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Category: drones – Page 110

https://youtu.be/qqtv4XAWeC8

Where to get the GAIA 160-Hybrid drone: https://www.foxtechfpv.com/gaia-160-hybrid-hexacopter-arf-combo.html

We did it!!!!!!
Broke the Flight Time Record!!!!!
This is a historic moment for UAV drone.
Foxtech GAIA 160-Hybrid has made aviation history by completing the 100km crossing sea bay flight in 180 minutes.
On 9th September, Foxtech team successfully completed the crossing sea bay flight with GAIA 160-Hybrid from changdao to dalian. GAIA 160-Hybrid took off from a yacht in changdao and landed on a coast of Dalian, the total range is 100km, this is the longest single flight of a hexacopter in the World! Foxtech GAIA 160-Hybrid hexacopter broke the flight time record!
FOXTECH GAIA 160-Hybrid hexacopter has an onboard 2000w generator that offers plenty of power to 6 very high efficiency motors to ensure a long flight time. It is installed with redundancy flight controllers, three GPS and a full range of optional equipments like RTK GPS, 20km datalink, parachute, secondary radio control to make this drone very reliable and very safe.
Foxtech team arrived in changdao on 5 September, but due to the heavy wind and bad weather conditions the flight was actually delayed, we have to stop the mission and wait for another good weather to try again. Finally, Foxtech team was ready to make their attempt on 9 September. Departing from a yacht in changdao, weather was cooperative and all was going well.
Foxtech GAIA 160-Hybrid successfully took off from the yacht, with GPS guidance and automated flight, the drone could fly independently. And the drone was accompanied by a yacht staying within a range of 500 meters, so that our operator could control the aircraft at any time. During the flight, the wind was rising, force 7 grades, the wind speed is about 17m/s. But with the robust stability of GAIA 160-Hybrid and rich experience of our technicist, GAIA 160-Hybrid overcame the adverse weather conditions, and just over 3 hours after takeoff, GAIA 160-Hybrid landed safely in a coast of Dalian.
The journey was filled with challenges, because any type of adverse wind will have a
severe impact on the drone. So this time the successful flight dramatically proved the.
reliability and potentials of GAIA 160-Hybrid, proved that Foxtech GAIA 160-Hybrid is a high-performance flying platform which is able to adapt many complicated environment, especially the strong breeze and gale weather. A longer flight time coupled with good stability of GAIA 160-Hybrid opens a wide range of new commercial possibilities for businesses such as inspection of offshore platforms, search and rescue, power line inspection etc.

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Could physics help people with epilepsy? That’s the question tackled by Louis Nemzer, a physicist at Nova Southeastern University, in the September 2019 issue of Physics World magazine, which is out now in print and digital formats.

He thinks that machine learning and real-time monitoring of the brain could give people with epilepsy live information about how much at risk they are of an imminent seizure – and is even developing a smartphone app to help them in daily life.

Elsewhere in the issue, Peter Martin and Tom Scott from the University of Bristol describe how they’ve used drones to map radiation levels at the Chernobyl plant, which you can also read on this website from 2 September, while Kate Brown from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examines the health impact of Chernobyl fall-out.

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique for measuring speed and distance in indoor environments, which could be used to improve navigation technologies for robots, drones—or pedestrians trying to find their way around an airport. The technique uses a novel combination of Wi-Fi signals and accelerometer technology to track devices in near-real time.

“We call our approach Wi-Fi-assisted Inertial Odometry (WIO),” says Raghav Venkatnarayan, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “WIO uses Wi-Fi as a velocity sensor to accurately track how far something has moved. Think of it as sonar, but using radio waves, rather than sound waves.”

Many devices, such as smartphones, incorporate technology called inertial measurement units (IMUs) to calculate how far a has moved. However, IMUs suffer from large drift errors, meaning that even minor inaccuracies can quickly become exaggerated.

