#Making drones more customizable A first-ever standard perating systemfor drones, developed by a startup with MIT roots, could soon help manufacturers easily design
Today, hundreds of companies worldwide are making drones for infrastructure inspection, crop-and livestock-monitoring,
and application-specific software to add to commercial drones for multiple purposes. The key component is the startup Linux-based autopilot device,
a small red box that is installed into all of a client drones. his is responsible for flying the vehicle in a safe, reliable manner,
who researched and built drones throughout his time at MIT. To customize the drones customers use software to select third-party drone vehicles and components such as sensors, cameras, actuators,
and communication devices configure settings, and apply their configuration to a fleet. Other software helps them plan
and monitor missions in real time (and make midflight adjustments), and collects and displays data. Airware then pushes all data to the cloud,
If a company decides to use a surveillance drone for crop management, for instance, it can easily add software that stitches together different images to determine which areas of a field are overwatered
Delta Drone in France is using the platform for open-air mining operations, search-and-rescue missions,
Another UAV maker, Cyber Technology in Australia, is using the platform for drones responding to car crashes and other disasters,
and infrastructure with drones that require specific cameras and sensors as potential early customers. A company from scratch Airware roots date to 2005,
Phd 3 to build drones for an intercollegiate competition. At the time, drones were used primarily for military surveillance,
powered by a lack boxthat could essentially fly the drones and control the camera. There were also a handful of open-source projects made by hobbyists that let people modify drones
but the code was tweaked unreliable when. f you wanted to do anything novel, your hands were tied,
Downey says. The group decision: build a drone from scratch. But their advisor, Jonathan How, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics who directs of the Aerospace Controls Laboratory,
told them that required too much time, and would cost them the competition. e said, oue right,
A five-year stretch at Boeing as an engineer for the U s. military A160 Hummingbird UAV and as a commercial pilot put Downey in contact with drone manufacturers, who,
Not much of the early MIT drone designs made it into the final Airware platform. ut building that early drone at MIT
the development of a standard operating system for drones is analogous to Intel processors and Microsoft DOS paving the way for personal computers in the 1980s.
without needing to know details of the underlying hardware. ee doing the same thing for the drone space,
Downey says. here are 600 companies building differing versions of drone hardware. We think they need the Intel processor of the drones,
if you will, and that operating system-level software component, too like the DOS for drones.
The benefits are far-reaching, Downey says: rone companies, for instance, want to build drones and tailor them for different applications without having to build everything from scratch,
he says. But companies developing cameras, sensors, and communication links for drones also stand to benefit,
he adds, as their components will need only to be compatible with a single platform. Additionally, it could help the Federal aviation administration (FAA) better assess the reliability of drones;
Congress recently tasked the agency with compiling UAV rules and regulations by 2015. This could also help promote commercial drone use in the United states,
which lags behind other countries around the world, primarily in Europe, Downey says. ather than see a world where there 500 drones flying overhead,
and every drone has different software and electronics, it good for the FAA if all of them had reliable and common hardware and software,
he says. e think it valuable for everybody. n
#Manual control When you imagine the future of gesture-control interfaces, you might think of the popular science-fiction films inority Report (2002) or ron Man (2008).
along with Leurent who actually started FEA work with Patera group back in 2000 earned a Deshpande innovation grant for their upercomputing-on-a-smartphoneinnovation. hat was a trigger,
This very small chemical modification triggers a sequence of events where that gene is expressed no longer Sikes says.
It fires infrared laser light at the missile which would confuse the missile s programming and cause it to lose its target.
The laser s compact design would allow it to be mounted on a fighter jet. With the Terablade technology Huang says The sky is the limit literally y
#$650 million commitment to Stanley Center at Broad Institute aims to galvanize mental illness research The following is adapted from a press release issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
and water that s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity; the oil gradually floats to the top where it can be skimmed off.
Think of the electricity as water being transferred via bucket from a full tank to an empty tank
In that analogy, the bucket is the adapter that collects the water (electricity) from a full tank (outlet) and dumps it into an empty tank (laptop battery.
say, a gallon of water per minute from the full tank to the empty tank,
with conventional adapters youe dipping a one-gallon bucket into the full tank once a minute,
Many applications such as submarines sonar systems instead use two-dimensional arrays and in that case the savings compound:
Strano and the paper lead author, postdoc and plant biologist Juan Pablo Giraldo, envision turning plants into self-powered, photonic devices such as detectors for explosives or chemical weapons.
