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Category: drones – Page 73

Dr. Missy Cummings, Ph.D — Professor, Duke University — Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory

Engineering A Safer World For Humans With Self Driving Cars, Drones, and Robots — Dr. Missy Cummings PhD, Professor, Duke University, Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, Duke Engineering.

Dr. Mary “Missy” Cummings, is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the Pratt School of Engineering, at Duke University, the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences, and is the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics.

Dr. Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.

Dr… Cummings was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots earning the rank of lieutenant and serving as naval officer and military pilot from 1988–1999.

Dr. Cummings research interests include human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-systems engineering, public policy implications of unmanned vehicles, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

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There are no shortcuts when you build a drone destined for Mars

“Never, never ask me for a shortcut.” her mom said while she was growing up.

MiMi Aung (born 1968) is a Burmese 🇲🇲 American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

She is the lead engineer on the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, the first extraterrestrial aircraft which landed on Mars today.

She was inspired by her mother to study science, maths and engineering. Her mother was the first woman in Myanmar to get a PhD in mathematics.

She tested the technology she and her colleagues developed for seven years at NASA.

Mars’ atmosphere is a lot thinner than Earth’s. This means to keep the helicopter in the air, the blades must spin very fast and it can’t weigh more than 2 kilograms.

Ingenuity’s mission on Mars is to help Perseverance find the best routes around Mars.

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Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Founder / President, Amazon Biodiversity Ctr — Snr. Fellow, United Nations Fnd

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, is an innovative conservation biologist, who is Founder and President of the non-profit Amazon Biodiversity Center, the renowned Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, and the person who coined the term “biological diversity”.

Dr. Lovejoy currently serves as Professor in the department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, and as a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation based in Washington, DC.

Dr. Lovejoy has also served as the World Bank’s chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean, the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, President of the Heinz Center, and chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.

Spanning the political spectrum, Dr. Lovejoy has served on science and environmental councils under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. At the core of these many influential positions are seminal ideas, which have formed and strengthened the field of conservation biology.

In the 1980s, Dr. Lovejoy brought international attention to the world’s tropical rainforests, and in particular, the Brazilian Amazon, where he has worked since 1965.

With multiple co-edited books (including Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere; Drones for Conservation — Field Guide for Photographers, Researchers, Conservationists and Archaeologists; Costa Rican Ecosystems; Climate Change and Biodiversity; On the Edge: The State and Fate of the World’s Tropical Rainforests), Dr. Lovejoy is credited as a founder of the field of climate change biology. He also founded the series Nature, the popular long-term series on public television.

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The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons

Last August, several dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings.

So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.

The mission was just an exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon; the robots were armed with nothing more lethal than radio transmitters designed to simulate interactions with both friendly and enemy robots.

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In the emptiness of space, Voyager 1 detects plasma ‘hum’

Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.

The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system’s border with interstellar —into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.

Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. “It’s very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth,” Ocker said. “We’re detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas.”

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Ehang Unveils Tree-Like ‘Baobab’ Vertiports For Its Autonomous Passenger Drones

autonomous air vehicle company ehang unveils ‘baobab’, a large tree-like tower and landing platform for its EH216 passenger drones. designed by giancarlo zema design group (GZDG) with sustainability at the core, photovoltaic panels on the vertiports will generate energy and independent plug-and-play charging points will recharge the drones wirelessly. currently in the development stage, ehang and GZDG hope to enter the emerging global eco-tourism sector with hubs being planned for a lakeside site in china’s zhaoqing city as well as in the maldives, the united arab emirates, and italy.

Images courtesy of giancarlo zema design group (GZDG)

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Exyn Brings Level 4 Autonomy to Drones

Fully autonomous exploration and mapping of the unknown is a cutting-edge capability for commercial drones.

Drone autonomy is getting more and more impressive, but we’re starting to get to the point where it’s getting significantly more difficult to improve on existing capabilities. Companies like Skydio are selling (for cheap!) commercial drones that have no problem dynamically path planning around obstacles at high speeds while tracking you, which is pretty amazing, and it can also autonomously create 3D maps of structures. In both of these cases, there’s a human indirectly in the loop, either saying “follow me” or “map this specific thing.” In other words, the level of autonomous flight is very high, but there’s still some reliance on a human for high-level planning. Which, for what Skydio is doing, is totally fine and the right way to do it.

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