Tag: Drones

Categories
GeekWire

Radical raises $4.5M for stratospheric solar drones

Radical demonstration airplane seen from above during test flight
Radical's demonstration airplane takes a long-duration test flight. (Radical Photo)

Seattle-based Radical says it has raised $4.5 million to support the development of solar-powered, autonomous airplanes that can beam down connectivity and imagery during long-duration, high-altitude flights.

The seed funding round was led by Scout Ventures, with additional funding from other investors including Inflection Mercury Fund and Y Combinator. According to Pitchbook, Radical previously received $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator.

Radical’s co-founders are CEO James Thomas and chief technology officer Cyriel Notteboom. Both founders are veterans of Prime Air, Amazon’s effort to field a fleet of delivery drones. They left Amazon in mid-2022 to found Radical — and the aerospace startup is just now coming out of stealth.

Thomas told me that Radical will use the fresh investment to expand its team, which currently amounts to four people. “We’re still a small team, but we’re growing very quickly,” he said. “We’re currently hiring. Those positions are up on our website, with more to come.”

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Amazon drones advance in Arizona, retreat in California

Amazon MK30 drone
Amazon says its next-generation MK30 drone will start making deliveries later this year. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon says it’s gearing up to add a community in Arizona to its list of Prime Air drone delivery zones.

Later this year, customers in the West Valley region of the Phoenix metro area will be able to get their purchases via drones dispatched from Amazon’s Same-Day Delivery site in Tolleson, Ariz., the company said today.

The West Valley region joins College Station in Texas as an Amazon drone delivery site. Last year, Prime Air began free prescription deliveries in 60 minutes or less to customers in College Station, in partnership with Amazon Pharmacy.

For the past two years, Amazon has also been offering drone deliveries in Lockeford, Calif. — but today the company said it would be closing down that delivery site, citing the need to “prioritize our resources to continue growing the program.”

“We’ll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods,” Amazon said.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Cosmic Tech

WiBotic unveils a pad that can manage drones on its own

PowerPad Pro sitting in a crop field
WiBotic's PowerPad Pro undergoes testing in a farm field. (WiBotic Photo)

Seattle-based WiBotic has made a name for itself with battery charging stations for drones as well as for ground-based robots, and now its best-known charger is getting smarter.

WiBotic’s PowerPad Pro can bring in any type of drone for autonomous charging — without needing a human operator to guide it in — and also download a drone’s high-resolution data for transmission to a remote mission control center.

“We’ve really solved the power and data piece for this,” Ben Waters, Wibotic’s co-founder and CEO, told me.

Continue reading “WiBotic unveils a pad that can manage drones on its own”
Categories
GeekWire

Microsoft pushes autonomous drones to new heights

Wind farm simulation with inspection drone
A simulated drone flies next to a wind turbine during a Project AirSim training session. (Airtonomy Graphic)

How do you teach an autonomous drone to fly itself? Practice, practice, practice.

Now Microsoft is offering a way to put a drone’s control software through its paces millions of times before the first takeoff.

The cloud-based simulation platform, Project AirSim, is being made available in limited preview starting today, in conjunction with this week’s Farnborough International Airshow in Britain.

“Project AirSim is a critical tool that lets us bridge the world of bits and the world of atoms, and it shows the power of the industrial metaverse — the virtual worlds where businesses will build, test and hone solutions, and then bring them into the real world,” Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft corporate vice president for business incubations in technology and research, said today in a blog posting.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

NASA funds big ideas from small businesses

Illustration: Astronauts on the moon
An artist’s conception shows astronauts at work on the moon. (NASA Illustration)

How do you keep moondust from gumming up the works in NASA’s future spacesuits and spacecraft? That’s one of the issues addressed in the latest batch of projects backed by NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program.

“NASA is working on ambitious, groundbreaking missions that require innovative solutions from a variety of sources – especially our small businesses,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in a news release. “Small businesses have the creative edge and expertise needed to help our agency solve our common and complex challenges, and they are crucial to maintaining NASA’s leadership in space.”

Four SBIR research contracts will go to Washington state companies. And two of those contracts are going to Everett-based Off Planet Research. One Off Planet project focuses on the development of a flexible fiber seal that will hold up in dusty environments.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Walmart and DroneUp set up drone delivery hubs

Walmart drone delivery
A package-carrying drone flies above a Walmart store and its DroneUp delivery hub. (Walmart / DroneUp Photo)

Walmart is partnering with Virginia-based DroneUp on a network of drone delivery hubs, starting with a neighborhood market in Farmington, Ark.