But the comparatively simple maneuver of swimming back and forth across a tank drains the canister quickly.
version of Batman famed utility-belt grappling gun: At the pull of a trigger, the handheld device can hoist two people about 30 stories up a rope in 30 seconds.
Exciting, for sure. But despite its appeal as what Atlas cofounder and APA co-inventor Nathan Ball 5, SM 7 calls a ee-whiz gadgetwith seemingly limitless,
Roughly the size of a small shoebox, the aluminum-cased APA which began as a prototype for MIT Soldier Design Competition in 2005 has a handle with direction control switches (up or down) and a trigger.
#Defusing bombs by color This March, Cambodia held its first national-level science festival at the Royal University of Phnom penh,
The demining process, called explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), is dangerous but necessary work. It is estimated that there are still 4 to 6 million unexploded pieces of ordnance in Cambodia,
which was bombed heavily during the Vietnam war. The repercussions have been severe: Between 1979 and 2013, there were over 40,000 reported injuries and nearly 20,000 fatalities due to unexploded land mines.
whereas real parts of bombs are allowed never. Vandiver made the organization first 3-D printed land mine example from an existing computer-aided design (CAD) model of a Russian antipersonnel landmine.
and create a training set consisting of 10 explosive devices commonly encountered by workers in Cambodia.
and work with the 3-D printed models to learn by discovery how different bombs
and bomb fuses have been received well in the humanitarian EOD community. Golden West is receiving orders from around the world for models made on 3-D printers set up by Golden West in Phnom penh.
Because of the high demand for these effective, portable training sets, the U s. Department of state has funded an extension of the project to produce training sets for cluster bombs and land mines.
folded or even penetrated by bullets without failing. This should improve both safety and durability,
after the Explorer release, Aguilar says Bounce Imaging may option its image-stitching technology for drones, video games, movies,
Using magnetic tweezers to stretch cells we were able to further activate cell signalling pathways to trigger cell death.
which today are the result of explosive devices, rupture blood vessels and create internal hemorrhages through which a person is constantly losing blood,"Gaharwar notes."
The dsrna then triggers a genetic chain reaction that destroys specific MESSENGER RNA or mrna in the developing insects.
These characteristics mark the trail heads of a variety of paths for research on this nanocomposite material for applications from flexible armor to aerospace components.
#Cancer-killing nanodaisies NC State researchers have developed a potential new weapon in the fight against cancer:
In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage a submarine complete with crew is shrunk in size so that it can navigate through the human body enabling the crew to perform surgery in the brain.
Nevertheless tiny submarines that could navigate through the body could be of great benefit: they could deliver drugs precisely to a target location a point on the retina for instance.
Indeed a scallop-shaped miniature submarine could also be driven by an actuator that responds for example to temperature changes.
The tiny submarine could also be used in media other than synovial fluid. Other liquids in which such nanovehicles could deliver drugs for example include the vitreous humor of the eye mucous membranes and even blood.
#Better bomb-sniffing technology with new detector material University of Utah engineers have developed a new type of carbon nanotube material for handheld sensors that will be quicker
including homemade bombs, and about two-dozen different toxic gases, says Zang. The technology also can be applied to existing detectors
#Researchers develop green tea-based'missiles'to kill cancer cells more effectively Green tea has long been known for its antioxidant, anticancer, antiaging and antimicrobial properties.
When injected into the body these carriers act like homing missiles traveling through the body to zoom in on the target cells where they will release the cancer-destroying drugs.
Simultaneously, light from the green end of the solar spectrum triggers the br protein to begin pumping protons along its membrane.
New'T-ray'tech converts light to sound for weapons detection medical imaging More information: Sensitive Room-temperature Terahertz Detection via Photothermoelectric Effect in Graphene Xinghan Cai et al.
Surgical removal is one of the main weapons doctors have to treat brain tumors. The problem is that currently there's no way to know
Berkeley, could soon give bomb-sniffing dogs some serious competition. A team of researchers led by Xiang Zhang,
"The new sensor could have many advantages over current bomb-screening methods.""Bomb-sniffing dogs are expensive to train
when not connected to detonators. It is the explosive found in Richard Reid's shoe bomb in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmtallab's underwear bomb in 2009.
