Lifeboat Foundation

On Monday scientists called for advanced technology as the current use of aircraft to spray the pests is proofing to be futile amid growing concerns over their rapid spread.

The experts say deployment of superior technologies such as drones could hold the key to successful combat of the locusts that are now threatening food security in the country.

However, with regulations guiding drones in the country yet to be approved, use of the technology may not be possible as at now.

A swarm of autonomous robots has been deployed by researchers from DARPA to test how the technology could be used as part of an urban raid. The experiment was part of a project to find ways to map environments and gather real-time intelligence using aerial and land based robots.

In the not-so-distant future, hundreds of unmanned drones and on-the-ground rovers could swoop into an area of interest and spew crucial data to human military operators faced with limited sight lines or tasked with navigating unpredictable spaces, researchers the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said this week.

O.o.

Next step: recovering the Gremlins inside a C-130 while still in flight.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency has set its sights on a new kind of drone ship — one that doesn’t contemplate a human ever setting foot on it. Dubbed NOMARS (No Manning Required, Ship), the new ships could feature radical new designs and cut costs by removing any elements normally needed to accommodate people.

Update January 29th, 10:10AM ET: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket on time this morning, deploying all 60 satellites into orbit. The rocket also performed another landing on the company’s drone ship in the Atlantic after launch. While SpaceX did catch one half of the rocket’s fairing, the other half just missed its boat.

Original story: A week after performing a crucial test flight for NASA, SpaceX is poised to launch yet another Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. This mission is tasked with sending up the latest batch of internet-beaming satellites for SpaceX, adding on to the roughly 180 satellites the company already has in orbit.

Continue reading “SpaceX successfully launches its fourth batch of internet-beaming Starlink satellites” »

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Yates Electrospace Corporation (YEC), whose Silent Arrow platform is bringing disruptive innovation to the heavy payload, unmanned cargo delivery market, today announced the design completion and specifications of a wide-body version of its successful GD-2000 cargo delivery drone, with unveiling set for July 20–24, 2020 at YEC booth 4470, Farnborough International Airshow, UK.

Public-safety drone consultancy Skyfire Consulting has announced a partnership with UAV company Doosan Mobility Innovation and hydrogen-fuel service provider ReadyH2 to tackle a pipeline-inspection project for an unnamed American company.

Doosan will deploy a hydrogen-powered octocopter. The drone sports a hydrogen-powered generator fueling two hours of flight time per mission over nearly 50 miles.

Continue reading “Hydrogen-fueled Drones Will Inspect U.S. Gas Pipeline” »

GORHAM, Maine (AP) — A Maine woman who was harassed by a drone for two days says police told her they could do nothing about it.

Mary Dunham says a drone tracked her in her car on Tuesday as she drove to a gas station, where she called police, and then to her home in Gorham. It followed her eight miles to her brother’s house in Standish the following day.

It was an “unnerving” experience, she said. “The officer arrived and said, ‘Yeah, I see it. I don’t know what to tell you though. We can’t do too much,’” she said.

The algorithm lets robots find the shortest route in unfamiliar environments, opening the door to robots that can work inside homes and offices.

The news: A team at Facebook AI has created a reinforcement learning algorithm that lets a robot find its way in an unfamiliar environment without using a map. Using just a depth-sensing camera, GPS, and compass data, the algorithm gets a robot to its goal 99.9% of the time along a route that is very close to the shortest possible path, which means no wrong turns, no backtracking, and no exploration. This is a big improvement over previous best efforts.

Why it matters: Mapless route-finding is essential for next-gen robots like autonomous delivery drones or robots that work inside homes and offices. Some of the best robots available today, such as Spot and Atlas made by Boston Dynamics and Digit made by Agility Robotics, are packed with sensors that make them pretty good at keeping their balance and avoiding obstacles. But if you dropped them off at an unfamiliar street corner and left them to find their way home, they’d be screwed. While Facebook’s algorithm does not yet handle outside environments, it is a promising step in that direction and could probably be adapted to urban spaces.