 3 billion yen ($372 million) over the next four years to develop the aircraft, which would come into operation in 2020, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported without citing sources.
The development of the drone, which will be equipped with an infrared sensor to seek out low-altitude missiles, comes after Japan failed to detect North Korea’s failed rocket launch in April.”
UAVs: Civilian applications for drone tech in Africa - a delivery network using drones.
Matternet Is Developing a Vast Network of Delivery Drones to Move Our Stuff
Motherboard: So you want to do something good with drones, for once.
Andreas Raptopoulos: Yeah, exactly, I see a lot of opportunity to do good. Our particular goal is to do transportation in places that are not easily accessible. We think we stumbled upon something that can be the next paradigm for micro-transportation. We started thinking: ‘how can we serve places that are not connected by roads?’ Say, many Subsaharan African countries, many South American countries, where you need to deliver medicine, you need to deliver vaccines, you need to move blood samples for HIV—and there’s just no road to allow you to do it reliably.We started thinking, ‘can we use drones to help us do it?’ So we created a concept—as you know, small UAVs today are very, very capable. They move very reliably, and navigate by GPS and do missions that allow you to carry small loads. Our threshold right now is 2 kilograms, which is about 4 pounds. But the problem they have now is a battery life which doesn’t allow them to travel for long distances. So we created a system that basically allows us to counteract this disadvantage. We use small landing stations that do automatic battery swaps that allow one of those vehicles to land switch batteries and go out again.
PopTech Social Innovation Fellow Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure.
Related: The micro-everything revolution.
(via emergentfutures)
UAVs: The every increasing use of drones and how it will affect daily life.
By Conor Shine Las Vegas Sun
They can fly, swim and even walk, carrying cameras or cargo long distances through often-treacherous terrain.
The military has researched and used unmanned vehicle systems, commonly known as drones, for 40 years in faraway war zones. The vehicles have…
![Then legs,…. then UHVs (Unmanned Humanoid Vehicle)?
futurescope:
Robotic Arms being added to UAVs
via nextbigfuture:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as those used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance, could be getting a hand –and an arm– from engineers at Drexel University as part of a National Science Foundation grant to investigate adding dexterous limbs to the aircrafts.
[read more] [Drexel]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m86cllyPcA1r08k60o1_400.jpg)
Then legs,…. then UHVs (Unmanned Humanoid Vehicle)?
Robotic Arms being added to UAVs
via nextbigfuture:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as those used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance, could be getting a hand –and an arm– from engineers at Drexel University as part of a National Science Foundation grant to investigate adding dexterous limbs to the aircrafts.
(via futurescope)
![futurescope:
joshbyard:
Micro-Drones Improving Intelligence, Autonomous Capabilities Point to Bigger Role in Military
…researchers led by Roland Brockers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have developed a MAV that uses a camera pointed at the ground to navigate and pick landing spots. It can even identify people and other objects. The system enables the drone to travel through terrain where human control and GPS are unavailable, such as a city street or inside a building.
A human operator needs to tell the drone only two things before it sets off: where it is and where its objective is. The craft figures out the rest for itself, using the camera and onboard software to build a 3D map of its surroundings. It can also avoid obstacles and detect surfaces above a predetermined height as possible landing zones. Once it selects a place to put down, it maps the site’s dimensions, moves overhead and lands.
In a laboratory experiment, a 50 centimetre by 50 centimetre quadrotor craft equipped with the navigation system was able to take off, travel through an obstacle-filled indoor space and land successfully on an elevated platform. Brockers’s team is now testing the system in larger, more complex environments.
…Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that autonomous navigation and landing capabilities are unprecedented in a drone of this size. “Typically the information required to locate a landing site and stabilise a vehicle over it is coming in at a 100 times a second,” he says. “No one else has been able to design a system so small with this kind of processing power.”
(via Micro-drones: The new face of cutting-edge warfare - tech - 23 July 2012 - New Scientist)
[more @nextbigfuture] [paper (pdf)]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7maom8Agb1qgpcs1o1_400.jpg)
Micro-Drones Improving Intelligence, Autonomous Capabilities Point to Bigger Role in Military
…researchers led by Roland Brockers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have developed a MAV that uses a camera pointed at the ground to navigate and pick landing spots. It can even identify people and other objects. The system enables the drone to travel through terrain where human control and GPS are unavailable, such as a city street or inside a building.
A human operator needs to tell the drone only two things before it sets off: where it is and where its objective is. The craft figures out the rest for itself, using the camera and onboard software to build a 3D map of its surroundings. It can also avoid obstacles and detect surfaces above a predetermined height as possible landing zones. Once it selects a place to put down, it maps the site’s dimensions, moves overhead and lands.
In a laboratory experiment, a 50 centimetre by 50 centimetre quadrotor craft equipped with the navigation system was able to take off, travel through an obstacle-filled indoor space and land successfully on an elevated platform. Brockers’s team is now testing the system in larger, more complex environments.
…Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that autonomous navigation and landing capabilities are unprecedented in a drone of this size. “Typically the information required to locate a landing site and stabilise a vehicle over it is coming in at a 100 times a second,” he says. “No one else has been able to design a system so small with this kind of processing power.”
(via Micro-drones: The new face of cutting-edge warfare - tech - 23 July 2012 - New Scientist)
[more @nextbigfuture] [paper (pdf)]
(via emergentfutures)
