Good news for those joining us at Sparkfun's Autonomous Vehicle Competition: if you're bringing your kids, they'll have something fun to do:

Sparkfun announcement:

At this year's competition, we will…

A few details here (love the RADAR mount!). 

(Via Robot…

In the five years that we've been running this site, the Moderators have banned thousands of spammers, but only three or four members for violations of our Terms of Service, which make clear that civil discourse is paramount and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

This is not something we do lightly. It happens only after repeated violations and warnings, and we do it with a heavy…

New research by the NIMBUS lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has demonstrated how a UAV could hover over electronics on the ground and charge them. This might be useful for distributed sensor networks that can't use solar energy…

Long time readers here will know of my love for LEGO Mindstorms NXT, and my first NXT autopilot many years ago. So I was delighted to see…

From Boing Boing:

"In the New York Times today, Brian Lam (formerly of Gizmodo, now the…

Found here. 

See it here before it's taken down. Found by Gary Mortimer at…

MicroFly, an open source nanoquad, hit its Kickstarter funder target of $5,000 and will be funded. From the project page:

I've been inspired by the crew at …

Just a hint of what's to come. You'll need to use PLA, not ABS plastic, and it's a challenging print, but just imagine what will be possible as 3D printing technology improves. The design files are here.

Video of printing and…

Good news: Arduino has released a new version of its IDE (1.0.1) and it now supports ArduCopter/ArduPlane right out of the box. (The previous versions of Arduino required a patched version that we supplied to handle the size of the ArduCopter/ArduPlane codebase, which is considered the most complex Arduino program ever made!)

Here are the…

We had a great time at Maker Faire, which was absolutely packed (100,000+ people). Above is a panorama shot of the 3D Robotics talk on Quadcopter UAVs, which was standing room only! (Thanks to Alan Sanchez and Sam Kelly for the ArduCopter flying and panorama photo taking).

 
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Sparkfun writes:

Our Autonomous Vehicle Competition is less than a month away now (June 16, 2012 at SparkFun Headquarters). It's shaping up to be an awesome day! We've created…

Once again, the 3D Robotics team is going to have a big DIY Drones area at Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend (picture from last year shown--we've got brand new banners this year ;-)). Come meet the team and Arduino leader Massimo Banzi (speaking at 3:00 on…

From New Scientist (via SAUSNews), a report on the f…

From PoliceOne.com: an article on how to prepare for the new career of Police UAV Pilot. Includes advice from Curtis Sprague, a retired SWAT Officer and former Federal Air…

This is just a good journalistic summary by …

The Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition is on June 16th, just a month away! Once again the DIY Drones teams will be well represented, with at least 15 people from the APM team alone coming and competing. There will be the usual barbecue at Doug…

From Hackaday:

Check out this video footage of this LED-adorned RC helicopter flying on a dark night. But this isn’t an art project. Analyzing the long-exposure photography…

Jordi is one of MIT Tech Review's top ten innovators under 35 in Mexico! From the award annoucement: 

A 21-year old Mexican immigrant faces another day of tedious confinement in his apartment in…