U s. Attorney general Eric holder Jr. was quoted recently in news reports as having"extreme extreme concern"about Yemeni bomb makers joining forces with Syrian militants to develop these hard-to-detect bombs,
which can be hidden in cell phones and mobile devices.""PETN has more nitro functional groups and is more electron deficient than the DNT we detected in our experiments,
Fortunately researchers have pinpointed now the breaking mechanism of several monolayer materials hundreds of times stronger than steel with exotic properties that could revolutionize everything from armor to electronics.
and long-term vibration and is suitable for coating internal components such as apertures baffles cold shields and Micro Electro Mechanical systems (MEMS)- type optical sensors.
Hypervelocity impact tests are used mostly to simulate the impact of different projectiles on shields spacecraft
Scientists shoot carbon nanotubes out of high-speed gun (w/video) More information: Unzipping Carbon nanotubes at High Impact.
Like tiny submarines these versatile nanocarriers can navigate in the watery environment surrounding cells and transport their guest molecules through the membrane of living cells to sequentially deliver their cargo.
#Scientists shoot carbon nanotubes out of high-speed gun (w/video)( Phys. org) What happens when you shoot multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTS) out of a gun onto an aluminum target at a velocity of more than 15000 mph?
Scientists finally have the answer. If a nanotube reaches the target at a 90â°angle (head-on) it will break
or an enemy tank in combat that lacks the proper coding. In this study researchers worked with lead selenide nanoparticles,
#Remote Bomb Detector Uses Sound waves To Distinguish Between Types Of Explosives#A new type of bomb detection can sniff out how powerful an explosive#is from afar.
and a sonic beam to identify how the bomb's casing vibrates. From the patterns of the vibrations the researchers can tell
I am sure a great many Popsci readers are thinking this at the same time I'm typing it Attachã this to a drone for remote scouting in 3d!
And to keep the weight down for processing this data the data could just be beam back to the drone remote site to be processed there.
considering allowing a company to sell genetically modified salmon that would be farmed in inland tanks.)The BBC talked with Helen Wallace a spokeswoman from Genewatch an opposing group.
Sabre has the unique ability to use oxygen in the air rather than from external liquid-oxygen tanks like those on the space shuttle Strapped to a spacecraft engines of this breed would eliminate the need for expendable boosters
4. If LOX is an oxidiser for at least part of the flight where is the tank?
Besides there will be no external tank for debris to shed from and hit this vehicle. I read that they had a breakthrough in developing materials for the engines to enable them to survive the intense heat
We dont need a new suborbital launch system for spy satellites or a taxi service to the ISS.
Police force will be replaced with drone copters that taze you and fly off to prisons without hallways
#Sewer Sensors Detect Homemade Bombs As They're Being made Could the secret to finding illicit explosives labs before they harm anyone be hiding in a city's poop?
A European union-funded research project spearheaded by the Swedish Defense research agency FOI aims to sniff out the telltale signs of bomb-making through the sewer system.
while different sensors above the ground monitor for elevated amounts of gas byproducts of the bomb-making process in the area.
and nobody thinks there's going to be a silver bullet that normalizes cognition Reeves said in a statement.
#How David Schmale Tracks Airborne Microbes With Drones Each year Popular Science seeks out the brightest young scientists and engineers and names them the Brilliant Ten.
An associate professor of food safety and plant biosecurity at Virgina Tech Schmale sends drones armed with petri dishes into the atmosphere to capture airborne crop pathogens.
so he'll be sending his drones into them to collect samples. If clouds provide a longer-term reservoir of bacteria
The gun slingers sneaking booze in? yet it is many factors of scale larger than the deaths with MJ...
#Navy Demonstrates Swarm Of Armed Robot Boats Call them sea drones dronaughts or roboats the Navy demonstrated a swarm of remotely-controlled boats on the James river In virginia this August.
As if animated by the same mind the13 patrol boats all moved in unison their crewless decks painting a picture of
while the robot ships had the ability to move on their own there is always a human in the loop before the robot boats fire their weapons.
and ONR said they were armed with a variety of weapons--from. 50 caliber machine guns to high-powered microwave weapons.
Multiple times during the media call Klunder and Brizzolara mentioned Al qaeda s suicide bombing attack on the destroyer USS Cole in October 2000.
