On October 28 a small quad-rotor delivery drone, of the type used to delivering packages to your door, resupplied a U. S. Navy Submarine.
Category: drones – Page 107
Uber has announced it’s developing a new drone it hopes to use for Uber Eats deliveries one day. Eric Allison, the head of Uber Elevate, talked about the new drone in Detroit yesterday at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. And while the mock-up design looks pretty cool, with rotating wings and six rotors, the details released so far raise some red flags.
According to Forbes (emphasis ours):
The new drone design can carry dinner for up two people and features six rotors, the company says. Its battery is designed for eight minutes, including loading and unloading, and it can only do relatively short hauls. The drone has a roundtrip range of 12 miles, or a total flight time of 18 minutes.
A drone-like flying taxi whirred over Singapore’s waterfront Tuesday, with the firm behind the test hoping the aircraft will revolutionize travel in traffic-choked Asian cities.
The 18 propeller vehicle, developed by German firm Volocopter and with a pilot onboard for safety during the test flight, took off from a promontory and flew for about two minutes and 30 seconds around the Marina Bay district.
Heavy rains in the morning almost delayed the flight, but the skies cleared in time for the battery-operated, two-seater taxi to quietly fly past skyscrapers.
UPS has launched an airline for life-saving medical deliveries. It’s the FAA’s first-ever approved drone airline, and it’s already being used at a North Carolina hospital campus. Oct. 25, 2019.
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Flying robots that deliver packages to people’s doorsteps are no longer science fiction. Companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Wing and Uber Technologies Inc. are starting the most advanced trials of drone delivery in U.S. history.
While commercial drone delivery faces many hurdles, government-approved tests by the tech giants will mark the first time consumers in parts of the country experience the technology. Wing this month started tests in Christiansburg, Va., while Uber says it will experiment in San Diego…
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The idea is simple: Send kites or tethered drones hundreds of meters up in the sky to generate electricity from the persistent winds aloft. With such technologies, it might even be possible to produce wind energy around the clock. However, the engineering required to realize this vision is still very much a work in progress.
Dozens of companies and researchers devoted to developing technologies that produce wind power while adrift high in the sky gathered at a conference in Glasgow, Scotland last week. They presented studies, experiments, field tests, and simulations describing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of various technologies collectively described as airborne wind energy (AWE).
In August, Alameda, Calif.-based Makani Technologies ran demonstration flights of its airborne wind turbines—which the company calls energy kites—in the North Sea, some 10 kilometers off the coast of Norway. According to Makani CEO Fort Felker, the North Sea tests consisted of a launch and “landing” test for the flyer followed by a flight test, in which the kite stayed aloft for an hour in “robust crosswind(s).” The flights were the first offshore tests of the company’s kite-and-buoy setup. The company has, however, been conducting onshore flights of various incarnations of their energy kites in California and Hawaii.
Raytheon has delivered the first anti-drone buggy to the US Air Force, just over year after it introduced the technology. It’s a high-energy laser system mounted on a small all-terrain vehicle, to be specific, which uses electro-optical/infrared sensors to detect and track drones. After it identifies and tracks the unwelcome flying device, it then neutralizes it with its laser in a process that takes a few seconds.
The air taxi’s maker, German aviation start-up Volocopter, has previously conducted public demonstration flights in Germany, Dubai and Finland.
“[This] is an important milestone for the introduction of urban air mobility, simply because we give people the image in their mind and the opportunity to see how the vehicle behaves in the air, and how quiet it is in full flight,” Volocopter CEO Florian Reuter told Al Jazeera after the test run.
Volocopter is one of several companies developing a drone equivalent to traditional helicopters, and proponents say electrically powered air taxis offer a safer, quieter, emissions-free alternative.
Search and Rescue
This isn’t the first time a drone has proven invaluable in a search-and-rescue operation — we’ve seen others help save stranded swimmers, earthquake victims, and lost hikers.
While many of the drones used for those missions were designed for rescue purposes, in this instance, the drone’s owner, Steve Fines, typically used it to shoot photography — but when he heard Ethan was lost, he knew he had to do what he could to help find the boy.