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With a flourish of a silk curtain at the Farnborough Air Show on July 16, British defense secretary Gavin Williamson unveiled a full-scale model of the Tempest, the UK’s concept for a domestically built twin-engine stealth fighter to enter service in the 2030s. The Tempest will supposedly boast a laundry list of sixth-generation technologies such as being optionally-manned, mounting hypersonic or directed energy weapons, and capability to deploy and control drone swarms. However, it may also represent a Brexit-era gambit to revive defense cooperation with Germany and France.

London has seeded “Team Tempest” with £2 billion ($2.6 billion) for initial development through 2020. Major defense contractor BAE System is leading development with the Royal Air Force, with Rolls Royce contributing engines, European firm MBDA integrating weapons, and Italian company Leonardo developing sensors and avionics.

Design will supposedly be finalized in the early 2020s, with a flyable prototype planned in 2025 and production aircraft entering service in 2035, gradually replacing the RAF’s fourth-generation Typhoon fighters and complementing F-35 stealth jets. This seventeen-year development cycle is considered ambitious for something as complicated and expensive as a stealth fighter.

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While the Valkyrie program develops one type of wingman drone, the broader Skyborg program is working on the hardware and software for integrating manned and unmanned fighters.

The U.S. Air Force’s future drone fighter is back in the air.

The XQ-58 Valkyrie on June 11, 2019 took off for its second test flight over Yuma, Arizona. The 29-feet-long, jet-powered drone “successfully completed all test objectives during a 71-minute flight,” the Air Force Research Laboratory announced.

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That vast majority of quadcopter drones produce thrust in a very straightforward way: the propellers push air downwards at a high speed which creates lift. But that doesn’t mean other means of propulsion can’t be used. YouTuber Tom Stanton often experiments with unconventional drones and methods of propulsion, and in his newest video he has made a drone fly using the Coandă effect.

The Coandă effect, named after Romanian inventor Henri Coandă, describes the propensity for fluids — including air — to cling to convex surfaces as they move across them. That’s because a low pressure zone is created around the curved surface, and the atmospheric pressure of the surrounding air pushes the moving air along. This effect can be used to redirect the flow of air, which is how Stanton wanted to provide thrust for a drone. Instead of having propellers that push directly down on the air, he used an impeller to push air outwards horizontally. The impellers are mounted on top of domes, and the Coandă effect pulls the air downwards to provide thrust.

For his first test, Stanton 3D-printed both the impellers and Coandă effect domes. Those were then mounted on a fairly standard drone frame, complete with a conventional flight controller to adjust the motor speed and keep the drone stable. Unfortunately, that design didn’t perform well and was barely able to take off, unable to even get past the ground effect. He then modified the design to use traditional propellers on top of the domes. That setup performed much better, but Stanton is quick to note that it’s still far less efficient than just omitting the domes altogether — even after accounting for their additional weight.

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off the Subterranean Challenge in December 2017, with the goal of equipping future warfighters and first responders with tools to rapidly map, navigate, and search hazardous underground environments. The final winner of the four-event competition won’t be selected until 2021, but Team Explorer from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University managed to best rivals for the initial prize.

On four occasions during the eight-day Tunnel Circuit event, which concluded today, each team deployed multiple robots into National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health research mines in South Park Township, Pennsylvania, tasked with autonomously navigating mud and water and communicating with each other and a base station for an hour at a time as they searched for objects. Team Explorer’s roughly 30 university faculty, students, and staff members leveraged two ground robots and two drones to find 25 artifacts in its two best runs (14 more than any other team), managing to identify and locate a backpack within 20 centimeters of its actual position.

“Mobility was a big advantage for us,” said team co-leader Sebastian Scherer, associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, in a statement. “The testing [prior to the event, at Tour-Ed Mine in Tarentum, Pennsylvania] was brutal at the end, but it paid off in the end. We were prepared for this … We had big wheels and lots of power, and autonomy that just wouldn’t quit.”

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Robots are about to go underground — for a competition anyways.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles.

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