Payloads
An enterprising young computer engineer, Jonas Pfeil, who recently graduated with an M.Sc. from the Technical University of Berlin, will present his 'Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera' as the Emerging Technologies demonstration at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011. Panoramic photography creates fascinating images. Very wide angle images are closer
Research
Thales Alenia Space has won a contract from the European Space Agency to lead a nine-month study regarding satellite communications solutions for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The ESPRIT (Emerging system concepts for UAS command & control via satellite) study will focus on the provision of communication capacity for Command & Control
Research
In May, DARPA launched the UAVForge Challenge to use crowd-sourcing to build small UAS through an exchange of ideas and design practices. The goal is to build and test a user-intuitive, backpack-portable UAS that can quietly fly in and out of critical environments to conduct sustained surveillance for up to
Research
NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center recently awarded contracts to six research and development firms to assist the center in meeting the goals of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System, or UAS in the NAS, project. In addition, cooperative agreements were issued to four universities
Research
Officials of the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Smart Collection Office in Washington has issued a broad agency announcement for the initial phase of the Great Horned Owl (GHO) programme. The programme seeks to develop fuel-to-electricity systems that couple advanced combustion engines to alternators or generators, as well
Research
Dr. Jayant Sirohi has focused his research on determining the most effective and efficient way to build tiny unmanned aircraft that can fly off and complete missions on its own. For the past two years, Sirohi has been developing, building and testing prototypes to find the most efficient design for
Research
Micro Air Vehicles are tiny, hovering bots that have been deployed for battlefield reconnaissance. But they’re still as limited as they are small. MAVs can’t really navigate urban environments or maintain a stable hover when the wind suddenly shifts. ”Get them among buildings or give them something to
Payloads
The US Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot “adversarial intent.” “If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation,
Research
The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania just posted this impressive video of their latest work in planning and control for heterogeneous quadrotor teams in environments with obstacles. The work was done by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev, and Vijay Kumar. Mid-sized Quad was
Research
The Guardian UK's Owen Bowcott joins Professors Jim Scanlan and Andy Keane from the University of Southampton, who are developing data-gathering unmanned aircraft for commercial and civilian use. The video also features the 3D printer built aircraft that we first featured on August 1. Source: Guardian Media Group
Research
This year competition includes not only unmanned air vehicles but unmanned ground vehicles as well. The format of the competition will build on the success of the UAV competitions held in 2007, 2009 and 2011 and will keep expanding through the involvement of UGVs. There are two competitions running together
Research
The International Micro Air Vehicle Conference (IMAV 2011) which was held in the Netherlands last week, also featured a series of indoor and outdoor competitions. Winner of the KLPD user trophy (Best operational MAV) was the Akaflieg Team from the Academic flight club Bremen, Germany. Full results are available here.