garymortimer - Slashdot User

Submission + - Activists' drone shot out of the sky for fourth time (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Monday November 19, 2012 @04:45PM

garymortimer writes: "“I had more control than I anticipated,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it didn’t just drop out of the sky.”

Photos provided by the animal rights group show the multicopter smoking on the ground, with its lithium polymer battery supply smoldering. Another photo shows the drone’s video camera smashed. The drone, dubbed “Angel,” was a Cinestar 8 octocopter estimated at $4,000.

This wasn’t the first time SHARK has been shot out of the sky. This is the fourth drone that the group has lost while investigating pigeon shootings. One drone landed on club property, and is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.

“It’s becoming a regular occurrence because the police refuse to do anything,” Hindi said."

Comment I'm thinking not (Score 1) 1

by garymortimer on Thursday November 15, 2012 @01:04PM (#41992885) Attached to: UAV Solar Turbine to deliver 30 to 90 days of flight

This is so out there its worth sharing!!!

Submission + - UAV Solar Turbine to deliver 30 to 90 days of flight (suasnews.com) 1

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Thursday November 15, 2012 @01:01PM

garymortimer writes: "What if you had the opportunity to help fund a product that can CHANGE THE WORLD?

The AirShip V2 Solar Turbine is designed to provide critical new capabilities in a reliable and more affordable manner; all while consuming no fossil fuels and emitting no carbon emissions. Its reduced carbon footprint is defined by multiple stages:

Solar film nanotechnology
Clean tech solar turbine manufacturing
Renewable solar electric power for long flying time
AirShipTG has designed a Solar Turbine engine that is more efficient, non-polluting and inexpensive to use than any other small UAV propulsion system in the market. It is an industry game-changing revolutionary approach to ultralite UAV propulsion that eliminates the carbon footprint. It reduces UAV aircraft weight and eliminates the need to carry onboard fuel because of the introduction of renewable solar energy with rechargeable ultra-capacitors."

Submission + - Dragonfly spy drone fits in a hand Georgia Tech (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @12:51PM

garymortimer writes: "The TechJect Robot Dragonfly is a multi-engineering design. It requires everything from aerodynamics, machine design, mechatronics, electronics, communication systems, flight control software, user-interfaces and much more. We’ve put in a lot of work to bring harmony to chaos and bring the dragonfly to life; however, getting something robust enough to endure the elements, strong enough to outlast crashes and accidents; smart enough so everyone can operate them easily; and finally cheap enough so everyone can afford one, we have to professionally manufacture the robot bugs; which is an expensive proposition."

Submission + - Drone bounces off skyscraper NZ catches fire (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Monday October 29, 2012 @07:34PM

garymortimer writes: "In the right hands and with planning and preparation multicopters can produce exceptional low cost aerial imagery.
Its is easy to judge in retrospect. If this flight had been incident free we might never have been sent the link to the footage.

Should the NZ CAA authorised the flight they would not have allowed it to take place without some form of crowd control, the driver of LOVE 66 and owners of all the other parked cars would not have been happy if that airframe had bounced a little further and started burning on their vehicles."

Submission + - Drone hits building Auckland CBD NZ (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Saturday October 27, 2012 @11:03AM

garymortimer writes: "Where to start with this footage.

It shows a multicopter pilot operating in a congested area in Auckland New Zealand with what might be described as a carefree attitude.

The aircraft lifts off and flies into a building. Something on board, almost certainly LiPo batteries powering the eight bladed craft start smoking once it hits the ground."

Submission + - Drone caught by a wire (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @07:38AM

garymortimer writes: "A great new video from PBS News of a Scan Eagle being caught in the wire, a deceptively simple way of recovering a UAS to a moving ship. It really is the benchmark sUAS fixed wing system."

Submission + - Drones patrol Yorkshire Dales skies – to protect peat bogs (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @06:29AM

garymortimer writes: "The technology used in creating drones is now helping preserve the ancient threatened landscape in the Yorkshire Dales thanks to a joint venture between a wildlife charity and a science and technology body.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, are being flown over peatland sites in and around Cray Moss in the dales, to collect data and help experts create a detailed picture of the extent and severity of peatland degradation.

Images sent back from the aircraft are turned into a 3D model of the landscape."

Submission + - Fly it; Play it; Hack it $230k Kickstarter drone project (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Thursday October 11, 2012 @05:44PM

garymortimer writes: "Another UA Kickstarter project takes off, this one has the potential to change how military multicopters might be flown. An impressive total already, at the time of writing, 146 backers and $17,329 only $212,671 to go! Best of luck team, will be watching with interest.

This is not your ordinary quadcopter!

Our tilt-to-fly Mimix controller is so simple that flying becomes second nature. Now you can do other fun things with your friends like playing real-life, multi-player aerial games – indoors or out. Try doing that with any other palm-sized quadcopter!"

Submission + - Small drones allowed to range 100km France (suasnews.com) 1

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @05:19AM

garymortimer writes: "France takes a huge leap forward, this permission has major implications for power and pipe line simple surveys and anything that happens BLOS (beyond visual line of sight) Congratulations must go to Delair Tech! Pushing the boundaries!"

Submission + - Drone duel outwits FAA, but not hackers (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Saturday September 29, 2012 @04:25PM

garymortimer writes: "What began as a think tank stunt with a do-it-yourself drone turned into a lesson for researchers on the inadequacy of Federal Aviation Administration unmanned aircraft zoning.

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, challenged friends to a duel in the sky last weekend with smartphone-controlled toy helicopters purchased from Brookstone. Congress this year mandated that FAA open the U.S. airspace to privately owned drones in 2015. On Sunday, two children younger than 15 helped Wittes win the Drone Smackdown by disabling their opponents’ control panel, or iPhone in this case."

Submission + - Korean suicide combat unmanned air vehicle (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Friday September 28, 2012 @03:17AM

garymortimer writes: "Electric ducted fan (EDF) and rudder elevator the claimed performance figures for KAI’s new guided weapon seem slightly optimistic.

A maximum speed that ranges between 350-400km/h (189-216kt), says KAI. It navigates using GPS and a data link, and the company refers to it as a “suicide combat unmanned air vehicle”.

“After [the Devil Killer] moves to the target point along the pre-programmed route, which is designated with navigation points, the operator can identify targets through the forward-looking camera image and then commence either a manual or automatic strike,” says KAI."

Submission + - Canadian Police Drone Marijuana Bust (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Friday September 14, 2012 @05:46AM

garymortimer writes: "A police drone aircraft zeroed in on several marijuana grow-ops in north Milton and Halton Hills Tuesday, leading to the seizure of 744 plants with an estimated street value of $744,000."

Submission + - Court Upholds Domestic Drone Use in Arrest of American Citizen (usnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Thursday August 02, 2012 @04:15PM

garymortimer writes: "A North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen."

Submission + - Navy drones that miss things like birds do. (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:10PM

garymortimer writes: "In the lab, researchers set up an artificial forest with tall pipes serving as trees at Harvard University’s Concord Field Station. Birds and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-built UAV are wired with small digital video cameras and motion-capture technology similar to that used in Hollywood. Both are studied in parallel to compare and learn from performance as the research progresses. A goal is to move to flight in a real forest by the program’s end.

The idea is not to copy the birds but to incorporate lessons about how they navigate and use dynamic obstacle avoidance methods into a system that can make real-time decisions that take into account its surroundings. For example, researchers already have discovered a theoretical speed at which the probability of a collision is high in forests with an average distribution of trees; if a UAV stays below that threshold, the probability of an accident lowers dramatically. The program also has begun to reveal the types of flight strategies used by birds in these environments."

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