The move appears to put Walmart ahead of its retail rival, Amazon, in expanding the frontier for aerial deliveries. Amazon announced its drone development program back in 2013, and two years ago, the company said regular drone deliveries were mere months away. Recent reports, however, have hinted that Amazon Prime Air’s progress has slowed down significantly.

Today’s announcement about the first delivery hubs in Arkansas comes five months after Walmart made a strategic investment in DroneUp and signed a contract that expanded the companies’ pilot project for drone deliveries.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Cosmic Space

Mars helicopter blazes trail for future flights

An image captured by NASA's Ingenuity helicopter shows the rotorcraft's shadow on the Martian surface. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)

For the first time ever, a robotic flier made a controlled takeoff and landing on the surface of another planet – and NASA says space exploration will never be the same.

“This really is a Wright Brothers moment,” NASA’s acting administrator, Steve Jurczyk, said hours after today’s first Red Planet flight by the Ingenuity helicopter.

The 4-pound, solar-powered helicopter arrived on Mars in February as a piggyback payload on NASA’s Perseverance rover. After weeks of preparation, which included a software fix downloaded from a distance of 178 million miles, Ingenuity spun up its twin rotors and lifted off for a 39.1-second, 10-foot-high hop.

It was the first of five planned flights that serve as a technology demonstration for future aerial missions that could flit through Mars’ ultra-thin carbon dioxide atmosphere.

Project manager MiMi Aung of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the feat was equivalent to sending an earthly rotorcraft flying at an altitude three times the height of the Himalayas.

“Unforgettable day,” she said.

Continue reading “Mars helicopter blazes trail for future flights”
Categories
GeekWire

Robot charging system wins Europe’s seal of approval

Drone with WiBotic PowerPad
A drone outfitted with WiBotic’s wireless charger sits on top of a WiBotic PowerPad. (WiBotic Photo)

Two of the wireless charging systems made by Seattle-based WiBotic have won safety approvals in Europe, marking what the startup’s CEO calls a major milestone.

The chargers and transmitters now have CE Mark approval, which means they meet the safety, health and environmental protection requirements for the European Economic Area. What’s more, the systems have been found to comply with the International Electrotechnical Commission’s directives for the European Union and Canada’s CSA Group standards organization.

“We also recently completed FCC approval in the U.S., so our systems are compliant with reputable regulatory agencies within many countries around the world,” WiBotic CEO Ben Waters said today in a news release. “This, in turn, opens several exciting partnership and deployment opportunities for us across Europe, Canada and beyond.”

WiBotic, which was spun out from the University of Washington in 2015, has developed battery charging systems that can power up autonomous drones as well as robots on land or sea wirelessly, without human intervention. The company’s power management software, known as Commander, can work with the hardware to optimize battery use for an entire fleet of robots.

There’s even a project aimed at charging up future robots on the moon.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

This software takes charge of charging up robots

WiBotic Commander
WiBotic’s Commander software package keeps track of the charging status for a fleet of drones. (WiBotic Graphic)

It’s hard enough to remember to keep your smartphone charged up, so can you imagine how much harder it’d be to track the charging status of dozens of drones or robots? Now WiBotic has an app for that: a software platform that manages the battery-charging routines for mobile devices that use its wireless charging system.

Today the seven-year-old Seattle startup unveiled its first software product, an energy management package called Commander.

“Commander was developed mostly through listening and learning from our customers who were building robots, and then deploying robots, and then deploying fleets,” said Ben Waters, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

FAA rules could smooth the way for drone deliveries

Delivery drone at re:MARS
Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Business, shows off the company’s delivery drone in June 2019. (Amazon Photo)

After months of feedback and fine-tuning, the Federal Aviation Administration today issued its final versions of safety rules for drones that fly over people and at night — including the drones that Amazon is developing to make package deliveries.

“The new rules make way for the further integration of drones into our airspace by addressing safety and security concerns,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said in a news release. “They get us closer to the day when we will more routinely see drone operations such as the delivery of packages.”

Draft versions of the rules were issued a year ago, kicking off a review period during which the FAA received about 53,000 comments. The final rules take effect in about two months.

Get the full story on GeekWire