There are four ways drones typically navigate. Either they use GPS or other beacons, or they accept guidance instructions from a computer, or they navigate off a stored map, or they are flown by an expert in control.
What do you when absolutely none of the four are possible?
You put AI on the drone and it flies itself with no outside source of data, no built-in mapping, and no operator in control.
Amazon has unveiled its self-piloting Prime Air drone that the tech giant says will soon be used to fly packages directly to customers’ doors. Amazon will be conducting test delivery flights in the months ahead. NBC’s Tom Costello reports for TODAY. June 6, 2019.
A YouTube engineer invented an off-road ‘Not-A-Wheelchair’ for his wife to give her more freedom than ever before.
Zack Nelson, better known as JerryRigEverything, is known for testing out the durability of smartphones, looking at drones and conjuring other cool, wacky stuff.
His partner, Cambry Kaylor, is a regular contributor on the channel. In 2005, she had an equestrian accident which led to her being paralysed from the waist down. With Zack’s help, her injury doesn’t hold her back whatsoever.
We’ve had impressive efforts, such as India planting 66 million trees in a day, but that was a large-scale event, which required organizing millions of volunteers. It would be difficult to recreate something like that on a regular basis.
Luckily, a former NASA engineer has developed drones that can plant 100,000 trees per day each.
Multiply that by 165 drones, and we could easily fill the 6-billion-tree gap we face each year.
Sept. 9, 2020 By Tom Ward, Senior Vice President, Customer Product, Walmart.
Years ago, our founder Sam Walton famously said, “I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.” It remains a guiding principle at Walmart to this day. From being an early pioneer of universal bar codes and electronic scanning cash registers to our work on autonomous vehicle delivery, we’re working to understand how these technologies can impact the future of our business and help us better serve our customers.
Our latest initiative has us exploring how drones can deliver items in a way that’s convenient, safe, and – you guessed it – fast. Today, we’re taking the next step in our exploration of on-demand delivery by announcing a new pilot with Flytrex, an end-to-end drone delivery company.
The world’s first waterproof drone capable of submerging under water, floating like a boat and flying through the air at over 40mph (60kmh) has been unveiled by US engineers.
The $765 (£585) gadget, known as Spry, features a built-in 4K camera that can both record video and snap photos on the fly.
Footage is beamed back to a monitor embedded into a waterproof remote control, which the drone’s developers claim is another world first for the drone industry.
Engineers from Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab built a three-inch drone that could be launched from a barrel. It’s called SQUID, or the Streamlined Quick Unfolding Investigation Drone. And this year, the team has debuted a larger six-inch version of the drone.
Scientists analyse images over seven decades.
German and Russian scientists say they have documented the life cycle of a volcano for the first time, revealing that it has a kind of “memory”.
The volcano in question is Bezymianny, an active stratovolcano on the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Russia which suffered a collapse in its eastern sector back in 1956.
Photographs of helicopter overflights from Soviet times have now been analysed alongside more recent satellite drone data using state-of-the-art methods at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam.
A Camcopter S-100 drone made the first commercial drone delivery to an offshore oil platform in late August and it might be the beginning of a major industry. The helicopter drone flew a 3D printed part from Norway to a rig located about 60 miles off the coast. The flight was conducted without any special airspace adjustments and the drone was just part of the traffic servicing the oil fields. The drone also did an exterior inspection of the drilling platform and performed a simulated search and rescue drill with the rig’s standby vessel.
Of course, the oil companies are keeping a close eye on the drone developments because hauling freight and supplies to the rigs by drone could not only be a lot cheaper, but also safer. There are also several major helicopter companies that have oilfield supply as their core business watching the new initiatives. Servicing oil platforms is a multibillion-dollar business and also one of the most dangerous forms of commercial flying. Nordic Unmanned, which flew the first drone flight, says drones are a viable alternative to many missions now flown by big, expensive helicopters. “This marks the beginning of a new chapter within unmanned logistics,” spokesman Pål Kristensen said.” The technology is proven and robust enough to implement in large scale and reduces the risk cost and environmental footprint drastically.”
