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Archive for the ‘drones’ category: Page 73

Aug 19, 2020

Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI, space

This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.

“Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot’s weight,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.

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Aug 12, 2020

World’s First Manned Racing Drone Does A Backflip

Posted by in category: drones

Click on photo to start video.

The world’s first manned racing drone just took its first flight… Now, this is pod racing! 🙌 🤯

Flite Test

Aug 8, 2020

Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biological, cybercrime/malcode, drones, internet, law enforcement, nanotechnology, robotics/AI

The terrorist or psychopath of the future, however, will have not just the Internet or drones—called “slaughterbots” in this video from the Future of Life Institute—but also synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and advanced AI systems at their disposal. These tools make wreaking havoc across international borders trivial, which raises the question: Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not. What justifies the existence of the state, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, is a “social contract.” People give up certain freedoms in exchange for state-provided security, whereby the state acts as a neutral “referee” that can intervene when people get into disputes, punish people who steal and murder, and enforce contracts signed by parties with competing interests.

The trouble is that if anyone anywhere can attack anyone anywhere else, then states will become—and are becoming—unable to satisfy their primary duty as referee.

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Aug 5, 2020

Four companies will square off to win money to build Skyborg drone prototypes

Posted by in categories: drones, economics, military

Not all the companies that won Skyborg contracts are assured to score orders to build prototypes.

Aug 5, 2020

Propelling Exploration: Drones Are Going Interplanetary

Posted by in categories: drones, space

face_with_colon_three circa 2019.


Drones have already conquered Earth, and now they’re heading out into the solar system.

NASA announced yesterday (June 27) that it will launch a life-hunting rotorcraft called Dragonfly toward Saturn’s huge moon Titan in 2026. If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will land on the hazy, frigid satellite in 2034 and then spend several years flying around, gathering a variety of data and snapping amazing photos of the exotic landscape.

Aug 5, 2020

Watch SpaceX launch a South Korean satellite using the same booster that flew NASA astronauts

Posted by in categories: drones, military, satellites

SpaceX is launching South Korea’s first dedicated military communications satellite on Monday, with a target liftoff time of 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT). The launch window spans nearly four hours, ending at 8:55 PM EDT (5:55 PM PDT), so SpaceX has considerable flexibility in terms of when the launch could actually take place.

The Falcon 9 rocket being used for this mission includes a first-stage booster that flew previously on SpaceX and NASA’s Demo-2 mission — the historic mission that carried astronauts on board a SpaceX rocket for the first time. That launch, which took place on May 30, saw astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley successfully delivered to the International Space Station — where they’re currently preparing to depart on Demo-2’s concluding trip home on August 1.

This mission will include a recovery attempt for the first stage, using SpaceX’s “Just Read the Instructions” drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Aug 5, 2020

Self-organising swarms of firefighting drones: Harnessing the power of collective intelligence in decentralised multi-robot systems

Posted by in categories: drones, information science, particle physics, robotics/AI

Swarm intelligence (SI) is concerned with the collective behaviour that emerges from decentralised self-organising systems, whilst swarm robotics (SR) is an approach to the self-coordination of large numbers of simple robots which emerged as the application of SI to multi-robot systems. Given the increasing severity and frequency of occurrence of wildfires and the hazardous nature of fighting their propagation, the use of disposable inexpensive robots in place of humans is of special interest. This paper demonstrates the feasibility and potential of employing SR to fight fires autonomously, with a focus on the self-coordination mechanisms for the desired firefighting behaviour to emerge. Thus, an efficient physics-based model of fire propagation and a self-organisation algorithm for swarms of firefighting drones are developed and coupled, with the collaborative behaviour based on a particle swarm algorithm adapted to individuals operating within physical dynamic environments of high severity and frequency of change. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed self-organising system is effective, scalable and fault-tolerant, comprising a promising approach to dealing with the suppression of wildfires – one of the world’s most pressing challenges of our time.

Aug 5, 2020

Will Drone Waiters Revolutionise Food Service?

Posted by in categories: drones, food, robotics/AI

Drone Waiters-Boss Magazine
According to Forbes, payroll costs consume up to 25 per cent of a restaurant’s profit. Restaurateurs in Sydney and other parts of Australia hope to combat that expense by following in the footsteps of venues in Asia that have used drone waiters instead of human wait staff.

Faster and Human-Free Waiter drones are robotic devices that soar through the air with platters of food and glasses of beverages perched on top. Customers place their orders via electronic devices or other means, then the kitchen sends out their food on trays carried by machines rather than humans. Each drone can carry up to 4.4 pounds of cargo.

Sensors on the sides of the drones prevent them from crashing into objects or people as they navigate busy restaurants. While this strategy eliminates the human element that many experts believe is essential to the hospitality industry, the waiter drones’ success in Asia suggests they might prove a valuable contribution to restaurants in Australia.

Aug 5, 2020

DJI R&D head dreams of drones fighting fires by the thousands in ‘aerial aqueduct’

Posted by in category: drones

Drone companies like DJI, Aerones, and Walkera are thinking about how drones can soon revolutionize the way we fight fires.

Aug 3, 2020

Artificial intelligence and algorithms bring drone inspection breakthrough

Posted by in categories: drones, information science, robotics/AI

A drone has successfully inspected a 19.4 meter high oil tank onboard a Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel. The video shot by the drone was interpreted in real-time by an algorithm to detect cracks in the structure.

Scout Drone Inspection and class society DNV GL have been working together to develop an autonomous drone system to overcome the common challenges of tank inspections. For the customer, costs can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars as the tank is taken out of service for days to ventilate and construct scaffolding. The tanks are also tough work environments, with surveyors often having to climb or raft into hard to reach corners. Using a drone in combination with an algorithm to gather and analyse video footage can significantly reduce survey times and staging costs, while at the same time improving surveyor safety.

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