Tag Archives: Drone

A tethered drone has been used to demonstrate a pop-up large area private 4G LTE cellular network. “This allows the drone to act as a mobile tower in the skies, granting connectivity across expansive areas, covering up to 28km2 for 4G and even further for P25,” according to Simoco Wireless Solutions, which provided P25 radio equipment for the proof-of-concept. “Imagine ...

The University of Tokyo has demonstrated a near-autonomous drone-based system to identify the perfect day to pick a crop. “Harvesting a field as little as a day before or after the optimal time could reduce the potential income of that field for the farmer by 3.7% to as much as 20.4%,” said Tokyo researcher Wei Guo. “But optimum harvest times ...

BAE and Malloy Aeronautics have demonstrated their T-600 heavy drone in a NATO exercise in Portugal. “Our smaller T-150 has been tested and operated for years by the UK MoD and US DoD,” said Malloy Aeronautics CEO Oriol Badia. “T-600 has gone from concept to operational demonstrator in record time for a vehicle in this payload class.” Capable of vertical ...

Drone racing has joined the list of activities where AI beats humans – in multiple races against three world-class humans in this case – following research at the University of Zurich and Intel. “Physical sports are more challenging for AI because they are less predictable than board or video games,” said Zurich head of robotics and perception Davide Scaramuzza. “We ...

Sony has created a 61Mpixel interchangeable lens camera for professionals with industrial applications, such as those using drones for inspection, investigation, surveying or mapping. ILX-LR1, as it will be called, is box-shaped and measures 100 x 74 x 42.4mm and 240g. M3 screw holes allow mounting on any of its six sides, and there is a 1/4-20 UNC threaded (‘tripod’) ...

Mouser Electronics and Texas Instruments have teamed up to explore the challenges of electric urban air transportation (think: ‘big drones’) in a 26 page ebook. “Over the next ten years, the urban air mobility market will mature sufficiently to make short distance, point-to-point travel commonplace and affordable in densely populated areas through driver-less air taxis,” according to Mouser. “The five chapters ...

The project, Protecting Environments with UAV Swarms, also includes the British Antarctic Survey and Lancashire Fire and Rescue. Its vehicle is Windracers’ 10 metre wingspan twin-engine UAV, which can carry 100kg across 1,000km. “It incorporates a high-reliability autopilot system provided by Distributed Avionics,” said Windracers, and “the entire aircraft has been developed using a zero-single-point-of-failure philosophy, being robust to flight ...

Royal Mail is trying scheduled autonomous drone flights between Kirkwall and North Ronaldsay for two weeks. The trial, with drone operating company Windracers, is part of the UK Research and Innovation-funded ‘SATE’ project – a bid to better connect remote island communities. The drone is a UK-built fuel-powered twin-engine Ultra, and will operated from Kirkwall Airport on a 35 mile each-way ...

Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a way for drones to co-operate when carrying heavy parcels. According to the university, controlling a group of robots connected together to lift a package is in many ways more complex than controlling a swarm of robots that fly independently. “For us, the challenge is that the vehicles are being pulled in different directions by ...

FlyFocus has developed a detachable tethered drone that can hover for up to 30 days at 70m altitude, powered through a tether, then drop the line to fly for up to 30 minutes on internal batteries. Called CableGuard, the drone consumes up to 5kW, and 400Vdc is specified within the tether cable to reduce I2R losses, allowing lighter conductors to ...