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Category: drones – Page 2

Technological Convergence — the DARPA Lift Challenge

The DARPA Lift Challenge aims to shatter the heavy-lift bottleneck by seeking novel drone designs capable of carrying payloads more than four times their weight. This would revolutionize how we use drones across all sectors.

As military missions become more complicated, warfighters need more capable drones to use across diverse scenarios. The same applies to infrastructure inspection, package delivery, disaster response, and other civilian applications.

Current multirotor drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), are simple, affordable, and easy to operate. But their payload-to-weight ratio is low, typically 1:1 or less.

DARPA Challenges accelerate technological breakthroughs by focusing the ingenuity of teams of innovators and giving wild ideas a place to thrive.

Follow along at www.darpaliftchallenge.com

New Generation Of Intelligent Drones Defined By Technology Convergence

One of the most fascinating instances of current technological convergence is the quick development of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), also referred to as drones. A sophisticated ecosystem of intelligent autonomous platforms that can support defense, homeland security, critical infrastructure, emergency response, agriculture, logistics, energy, healthcare, and environmental protection is rapidly emerging from what started out as remotely piloted aircraft for military reconnaissance and commercial photography.

It is increasingly evident in our new digital era that the most significant technological advancements seldom come from a single invention; rather, they emerge when several technologies develop concurrently and start to support each other. This is called technology convergence, and it is true with trends in drones.

According to Grandview Research The global drone market size was valued at USD 83.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow from USD 96.4 billion in 2026 to USD 182.4 billion by 2033. Those are impactful statistics.

Rare footage of humpback whale birth captured on drone video: “A remarkable moment”

Forrest was joined by members of ORRCA’s team, who continued to monitor the mother and calf over several hours, “collecting observations during the critical first hours of the calf’s life,” the organization said on social media.

The footage is believed to be only the fourth complete humpback whale birth ever recorded on film anywhere in the world and the first-ever captured by drone.

“Every observation like this has the potential to expand our understanding of humpback whale reproduction, maternal behaviour and the earliest stages of a calf’s life,” ORRCA said.

New microwave neural network method could compress and secure wireless communications

One year after unveiling a first-of-its-kind “microwave brain” microchip capable of computing on ultrafast data and wireless signals, researchers from the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering have shown how the chip can encode information into its own language.

The work builds on the world’s first integrated microwave neural network designed by Bal Govind, Ph.D., and experimentally demonstrated with Maxwell Anderson. Together, they showed that the low-power chip could harness the physics of microwaves to emulate the brain’s pattern-finding abilities and perform computations almost instantaneously.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, the researchers found that the device can now use what they describe as microwave token embeddings—similar to the tokens used in large language models—to encode messages into radio signals and compress data, capabilities that could enable faster, more secure communications for satellites, drones and other technologies.

Game-engine forests train drone AI to count trees with far less labeling

A drone swoops low over an alpine forest. It climbs suddenly to follow the contours of the sharply rising landscape. Pulses from its lidar—a laser mapping instrument—rapidly scan the trees below.

The forest, however, isn’t real. In fact, the entire landscape is a synthetic rendering created by University of Cambridge researchers to teach algorithms how to see trees.

The ability to recognize an individual tree in the forest canopy is essential for calculating how forests grow, how they respond to climate change and how much carbon they store. Until now, researchers developing forest vision systems would painstakingly trace the outlines of thousands of trees to provide the system with sufficient training data, a process that can take weeks.

CubePilot drone software dev hit by DNS hijacking to intercept traffic

CubePilot, an Australian firm that designs flight controllers for drones (UAVs), announced a severe operational disruption caused by a DNS hijacking attack.

Hijacking domain name system (DNS) records allows threat actors to redirect users to their infrastructure, diverting traffic intended for a legitimate service. This exposes users to dangerous scenarios such as sensitive data interception, malware delivery, and phishing.

According to a status update published on CubePilot’s website, an attacker gained control of the cubepilot[.]org domain DNS settings on July 24, allowing them to intercept traffic intended for internal systems.

Genesis chip may help AI with its memory problem

One of artificial intelligence’s most stubborn problems is enabling AI systems to accumulate new knowledge without losing what they previously learned. A team of researchers at the MATRIX AI Consortium at The University of Texas at San Antonio may have solved this issue with Genesis, a spiking neuromorphic accelerator chip that would enable on-device continual learning throughout its operational lifetime.

Imagine a security drone trained to patrol a dense forest to spot signs of wildfire. After months of honing its ability to identify smoke among pine trees, the drone is reassigned to a coastal region to watch for floods. The moment the drone learns to interpret these new types of images, it might completely lose its ability to detect a forest fire. In the world of artificial intelligence, this phenomenon is known as “catastrophic forgetting,” and it remains one of the biggest hurdles to creating truly intelligent, autonomous agents.

Dan Barry: Don’t Let Anyone Tell You That You Can’t Reach Your Dreams

For fifteen years, NASA told Dan Barry no.

He kept applying. Then he flew three shuttle missions, walked in space four times, and made two trips to the International Space Station. On the mission that didn’t go there, he was outside the orbiter rehearsing how to build it.

In 2011, I ambushed him with a camera at Singularity University and got 20 minutes.

Dan is not just an astronaut. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton and a doctorate in medicine from Miami, and he left NASA in 2005 to build #robotics for people with disabilities. So when our conversation turned to #ArtificialIntelligence, and specifically to what happens when we arm it, he was not speculating. He was describing machines he understood from the inside.

Armed drones were already flying in 2011. What nobody had done yet was hand the machine the decision to fire. Fifteen years on, that line is thinner than most people realize.

We also got into Asimov’s three laws, the Turing test, his 109 project to improve a billion lives in a decade, and whether we survive the #Singularity at all.

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