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Category: drones – Page 76

The technology could boost aerial robots’ repertoire, allowing them to operate in cramped spaces and withstand collisions.

If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.

Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.

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Innovating And Investing In The New Space Age — Space 2.0 — Hélène Huby, VP, Orion-ESM, Airbus Defence and Space.

Hélène Huby is Vice-President of the Orion European Service Module (Orion-ESM), at Airbus Defence & Space.

Airbus Defence & Space is a division of the Airbus Group, a European multinational aerospace corporation and the world’s largest airliner manufacturer.

The Orion-ESM is the European Space Agency’s contribution to NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will send astronauts back to the Moon, and beyond. It provides electricity, water, oxygen and nitrogen, as well as keeping the spacecraft at the right temperature and on course.

Hélène was previously Head of Innovation at Airbus Defence & Space where she grew a portfolio of over 50 new businesses, ranging from space data-based services to electrical-powered stratospheric drones, and was responsible for setting up Airbus Ventures, and an innovation center in Silicon Valley, for the Airbus Group.

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It can exceed the speed of sound, hitting an astonishing Mach 2.1! 😲🤯

A new combat drone has been created that can hit speeds of more than 1500mph.

The drone is much bigger than the ones you’ll have seen floating around your local parks, however, and looks more like a small spaceship.

Created by Kelley Aerospace, the supersonic drone is made up of carbon fibre and is completely unmanned; it can exceed the speed of sound, hitting an astonishing Mach 2.

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The Defense Department is hungry for small drones that will track objects and fly into buildings, combat zones and other dangerous areas with little help from remote pilots. Self-piloting drones will become a key part of fighting and other military activities in the years to come, said Mike Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon organization that aims to facilitate cooperation between the military and the tech industry.

While much has been made of tech’s unwillingness to work with the Pentagon, start-ups are still plumbing the industry’s decades-long ties to the military.

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This bolt-on system creates a drone that can fly straight out of your fabricator.

It’s been very cool to watch 3D printers and laser cutters evolve into fairly common tools over the last decade-ish, finding useful niches across research, industry, and even with hobbyists at home. Capable as these fabricators are, they tend to be good at just one specific thing: making shapes out of polymer. Which is great! But we have all kinds of other techniques for making things that are even more useful, like by adding computers and actuators and stuff like that. You just can’t do that with your 3D printer or laser cutter, because it just does its one thing—which is too bad.

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