As the Cole refueled at a Yemeni port a small foreign craft approached the side of the destroyer
Klunder didn't specify how the robotic patrol boats would have saved the Cole but it's possible that an unmanned robot boat could intercept a vessel full of suicide bombers.
Then the robot could either disable the attacking vehicle or cause any explosions to detonate prematurely with no American lives lost.
while people might not accept CARACAS on a destroyer soon the technology would work for merchant vessels and larger ships.
First patrol boats then the high seas s
#The Quest To Harness Wind energy At 2, 000 Feet To be more precise it's a stabilizing fin part of a tube-shaped robotic airship designed to tap the power of high-altitude winds.
When you launch a missile from a submarine its launch characteristics are going to be perturbed by the gravity field Sandwell explains.
It s going to affect the initial takeoff angle of the missile so you have to correct for that.
#Facebook Says Wi-fi Drones Will be sized Jumbo jet If a new Facebook plan is successful the easiest way to access the cloud may be...
Facebook wants to spread Wi-fi Internet to unconnected parts of the world with drones and at#a summit in New york earlier this week the company revealed those drones will be the size of jumbo jets.
In March of 2014 Facebook acquired drone maker Ascenta whose solar-powered drones could potentially#remain airborne at 65000 feet for months or years at a time.
Ascenta's web page has disappeared since the acquisition leaving only a goodbye notice in Facebook-blue.#
#To make this project fly Facebook plans on testing one of the drones over American skies by 2015 hoping to#have the project off the ground in three to five years.
While bringing Internet connectivity to unconnected parts of the world should be a good enough move for public relations Facebook also joined the ongoing war against calling unmanned aircraft drones:
#Snake Robots And A Quadcopter Fuse Together In this Chimera Drone Rescue robots are better when they travel in packs.
Quadcopter drones can quickly fly over and around obstacles but once on the ground they can t too much besides take off again.
A new chimera-like creation from the Modular Robotics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania combines two snakebots and one quadcopter into a sort of drone superorganism bringing rescue robots together
The drone#is designed explicitly as an alternative to stronger heavier robots that use force to power over rubble.
Roboticist Stella Latscha led the team of researchers that presented the drone last week at the 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
#U s army Wants A Parachuting Tank After years of service in wars--from Iraq to Afghanistan to Iraq again--the Humvee is on its way out.
The first vehicle is in essence a light tank. Creatively titled Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) it s an armored vehicle that can be dropped from cargo planes.
The United states hasn't had a light parachutable tank since they retired the M551 Sheridan in 1996 and even then its performance was underwhelming;
armor light enough to drop isn t very protective. Earlier attempts at flying tanks proved less effective.
The next vehicles is the ultra-lightweight combat vehicle (ULCV. The ULCV is in essence a turbo jeep.
While the current solicitation for the ULCV doesn't specify it a previous solicitation wanted the vehicle to to incorporate a medium caliber weapon into squad operations.
and with a big gun onboard to help them out. Lastly the Army is also looking at a light reconnaissance vehicle (LRV) also carried by Chinook helicopters both inside and underneath.
and engaging hardened enemy bunkers light armored vehicles and dismounted personnel in machine gun and sniper positions.
In addition to seeking out threats like that the LRV as requested will go farther than current Humvees protect against some blasts work in all weather and with degraded visibility and defeat outdated tanks.
what the Army can do early on in a war with the light tanks protecting the landing zone the combat vehicle carrying soldiers to the fight
across Australia's Outback in the new Michelin Cruiser Class. Practicality was paramount for these entries
The unusual shape was a compromise between aerodynamics and comfort for at least two people as required by the cruiser class specifications.
Researchers have thought about using spider silk for everything from surgical thread to bulletproof vests. There's no reason to make a cute scarf from spider silk of course
#Pentagon Wants Artificial intelligence In Future Fighters The Department of defense wants future generations of fighter aircraft to come with copilots already installed.
According to#the U s. Naval Institute both the Navy and the Air force want their next generation air superiority fighter to have Artificial intelligence.
The F-X is a fighter concept in development to replace the Air force s current top dog#the stealthy F-22 Raptor
Boeing s Phantom Works are developing the F/A-XX Advanced Navy Strike Fighter to replace their own F/A-18 Super hornet
The Navy s own X-47b experimental drone has landed on an aircraft carrier successfully and autonomously so adding a computer copilot to a naval craft could help there too.
