First-person drone piloting is yesterday’s news. Drones are becoming smarter as the electronic environment around them makes operator communication more difficult.
Category: drones – Page 10

While the Concorde’s engine relied on thousands of parts to break the sound barrier
There are several organizations and start-ups across the world that are working on developing hypersonic jets capable of flying at speeds above Mach 5 (3,836 mph). However, a propulsion system capable of providing sustained thrust at those speeds continues to be the biggest hurdle. Texas-based start-up Venus Aerospace has revealed a groundbreaking engine that has the potential to completely revolutionize high-speed air travel. Called the Venus Detonation Ramjet 2000 lb Thrust Engine (VDR2), the advanced propulsion system was unveiled at the recent Up. Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The VDR2 is engineered to power drones and aircraft to hypersonic speeds, allowing them to travel vast distances at high altitudes with unmatched efficiency. The hypersonic propulsion system combines the high thrust and efficiency of the Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) with the high-efficiency cruise of a Ramjet. Developed by Venus in partnership with high-speed air combustion specialist Velontra, the VDR2 will operate as a single engine offering propulsion from take-off to attaining speeds up to Mach 6.
Also read — Boom Supersonic’s superfactory, which will be building the ‘son of Concorde,’ will be completed by spring this year. The first assembly line at the North Carolina facility will roll out 33 supersonic aircraft each year, capable of flying passengers from New York to London in 3.5 hours.

Army Testing Robot Dogs Armed with Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Rifles in Middle East
The Army has sent at least one “robot dog” armed with an artificial intelligence-enabled gun turret to the Middle East for testing as a fresh counter-drone capability for U.S. service members, service officials confirmed.
Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service last…
The Army was testing at least one armed quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle at an installation in Saudi Arabia.



This robotic knee exoskeleton is made from consumer braces and drone motors
Robotic exoskeletons are an increasingly popular method for assisting human labor in the workplace. Those that specifically support the back, however, can result in bad lifting form by the wearer. To combat this, researchers at the University of Michigan have built a pair of robot knee exoskeletons, using commercially available drone motors and knee braces.
“Rather than directly bracing the back and giving up on proper lifting form,” U-M professor Robert Gregg notes, “we strengthen the legs to maintain it.”
Test subjects were required to move a 30-pound kettlebell up and down a flight of stairs. Researchers note that the tech helped them maintain good lifting form, while lifting more quickly.

Spiking Neural Networks and Their Applications: A Review
The past decade has witnessed the great success of deep neural networks in various domains. However, deep neural networks are very resource-intensive in terms of energy consumption, data requirements, and high computational costs. With the recent increasing need for the autonomy of machines in the real world, e.g., self-driving vehicles, drones, and collaborative robots, exploitation of deep neural networks in those applications has been actively investigated. In those applications, energy and computational efficiencies are especially important because of the need for real-time responses and the limited energy supply. A promising solution to these previously infeasible applications has recently been given by biologically plausible spiking neural networks. Spiking neural networks aim to bridge the gap between neuroscience and machine learning, using biologically realistic models of neurons to carry out the computation. Due to their functional similarity to the biological neural network, spiking neural networks can embrace the sparsity found in biology and are highly compatible with temporal code. Our contributions in this work are: (i) we give a comprehensive review of theories of biological neurons; (ii) we present various existing spike-based neuron models, which have been studied in neuroscience; (iii) we detail synapse models; (iv) we provide a review of artificial neural networks; (v) we provide detailed guidance on how to train spike-based neuron models; (vi) we revise available spike-based neuron frameworks that have been developed to support implementing spiking neural networks; (vii) finally, we cover existing spiking neural network applications in computer vision and robotics domains. The paper concludes with discussions of future perspectives.
Keywords: spiking neural networks, biological neural network, autonomous robot, robotics, computer vision, neuromorphic hardware, toolkits, survey, review.
MIT’s new drone with flying claws grabs objects mid-air at high speed
MIT’s soft drone flies and grasps, swiftly picking up a bottle in a demo video:
Interestingly, the drone’s new capabilities allow it to catch objects that are moving at speeds of up to 0.3 meters per second.
Researchers have been developing drones that can perch on surfaces and perform tasks such as inspecting structures and collecting DNA samples from trees. Surprisingly, this drone can do this in the near future. The video shows the drone hovering over a table, reaching out with its gripper, and successfully gripping a bottle.
This technology has several possible uses, ranging from simple activities like parcel delivery to more difficult missions in dangerous settings.

SpaceX Falcon 9 cleared to launch by FAA; next launch: Starlink overnight
Three days ago, an old Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded while landing on a drone ship during its 23rd landing. This caused SpaceX to halt the launch of another Falcon 9 rocket scheduled a few hours later while they worked on the problem.
3 days later, SpaceX had already corrected the problem and did two more Falcon 9 launches and landings. The 3 days included one day to get permission from the Federal government to launch again.
No other space company moves this fast! Normally, a space company takes a year or two to recover from an accident.
For example, NASA didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Challenger accident and again didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Columbia accident. These massive delays didn’t even contribute much to safety. For example, the last time a Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded was over 250 missions ago, more missions than all the Space Shuttles flew in total! The last time SpaceX actually lost customer cargo was 351 flights ago! (The Space Shuttle had a total of 135 flights, 2 being failures that killed a total of 14 people.)
Again, talking about safety, the Columbia blew up because its heat shield tiles failed. Well, in the last Starship test, many heat shield tiles failed although it landed safely, so Elon made a ton of changes to Starship including adding ablative shielding under critical heat shield tiles. The Space Shuttle never got protective ablative shielding, an example of why it had a poor safety record.
The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch the Falcon 9 while the investigation into Wednesday’s mishap wraps up.
Murder Drones: Full Movie
Thank you @LiamVickersAnimation made us such a wonderful animated series, we wish you good luck in your life in the meantime, enjoy the movie of all the epi…