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Drone Research
Echodyne Lands $490M Air Force Counter-Drone Deal as Ukraine’s Cheap Acoustics Spawn North American Rivals
The radar that can spot a quadcopter the size of a dinner plate at five kilometers is now wired into a $490 million U.S. Air Force counter-drone program. Echodyne, the Kirkland, Washington company behind the laptop-sized EchoShield radar, confirmed in…
Heligan Report Warns Counter-Drone Defenses Are Starved, But the Government Spending Numbers Tell a More Complicated Story
A consultancy report distributed this week puts a hard number on something drone operators have watched develop for two years: the money flowing into building drones dwarfs the money flowing into stopping them. The report’s author argues that imbalance has…
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…
IARPA Wants Drone Engines That Rot: New RFI Targets Bio-Derived Propulsion for Missions That Leave No Trace
IARPA’s RFI-26-01 seeks bio-derived materials for drone turbines and motors that degrade after missions. Responses due May 15. Analysis and what it means.
Tom Stanton Builds A 3D Printed Windup Plane That Flies 45 Seconds On A 4 Second Charge
British engineer Tom Stanton has built a 15.6 gram 3D printed plane powered by a single 10 farad supercapacitor, demonstrating a hand crank charging system that produces a 45 second flight from roughly 4 seconds of winding. The project, documented…
Harvard Students Build Fixed-Wing VTOL Drone to Track Sperm Whales in Dominica
Two Harvard mechanical engineering seniors have built a fixed-wing VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drone from scratch to help marine biologists locate sperm whales tagged with VHF (very high frequency) transmitters off the coast of Dominica, according to a project…
Chinese Researchers Release Open-Source Flight Control Software for Bamboo Drones
Researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University’s (NPU) School of Civil Aviation in Xi’an, China have published what they describe as the world’s first open-source flight control system built specifically for bamboo-frame unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), releasing the software and hardware configuration…
Nordic Investment Bank backs Estonian drone research hub
The Nordic Investment Bank is putting serious money behind Estonia’s growing drone ambitions, signing a EUR 11.4 million loan agreement with Metrosert AS to help build a new Drone Technology Unit at the country’s Applied Research Centre in Tallinn, as…
Lace folds a 3D printed drone into a backpack
A student led nonprofit is pushing 3D printing far beyond hobby frames, with a foldable 800 mm drone designed to be built almost anywhere, repaired fast, and used for real research work. A foldable research drone built to be printed…
Thermal Drones Are Keeping an Eye on Dolphins
Australia’s dolphins are not exactly living the carefree postcard life we imagine. Warmer oceans, heavier boat traffic, pollution, and expanding coastal cities are quietly piling stress onto these animals, and the tricky part is that dolphins rarely send a memo…
Indiana Pushes to Become America’s Next FAA Drone Test Site
U.S. Senator Todd Young has led Indiana’s entire congressional delegation in a bipartisan letter urging the FAA to select the state as one of two new national drone test sites, WRBI Radio reported. The delegation argues that Indiana’s manufacturing power,…
Coventry Advances Drone Research for Emergencies
Coventry University has started a new research program to explore how drones can support emergency operations in crowded cities, and the Urban Ascent project brings together Coventry City Council, Skyfarer, The Manufacturing Technology Centre and Slink Tech to test how…