Tag: Drones

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NASA adds a drone to its 2020 Mars rover

Mars Helicopter
An artist’s conception shows the Mars Helicopter. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has given the thumbs-up to putting a helicopter on Mars.

The Mars Helicopter, which is actually more of an autonomous drone, will be packed into the belly pan of a Red Planet rover that’s due for launch in 2020.

For months, mission planners and scientists have been debating whether it’d be worth flying the 4-pound rotorcraft for a 30-day test campaign.

Adding the drone to the rover potentially takes away from the space and time that can be devoted to other scientific experiments. But in today’s announcement, Bridenstine said the helicopter would build on NASA’s “proud history of firsts.”

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10 teams cleared to push the limits with drones

Aerix drone
Pilot projects will send drones where no drones have gone before. (Aerix Photo)

The U.S. Department of Transportation has selected 10 state, local and tribal governments to oversee pilot projects that will go where no drones have gone before. But this time around, Amazon has been grounded.

The projects are meant to help set a course for ever-expanding drone operations over the next three years.

“Data gathered from these pilot projects will form the basis of a new regulatory framework to safely integrate drones into our national airspace,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said today in a news release.

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Zipline adds zip to drone delivery service

Zipline drone
Zipline’s next-generation drone can hit a top speed of 80 mph. (Zipline Photo)

A California-based aerial delivery venture called Zipline has unveiled what it calls “the fastest commercial delivery drone on Earth,” capable of flying as fast as 80 mph (128 km/h).

Sustained cruising speed for the latest version of Zipline’s fixed-wing drone is almost 63 mph (101 km/h), which is about 13 mph faster than the previous version. It has a round-trip range of 100 miles, and can carry a maximum load of nearly 4 pounds.

The drone isn’t the only thing that’s been upgraded: Changes in the company’s logistics system have reduced the time from receipt of an order to the launch of a fulfillment flight from 10 minutes to one minute.

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Antarctic drone duty gets a successful start

Seaglider at work
Pierre Dutrieux, an oceanographer from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, works on one of the three Seaglider underwater drones deployed in West Antarctica. (Paul G. Allen Philanthropies Photo)

A scientific team supported by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is reporting the successful deployment of a trio of undersea drones to monitor how climate change affects Antarctica’s ice sheets.

Now it’s up to the drones.

“We are so pleased with both the initial data collection and the unprecedented operational success of the mission thus far,” Spencer Reeder, director of climate and energy for Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, said in a news release. “It is hard to fathom that we have already witnessed multiple fully autonomous Seaglider forays of up to 140 kilometers round-trip under the ice shelf.”

The project is being conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, with almost $2 million in funding from Allen.

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Boeing HorizonX gives a lift to drone radar venture

DroneHunter
Fortem Technologies’ DroneHunter UAV is designed to detect intruder drones, using its onboard radar system, and snare them in a net if necessary. (Fortem Technologies Photo)

Boeing’s HorizonX venture capital arm signaled that it’s doubling down on autonomous flight technologies by participating in a $15 million funding round for Utah-based Fortem Technologies, which sells a miniaturized detect-and-avoid radar system for drones.

The investment was announced today, less than two weeks after Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said self-flying air taxis “will happen faster than any of us understand.”

Boeing has placed some big bets on the technology over the past year — including the acquisition of Aurora Flight Sciences, which is working on an all-electric, autonomous air taxi, and an earlier HorizonX investment in Near Earth Autonomy.

Fortem Technologies’ TrueView radar system is designed to help unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as UAVs, detect and avoid other airborne objects beyond visual line of sight. It’s a key capability that’ll be required for future applications such as Amazon’s drone delivery system.

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APP airbag could protect drone-dropped deliveries

APP airbag
A diagram from Amazon’s patent application shows a delivery drone dropping a package protected by an airbag. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Seven years after Jeff Bezos had the idea of putting an airbag on your smartphone, Amazon’s inventors have kicked it up a notch by patenting a drone-mounted system that inflates an airbag around your package just before it’s dropped off for delivery.

