THE US military is close to unveiling new super-powered lasers capable of zapping nukes straight out of the sky.
The 150-kilowatt weapons will be fitted to warships and are able to ‘take out’ drones, aircraft, cruise missiles and even other ships.
“The previous laser prototype was tested in the Persian Gulf three years ago aboard an amphibious the USS Ponce,” said Col Mikhail Khodarenok, former editor of the Military-Industrial Courier.
Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road-faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight covered around 25 km (roughly 15.5 miles), taking a sample of pigments from one Merck lab in Gernsheim to its headquarters in Darmstadt in Germany.
This trial is significant in more ways than one: The area it covered spanned a fairly dense metropolitan area, flying over power lines, trains, roadways and more. It also did all of this without continuous line-of-sight, something that’s been required of most drone delivery trials in a commercial setting to date. The partners involved are hoping this means it can stand as a blueprint to other similar pilot projects and trials being run all over the world.
Next up, the project will continue to fly additional deliveries and then summarize their findings in a report to be delivered in March. Already, using drones instead of trucks seems to provide advantages in terms of time (saving between an hour and even a full day in some cases) and emissions, and it can cut down on the amount of empty return trips made by large, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles, as well.
The news: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted the first test of a new type of drone that can be launched from a plane in a swarm and recovered in mid-air when it’s done its job.
How it works: A military transport or bomber plane releases a series of drones in rapid succession. They carry out the task designated to them (surveillance, for example) and then return to the plane, docking on a line before being winched in. It looks a bit like the airborne refueling process.
Testing: A test, which took place in Utah in November but was first reported this week, showed that a military transport plane can successfully launch and monitor the drone, known as an X-61A Gremlin. However, after a successful mid-air launch and a flight lasting one hour, 41 minutes, the drone crashed when “mechanical issues” prevented its parachute from deploying, the firm behind the drone, Dynetics, said in a press statement. There’s video of the test here (it includes bad music, be warned). This spring, DARPA will try to fly and recover four of the drones for the first time.
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Government regulators plan to review drone designs in the same way they review other aircraft, a major step toward allowing routine drone deliveries and other flights over congested cities.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Feb. 3 announced it’s seeking comment from the public and the drone industry on what criteria should be used for determining whether these novel new devices are safe.
A team of roboticists and divers used an AI-powered drone to explore underwater caves farther than humans ever have.
In the future of urban warfare, swarms of autonomous drones and ground vehicles will win battles before they even begin.
DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program recently tested a swarm of 250 unmanned vehicles in a mock city at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi.
Researchers from Brown University have designed a new type of wing that could make small fixed-wing drones far more stable and efficient.
The new wing replaces the smooth contour found on the leading edges of most airplane wings with a thick flat plate and a sharp leading edge. Counterintuitive as it may seem, it turns out that the design has distinct aerodynamic advantages at the scale of small drones. In a paper published in Science Robotics, the researchers show that the new wing is far more stable than standard wings in the face of sudden wind gusts and other types of turbulence, which often wreak havoc on small aircraft. The wing also provides an aerodynamically efficient flight that translates into better battery life and longer flight times.
“Small drones can be really useful in many applications, including flights in populated areas as they are inherently safer for humans, but there are problems operating aircraft at those small scales,” said Kenny Breuer, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering and the study’s senior author. “They tend to be inefficient, which limits the battery-powered flight times of most drones to around 30 minutes or so. They also tend to get blown around by puffs of wind and turbulent air coming from obstacles such as buildings and trees. So we’ve been thinking about a wing design that might combat those problems.”
On Monday scientists called for advanced technology as the current use of aircraft to spray the pests is proofing to be futile amid growing concerns over their rapid spread.
The experts say deployment of superior technologies such as drones could hold the key to successful combat of the locusts that are now threatening food security in the country.
However, with regulations guiding drones in the country yet to be approved, use of the technology may not be possible as at now.
A swarm of autonomous robots has been deployed by researchers from DARPA to test how the technology could be used as part of an urban raid. The experiment was part of a project to find ways to map environments and gather real-time intelligence using aerial and land based robots.
In the not-so-distant future, hundreds of unmanned drones and on-the-ground rovers could swoop into an area of interest and spew crucial data to human military operators faced with limited sight lines or tasked with navigating unpredictable spaces, researchers the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said this week.
