From Smithsonian Magazine:

Water management researchers have been experimenting with unmanned drones that can fly over an orchard and record heat levels across vast…

As is customary and traditional, we celebrate every new 1,000 members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 23,000!

There were more than 1.41 million page views this month, which is a record. It just took us four weeks to get this latest 1,000 members--we're averaging about one new member every 43…

The Epson Movereo BT-100 is an Android-powered transparent video goggle, with interesting hacking potential. This 16-year old kid decided to show what they can do by flying an AR.Drone in FPV mode.

From …

For those of you frustrated with Digi's X-CTU Xbee configuration software, there's now an alternative. Massimo Banzi, the Arduino team leader (who I'm having dinner with tonight in Rome!), …

We don't cover military drones here, but I'll make an exception for this fascinating accident report. We've all lost drones due to technical malfunctions, so we can sympathize with this. At least ours didn't cost $73 million.

From…

Ning, the hosting platform that DIY Drones uses, has just enabled badges! We've been asking for these for a long time so I'm thrilled. What that means is that administrators such as myself can now recognize members for their contributions and award them badges that reflect their skills and accomplishments. 

The badges are little image files that show up on the members profile picture, everywhere they appear, so you can see their status at a…

The deadline for the current T3 competition (auto takeoff and landing) is Sunday night! I know it's still winter in much of the world, but let's get some more entries in. Right now…

The New America Foundation had a conference in Washington DC last week called "Tinkering with Tomorrow: Will the DIY Movement Craft the Future?" 

The full conference is recorded in the video above, but check it at at the 30:00 mark, when Tom Kalil, the Associate Director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, singles out DIY Drones as a great…

NASA and Lockheed Martin have teamed up to create the X-56A, which is designed to use sensors and fast-response control loops to stop wing flutter, which can be a killer in high-aspect ratio wings. From…

From IEEE Spectrum

Here's a quadrotor with giant spindly bird legs from the Utah Telerobotics Lab. It's a passive system which uses the weight of the robot to actuate the grippers, so that when…

This is a little off-topic for us, but here's a new achievement in aeronautics: a new paper airplane distance record of more than 266 feet. I'm particularily proud of our former University of Berkeley quarterback who had the winning throw. There was a little sticky tape on the plane, which is allowed by the rules, so it's not 100% paper, but the competitors…

Hizook has a great analysis of VC funding for robotics companies in 2011. There isn't as much of it as you might expect (note that only one is for a UAV company, Helen Greiner's CyPhy Works, which has yet to…

This great talk, given yesterday at TED, is now live. I was here and the crowd was wowed. Check out the lovely math on simplifying the 12-dimensional math to 4 dimensions at around the 5:00…