News, deep dives, and analysis — every Drone Research story, newest first.
A team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute just pulled off something that sounds simple until you actually think about what cameras and lidar can’t do. They built a palm-sized quadrotor that flies by listening, the same way a bat does, and they got it to dodge obstacles in fog, snow, and pitch darkness with a success…
TU Delft's Bee-Nav drone flies home from 600 meters without GPS, using a honeybee-inspired neural memory of just 42 kilobytes. Here's how it works.
Purdue University just put its full weight behind a future where one drone pilot coordinates dozens of aircraft at once. The Indiana research powerhouse is expanding a cluster of AI and autonomy programs that could fundamentally reshape how drones operate at scale. Building the Brain for Autonomous Flight The centerpiece of Purdue’s effort is AIDA3,…
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.
NOAA announced a new uncrewed surface vehicle for its research fleet, and the pitch is simple. It’s solar-powered, self-propelled, small enough to trailer behind a truck, and built to loiter at sea for months. Engineers at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle think it can do almost everything a weather buoy does, plus a…
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 in a video published to his YouTube channel, reimagines the classic rubber band powered toy…
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 files free to any developer worldwide. The paper appeared on February 28 in the journal…
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 reported by Defence Industry. The financing runs over ten years and supports laboratories dedicated to…
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