Cosmic Log
The Federal Aviation Administration today followed up on a White House mandate to speed progress toward drone deliveries by laying out a streamlined plan for approving more advanced operations.
Many of those operational features — such as flying beyond a drone operator’s visual line of sight, night flights and flying over people — are considered crucial for the drone delivery schemes being tested by Amazon as well as Google’s parent company and other ventures.
Seattle-based WiBotic today took the wraps off an integrated wireless charging pad for drones, as well as an onboard charger that weighs just 1.6 ounces.
The two new products are part of the University of Washington spinout’s strategy to provide a system for charging up robotic aerial vehicles as they go about their business, untouched by human hands.
The plug-and-play system is set up to send power wirelessly at short range from the pad’s transmitter to the charger’s receiver. Then the transmission is converted into electricity for a drone’s batteries. It’s an alternative to switching out batteries by hand, or hooking it up to a direct-contact charging system.
“Taking autonomous to the sky: You knew it was coming.”
Swiss-based Passenger Drone is following up on the tag line from one of its videosby declaring that its autonomous flying machine is indeed taking people into the sky on test flights.
The car-sized, electric-powered, 16-rotor copter has been stealthily under development for months. Robotic flight tests began in Switzerland in May, kicking off a succession of outings with simulated payload weights.
The first flights with passengers on board took place in early September, Peter Delco, one of the partners in the project, told GeekWire in an email.
While Amazon continues testing drone delivery systems for popcorn and other consumer goods, a startup called Zipline is expanding its fully operational medical drone delivery system from Rwanda to Tanzania to serve a desperate global health need.
Among the effort’s backers is the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Today Tanzanian health officials announced that they’ll launch what may well rank as the world’s largest drone delivery service in the first quarter of 2018.
When the system is up and running, fixed-wing drones will make up to 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities that serve 10 million people, according to a news release issued by California-based Zipline.
We already know about Amazon’s concept for airship warehouses to support drone deliveries, but here’s a new twist: Now the Seattle-based retailing giant has received a patent for another airship application, aimed at keeping track of drones as they go about their business.
And there’s yet another twist: That other retailing giant, Walmart, has its own plans for airship warehouses.
Amazon’s concept – known as an airborne monitoring station, or AMS – is described in a patent application that was filed two years ago and published today.
There’s new cause for hope in the fight against wildfires, and it involves Insitu, a Boeing subsidiary that’s headquartered in Bingen, Wash., and specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles.
Today Insitu announced a partnership with FireWhat, a California-based company that focuses on monitoring natural resources with Geographic Information Systems; and Esri, the global market leader in GIS software.
The three companies will use Insitu’s ScanEagle drones, FireWhat’s fire-monitoring technology and Esri’s ArcGIS platform to provide near-real time, web-based video feeds to mobile command centers.
During the day, military-grade electro-optical cameras will help fire incident commanders monitor the battle against wildfires. During the night, infrared cameras will keep watch. The aerial reconnaissance system will make use of an integrated imaging system developed by Insitu’s INEXA Solutions.
The drive to provide global internet access from the air is more of a horse race in the wake of Facebook’s second test flight of its full-scale Aquila high-altitude drone – a flight that the company said was more successful than the first one.
Facebook is developing the ultralight, solar-powered drone as a platform for beaming down network connectivity from a height of more than 60,000 feet, for months at a time. The idea is to provide internet service – including, of course, access to Facebook and its advertisers – to some of the billions of people who are in areas too remote for existing avenues of access.
A year ago, Facebook’s first test flight ended in a crash that substantially damaged the aircraft, apparently due to a gust of wind that put the drone in the wrong configuration for landing.
It took months for Facebook to fine-tune the drone’s design for the second flight, conducted May 22 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
Small drones, big data and computer vision: That’s the tech-frontier trifecta for Clobotics, a Shanghai startup that says it’s raised $5 million in seed funding and opened a research and development center in the Seattle area.
“This is where I took the plunge,” Clobotics co-founder George Yan, a former executive at Microsoft China and the Chinese drone venture Ehang, told GeekWire.
Yan said Clobotics (“cloud” plus “robotics”) has been more than a decade in the making. The venture aims to capitalize on the capabilities of aerial robotics and artificial intelligence to automate the task of evaluating the condition of hard-to-reach infrastructure.
GGV Capital, a U.S.-Chinese venture capital firm, is leading a $5 million financing round to get Clobotics off the ground, Yan said.
If filmmakers ever decide to do a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” with drones instead of birds, they could use Amazon’s concept for a drone-dominated fulfillment center in their set design.
The artwork, included in a patent application published today, shows a nine-story hive that’s swarming with drones. I’d hate to be the stick figure standing beneath that swarm.
A team of six Amazon inventors filed the application in 2015 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. Their intent isn’t to stir up nightmares, but to secure the rights to a design that optimizes Amazon’s traditional fulfillment centers for drone deliveries in an urban environment.
What happens if a child or a dog wanders into range while a drone is dipping down to make a delivery? Amazon has an answer: a “virtual safety shroud” that the drone creates, potentially based on readings picked up by its propellers.
The detect-and-avoid system is described in a patent application published today. Among the inventors is Gur Kimchi, the vice president and co-founder of Amazon Prime Air’s drone delivery operation, so you know it’s serious.
Amazon traditionally doesn’t comment on its patent applications, but here’s how the safety shroud would work, based on the description in the application, which was filed in February.