Military
General Atomics, which builds the iconic Predator, has rolled out its offering for DARPA’s Gremlins program, blandly called the Small Unmanned Air Vehicle (SUAS). The goal: Build drones — and equally critical, a launch and recovery system — that can take off from a manned aircraft, conduct a mission and come
News
The US Navy has awarded contracts to two contractors to refine concepts for the future MQ-25 unmanned carrier-based aerial refuelling aircraft. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) awarded a $43.6 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. “to conduct risk-reduction activities in support of the MQ-25 unmanned carrier aviation
Research
By making a detector’s pixels smarter than ever, DARPA aims to lay the foundation for multi-purpose imaging sensors that behave like many types of eyes at once.Picture a sensor pixel about the size of a red blood cell. Now envision a million of these pixels—a megapixel’s
News
This video presents an autonomous 250 g quadrotor performing aggressive maneuvers using a qualcomm snapdragon flight and relying only on on-board computation and sensor capabilities. The control planning and estimation tasks are solved based on the information provided by a single camera and an IMU. We show aggressive trajectories around
Research
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has announced that the Defense Department is expanding its technology startup DIUx, or Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental to Austin, Texas. DIUx was created to get new tech into the hands of our troops faster by changing the entire way DoD approaches innovation. “Given this city’
Research
The Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) and Lockheed Martin successfully demonstrated their UAV optimization technologies using aerial command and control (C2) of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The demonstration marks another successful milestone in the joint WUT-Lockheed Martin advanced applied research program on optimization of diverse fleets of aircraft, and
Research
ECBC joined with technology developers from private industry and other Army and joint organizations to test a new integrated system of chemical and biological agent sensors Aug. 15 through 26 at Dugway Proving Ground’s West Desert Test Center in Utah.The test took place at a U.S. Army
News
Boeing's hope that the Phantom Eye high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) might be returned to the skies has been ended with the disclosure by the US Air Force (USAF) that the sole prototype is to be sent to a museum instead.Flight trials of the liquid hydrogen-powered
Propulsion
Plastic foil substrates and chromium oxide interlayers are used in a novel technology that combines high efficiency, low weight, and extreme flexibility in a single platform.In the pursuit to solve the fossil fuel energy crisis, the use and development of photovoltaic technologies is thriving. In this technology, nature'
Research
A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot. This small, 3D-printed robot — nicknamed the octobot — could pave the way for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous machines. Soft robotics could revolutionize how humans
News
In a recently published study, researchers raised the possibility that ease the seagull's of flight might also make city centres an attractive option for these birds. Turbulant skies As terrestrial animals, it can be difficult for humans to imagine what it is like to travel in a medium
Accidents
Technical problems are to blame for the majority of drone-related accidents rather than their operators, according to researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Researchers Dr Graham Wild and Dr Glenn Baxter from RMIT University’s School of Engineering, along with John Murray from Edith Cowan University, completed the first