The inventors behind the new patent, published today, may not be as well-known as Amazon’s billionaire CEO, but they’re notable: One is Gur Kimchi, the Amazon VP in charge of the drone delivery program at Prime Air. The other is Avi Bar-zeev, who’s been involved in projects ranging from Microsoft HoloLens to Google Earth. He left Amazon after the patent application was filed in 2015 and is now at Apple.

The system they describe features an airlift package protection airbag, or APP airbag, that would be wrapped around a package that’s due to go out on a drone for delivery.

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Intel sets record with 1,218-drone Olympic salute

Intel drone show
The Intel drone light show team produces the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 Opening Ceremony drone light show, featuring Intel Shooting Star drones. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

The Winter Olympics’ first-ever drone light show has earned Intel the title from Guinness World Records for the “most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.”

There might be an asterisk in the record book, however: The show didn’t actually take place at today’s opening ceremony for the PyeongChang Olympics in South Korea. Instead, it was pre-recorded last December for broadcast during the event, just to make sure that bad weather or a technical glitch didn’t spoil the view.

The synchronized flight of 1,218 Intel Shooting Star drones broke Intel’s previous record of 500 drones, flown simultaneously in Germany in 2016. The performance also surpassed the 300-drone salute that was pre-recorded with Lady Gaga for Super Bowl LI last year.

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2,500 applicants sign up for drone experiments

Aerix drone
The FAA wants to give commercial drones freer rein. (Aerix Photo)

The city of Seattle, King County, Boeing, KING 5 and Tukwila’s police department are among more than 2,500 organizations and individuals who have registered their interest in experiments that could lead to routine drone deliveries, aerial night patrols and other advanced operations involving unmanned aerial systems.

One big name is missing from the Federal Aviation Administration’s list, which was published this week. It’s Amazon, the Seattle-based online retailer that’s been working on its own drone delivery system for years.

The fact that Amazon isn’t mentioned as an “interested party” doesn’t mean Amazon is uninterested: Registering isn’t a requirement for participating in the UAS Integration Pilot Program, which  the FAA set up to push the envelope for drone operations.

Being on the list of interested parties merely serves as a signal that the registrant wants to join a team that’ll be put together by governmental entities on a different list. That list of “lead applicants” has not been published.

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Why Amazon patented a self-destruct drone

Drone fragmentation
A diagram shows how a delivery drone might manage its own controlled fragmentation if it encounters problems during its trip. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Most inventors look for ways to make their machines more robust, but Amazon has won a patent for delivery drones that fall apart more easily.

Why? For safety reasons.

The patent application, filed last year and published last week, lays out a concept that calls for an automated “fragmentation controller” to be included on the drone.

That controller, analogous to a flight controller, works out and updates a backup plan for breaking the drone apart if the flight is disrupted for some reason.

As the drone goes about its business, onboard systems and the drone fleet’s mission control center would be on the watch for potentially hazardous conditions, such as inclement weather or equipment malfunctions.

If the drone gets into a jam, the fragmentation controller could be activated to go through an optimized self-destruct sequence. Pieces of hardware would drop off or be ejected based on the terrain that’s surrounding the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, when it gets into trouble.

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DroneSeed raises cash to plant trees with drones

DroneSeed drone
DroneSeed’s aerial vehicles drop water and seeds for reforestation. (DroneSeed via YouTube)

Seattle-based DroneSeed has raised more than $5 million in funding for a venture that uses drones to plant trees and sustain them from the air, according to documents filed this month with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Nov. 16 filing says 19 investors contributed to the funding round, with $260,000 of a $5.3 million offering remaining to be sold.

DroneSeed declined to identify the investors or provide further details about the investment.

In an email to GeekWire, DroneSeed CEO Grant Canary said the level of investment reported in the filing may change. More details are expected early next year.

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