Bringing the artificial intelligence inside the cockpit is one major way robots will fly alongside humans in fighters of the future--but it s not the only one.
#Google Already Testing Delivery Robots In Australia In rural Australia a drone delivers dog treats to a farmer.
The robot is a proof of concept part of#Project Wing by Google X. The program is designed to show that delivery drones are possible
The drone is a tail-sitter taking off vertically with its body perpendicular to the ground.
For the drone it works fine and the design lets the wing fly fast like a plane.
It also means the drone can hover and that s where the delivery mechanism of Project Wing shines:
With the prototype in place the next challenge is creating an infrastructure for drones so that they can travel safely through skies without hitting other vehicles.
While the FAA clearly wants drones to sense and avoid other aircraft its been slow to implement changes
If the drone industry wants to change the world it ll need an FAA that lets it deliver.
Watch the drone in action below and read more about Project Wing at The Atlantic a
and built on the Bullet Physics engine a game physics simulator. They are also developing a low-cost easy-to-use tensegrity robotics kits to make it easy for people to put together new tensegrity robots for students
#Autonomous X-47b Flies In Formation With Fighter aircraft If the latest tests are any indication humans
Yesterday the U s. Navy announced the first successful manned & unmanned aircraft flight operations of its experimental X-47b drone.
and an operator on the deck steered the drone aside while#the Hornet landed on the same deck.
Unlike most drones which have a pilot dictating their every move#by remote control the X-47b is largely autonomous calculating its flight paths.
#South africa's New AHRLAC Fighter Is A Drone Alternative Powered by a pusher propeller, covered in pixel camouflage,
the Advanced High performance Reconnaissance and Surveillance Aircraft (AHRLAC) looks like an alternate history version of a World war i fighter.
drones. The AHRLAC is designed for flexible roles, depending on how it's equipped. These range from surveillance to light attack,
Pusher propellers were used also on the infamous Predator drone. AHRLAC's maximum speed is about 310 mph,
and some missiles. The manufacturers boast that AHRLAC is the"first ever aircraft to be designed fully
"this chopper is primarily an antitank weapon, and is limited to less than 300 miles of range.
American nuclear submarines, hiding out at sea, used geo-locating satellites to calculate target trajectories, so that they could reliably hit the same points on earth from anywhere.
Even as American troopers started fighting in Afghanistan, the Department of defense was floating ideas about"Space Control"to make sure that nothing in space threatened the important American satellites already there.
and testing weapons in space s
#Solar Sponge Efficiently Makes Steam Generating steam is enormously useful. Much of the world's energy actually comes from steam-coal power plants heat up water to produce water vapor,
The food goes into oxygen-free tanks with particular bacteria species inside that thrive without oxygen.
#Ground Drone Project: Urban mobile robot chassis The Ground Drone Project wants to make a low cost ground robot chassis for hobbyists
and inventors that is capable of traversing challenging obstacles. The project#s original articulated traction control design offers a unique approach to obstacle traversal.
One solution to overcomeâ these constraints is the use of marine drones autonomous surfaceâ orâ underwater vehicles capable of traversing great distances and operatingâ independently for prolonged periods of time.
The latest project to take advantage of the benefits of marine drones theâ Robotic Exploration of Ocean Fronts by The british National Oceanographic Centreâ (NOC) is one of largest and most ambitious unmanned
At the beginning of October a fleet of seven marine drones were launched from the Isles of Scilly for a three-week journey across the ocean.
Phase one sees a fleet of seven marine drones being launched from a beach on the Isles of Scilly to travel up to 300 miles to the shelf edge and back.
#Projector Drone: Could drones broadcast the news? As a Board member of the Professional society of Drone Journalists and part of the team at both I-Drone
and SWARM UAV I am lucky enough to work in the growing civilian UAV industry everyday.
The Projector Droneâ that we have built in Melbourne Australia is one of my favorite in-house projects.
It has provided a great opportunity to explore the role of drones beyond#eye-in the sky#applications.
In short our#Projector Drone#does not record the world around it. It broadcasts onto it. http://player. vimeo. com/video/98604521our proof of concept build uses a modified DJI F550 Flamewheel kit gets twelve minutes flight time and features its own
@i-drone. com. auwritten by Ryan Hamlet for the Professional society of Drone Journalism n
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