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Autonomous drone mapping startup Emesent has announced its latest survey-grade LiDAR payload: Hovermap ST. The lightweight, IP65-rated solution is being launched with Emesent’s new Automated Ground Control feature that, the company stresses, enables autonomous data capture in harsher environments than ever and for a wider range of use cases.

Emesent’s LiDAR payloads leverage a process called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), in which a drone builds a map and, at the same time, localizes the drone in that map.

Thousands of cars—including Porsches, Volkswagens, and Lamborghinis—have gone down with the giant cargo ship Felicity Ace, which had been on fire in the Atlantic Ocean for nearly two weeks. A salvage operation was underway to take the roll-on-roll-off car carrier to a safe area off the Azores when it sank on Tuesday morning. The fire was out by the time the ship went under the waves.

The weather had been rough at the time, a spokesperson for Felicity Ace’s Japanese operator, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines transportation company, told Bloomberg. The ship sank after listing to starboard around 220 nautical miles off the Portuguese Azores archipelago at around 9 a.m. local time on March 1. Salvage craft remain posted at the site of the sinking to monitor the situation, according to a press release from the Felicity Ace Incident Information Centre.

Return of the optical drive.


Despite the year 2022, Pioneer has released a new SATA optical drive that will let you record data or video on high-precision BD-R media at up to 16x, as well as write and play back a very wide gamut of optical discs and media formats. Designed for built-in 5.25 inch drive bays, this drive is priced around $150.