Military
DARPA’s Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program seeks to help the U.S. military’s unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) conduct dynamic, long-distance engagements of highly mobile ground and maritime targets in denied or contested electromagnetic airspace, all while reducing required communication bandwidth and cognitive burden on human supervisors.
Research
Scientists from Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have undertaken a research program exploring the potential for drones to detect bonnethead sharks lurking in the shallows. The project is designed to test out exactly how reliable this approach could be when dealing with different water conditions and
News
If there’s ever a radiological catastrophe in the U.S. like the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, the stewards of the former national nuclear weapons proving ground in Nevada expect to be ready to deploy remote-controlled drones to check for contamination. Nevada National Security Site officials have purchased two
News
While scientists have gotten a lot better at estimating the strength of a hurricane before it hits land, they still don’t fully understand how hurricanes form. While satellite measurements can give meteorologists a pretty good picture of the atmospheric temperature and precipitation within a hurricane, sometimes the resolution is
Research
Drones may soon have the capability to save thousands of lives each year by detecting terrorists’ improvised explosive devices and active land mines from long-ago wars thanks to innovative technology developed at UW-Madison. The proven detection technology that also can detect chemical and nuclear weapons and drugs was successfully miniaturized
Research
Guoquan Huang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware was recently awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to design resource-aware, attack-resilient, consistent MAV navigation. The $166,000 award will enable Huang, whose expertise lies in robotics, to develop consistent state estimation algorithms that will
Propulsion
A paperlike battery electrode developed by a Kansas State University engineer may improve tools for space exploration or unmanned aerial vehicles. Gurpreet Singh, associate professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering, and his research team created the battery electrode using silicon oxycarbide-glass and graphene. The battery electrode has all the right
News
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, have developed an innovative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can stay on station beneath the water, then launch into the air to perform a variety of missions. The Corrosion Resistant Aerial Covert Unmanned Nautical System - or CRACUNS
Research
Aurora Flight Sciences announced that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the company the prime contract for Phase 2 of the Agency’s Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program. For decades, aircraft designers seeking to improve vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities have endured
Research
North Dakota State’s unmanned aerial vehicle program has been and continues to do ground-breaking research since it began in 2014. The program, led through the NDSU extension service of the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering department, has conducted research at the Carrington and Williston research centers. It now will be
Technology
MIT Media Labs has made sensor deployment as easy as unraveling a strip of tape from your toolkit. They’ve developed SensorTape, an unroll-able, deployable network of interconnected IMU and proximity sensors packaged in a familiar form factor of a roll of masking tape. Possibly the most interesting technical challenge
Research
Things were all abuzz at the 102nd Intelligence Wing, Jan. 18-22. The wing hosted a team of robotics experts and support personnel from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on the Building 158 hangar floor to test the capabilities of the latest autonomous UAVs and sensors as part of its