Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. military is investing billions of dollars each year in developing autonomous technologies that could enable planes, helicopters and drones to fly into some of the world’s most dangerous places, without a human pilot.

AI-empowered systems may soon allow autonomous flying machines to reduce the number of pilots and soldiers working in high-risk environments. Could these flying robots also be firing weapons? WSJ’s Jason Bellini reports, in the latest episode of Moving Upstream.

Hoversurf showed its rideable drone off in Dubai last October, and now, police are actively training to operate them for routine use.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gqoIEjKQ3yE

A team of scientists and engineers from the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol have returned from Guatemala where they have been teaching local scientists how to use drones to map the Fuego volcano which violently erupted earlier this year.

This professional drone builder built a drone he can fly in. 🆒.

The SMX-31 could be the first of a new generation of submarines.

With the rapid advances in drone technology spanning the 20^th century, it should come as no surprise that miniature flying robots are on the horizon: Between now and 2020, Goldman Sachs’ forecasts a $100 billion market opportunity for drones, helped by growing demand from the commercial and civil government sectors.

What is surprising is that it has taken researchers more than two decades to finally come up with a fully autonomous version. That’s because the electronics needed to power and control the wings were so heavy that, until now, flying robotic insects had to be tethered to a wire attached to an external power source.

Yet a team of engineers at the University of Washington, led by assistant professor Sawyer Fuller, were able to figure it out. Relying on funding from UW, they created RoboFly, a robo-insect powered by an invisible laser beam that is pointed at a photovoltaic cell, which is attached above the robot and converts the laser light into enough electricity to operate its wings.

Continue reading “Slightly heavier than a toothpick, the first wireless insect-size robot takes flight” »

DJI is taking one of its newest drones and turning it into something small businesses and government agencies might want to use. The Chinese drone maker just announced the Mavic 2 Enterprise — a modular $1,999 version of the Mavic 2 Zoom — that is better suited for tasks like inspection or search and rescue.

Mavic 2 Enterprise comes with three different accessories. There’s a 2,400-lumen spotlight, a 100-decibel speaker, and a flashing strobe. The loudspeaker allows operators to remotely blast up to 10 custom recordings, and the strobe is visible from three miles away. DJI says the accessories help move its products “beyond imaging” and “into configurable platforms that enhance aerial productivity.”

We are in the early days of what might be called the “physical cloud,” an e-commerce ecosystem that functions like the internet itself. Netflix caches the movies you stream at a data center physically close to you; Amazon is building warehouse after warehouse to store goods closer to consumers. And the storage systems at those warehouses are looking more like the data-storage systems in the cloud. Instead of storing similar items in the same place—a helpful practice when humans were fetching the goods—Amazon’s warehouses store multiples of the same item at random locations, known only to the robots. Trying to find an Instapot at one of Amazon’s warehouses would be like trying to find where in the cloud one of your emails is stored. Of course, you don’t have to. You just tap your screen and the email appears. No humans are involved.

What if you could store and deliver goods as easily as data? Amazon, Walmart and others are using AI and robotics to transform everything from appliance shopping to grocery delivery. Welcome to the physical cloud.

Original Story: This evening, SpaceX is set to launch a used Falcon 9 rocket from California, a flight that will be followed by one of the company’s signature rocket landings. But this time around, SpaceX will attempt to land the vehicle on a concrete landing pad near the launch site — not a drone ship in the ocean. If successful, it’ll be the first time that the company does a ground landing on the West Coast.

Up until now, all of SpaceX’s ground landings have occurred out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the company’s busiest launch site. SpaceX has two landing pads there, and has managed to touch down 11 Falcon 9 rockets on them. And each time the company has attempted to land on land, it’s been a success.

Continue reading “SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on the California coast for the first time” »