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Oct 3

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FPV pilot Parker Sheppard wearing goggles and holding a controller beside the Kinzua Bridge viaduct in Pennsylvania, with a 5-inch freestyle drone carrying a GoPro overhead

Pennsylvania · FPV

FPV Pilot Flies Kinzua Bridge, A Pennsylvania Park That Bans Drones

Parker Sheppard dove an FPV quad around Kinzua Bridge on a permit he says Pennsylvania granted. DCNR allows drones at six parks. Kinzua isn't one.

Haye KestelooOct 33 min read

Five people stand behind a table of quadcopter drones and laptops, between a Blue Arrow banner and a KEF Robotics banner

Department of Defense

Orqa, KEF And Blue Arrow Beat GPS Jamming In Front Of Green Berets

Orqa drones running KEF Robotics navigation and Blue Arrow's RII software flew recon and payload missions under GPS and radio jamming in Alabama.

Haye KestelooSep 23

Aerial view of the Butler Farm Show grounds after the July 13, 2024 Trump rally, the vantage point Thomas Crooks had and the Secret Service did not

Department of Homeland Security

Secret Service Saw Drones Near Obama and Sanders, Then Came Butler

GAO finds the Secret Service logged drone incidents in 2015, 2016 and 2021, changed no civilian drone policy and never wrote down why. Then came Butler.

Haye KestelooSep 4

Underwater drone

Navy Buys Attack Drone Subs Built in a Philly Marble Showroom

A 20-month-old Philadelphia startup is building 425-pound Ghostfin attack drone submarines for the U.S. Navy and Taiwan inside a former marble showroom.

Haye KestelooAug 27

Students in the Fly Like A Girl academy practicing drone piloting in South Fayette Township

Education

Fly Like A Girl Turns Pittsburgh Teens Into Drone Pilots

The Fly Like A Girl academy outside Pittsburgh has trained more than 100 high school girls to fly drones since 2023 and helped nearly a dozen of them earn FAA Part 107 certificates.

Rafael SuárezJul 25

DJI

MIT and Penn Open-Source MIGHTY, a Drone Motion Planner That Cuts Out Six-Figure Commercial Software

Researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have released MIGHTY, an open-source motion planner that lets drones react to obstacles in milliseconds using only onboard sensors and compute. The system, detailed in a paper accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and announced by MIT, jointly optimizes flight path and travel time in a…

Haye KestelooMay 28

National Guard Expands Small Drone Training

United States

Drone Operators Trained for Modern Combat at Fort Indiantown Gap

At Fort Indiantown Gap, the quiet February air is buzzing, not with helicopters, but with something smaller, sharper, and far more personal: drones. For ten days, as the National Guard reports, soldiers from across different units and specialties gathered to attend a small unmanned aircraft system operator course, known in military shorthand as sUAS The…

Rafael SuárezFeb 28

Overhead black-and-white view of a DJI Phantom quadcopter surrounded by folding DJI Mavic drones and other multirotors arranged on a white surface

United States

Army R.E.D. Drone With Arms Wins Innovation Title

At the U.S. Army’s inaugural Best Drone Warfighter Competition, one team showed up with something straight out of a robotics lab fever dream. A drone. With arms. That actually grabs things. And it won. Soldiers from the 28th Infantry Division took first place in the innovation category at the Army’s first Best Drone Warfighter Competition,…

Rafael SuárezFeb 23

Pennsylvania

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