They’re making drones, but not shooty-shooty death-death drones. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), otherwise known as drones, are remote control operated mini airplanes with cameras attached to their bellies, or noses, or both. These are not the drones you’re looking for—well, not if you want to remotely control a gun, that is—but these little beauties will help in aerial mapping for geography, filming for entertainment and sports events, tracking for police chases, and even emergency collection for emergency situations like natural disasters.
Here at CSULB, the Anthropology department uses UAVs for research by gathering visual data. Unfortunately for them and the budget, each unit is really pricey when bought from currently-existing retailers, and the only two feasible options are to fork over the money and hope the budget can survive it, or make one themselves.
This is why the Anthropology department approached the Industrial Design students about creating UAVs that were not only easy DIY drones, but also were units that were cheaper than, say, $15,000 per plane. The concept behind the UAV project was to create a system so that hobbyists with no engineering experience could use and assemble one functional enough for professional and scientific uses, and be cheap enough so it’s accessible for university and personal funding.
Just a few years ago, it would seem more like something out of a bad sci-fi film. But today, the possibility of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) floating over a farm taking pictures or video is a reality.
The unnerving whirring sound and ominous silhouette across the blue rural sky have triggered many opinions and possibilities for the agricultural community.
Rory Paul feels that UAVs, or drones, have many more positives than negatives. Paul is the owner of Volt Aerial Robotics in St. Louis and he sees tremendous potential for their use in agriculture.
“There are several applications we see developing. The simplest one is crop scouting. You could use a simple system like a helicopter or quad copter. The farmer can stand at the side of the field and get a bird’s eye view. There are huge advantages here because right now an agronomist can only see a small fraction of the field. If you see a problem, you get a picture of it and know exactly where it is,” he said. “The next application is mapping. You can use a fixed-wing UAV and you actually map the field creating an up-to- date digital map of the field. This allows the farmer to look at nutrient issues to develop an application plan and, technically, we could probably use precision spot spraying.”
In the distant future, he believes we could see other applications including pollination and population counts.
An interesting chat with Wayne, Kickstarter star and all round good egg. Its not easy bringing a new product to market, especially one that pushes the current envelope a little further. In this case time aloft, Wayne has already flown for two hours and confidently expects the platform to be able to make three.
A high performance remote control airplane for first person view (FPV) flying and the Umanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) hobbyist. Designed from the ground up to have an enclosed pan and tilt camera mounted in the nose for a completely unencumbered point of view. All wrapped up in a super slick fuselage with high aspect ratio wings, a high efficiency airfoil and room to swing up to a 12 inch propeller.
The all important specs:
Cruise Speed: 32knots
Max speed – 55knots
stall speed @4.5lbs about 11 knots
Climb Rate – 2000 ft/min
Wingspan = 102 in
wing area = 605 sq in
Wing loading = 1.191 lbs per sq ft @ 5 lbs
Fuselage Length = 45 in
Dry weight = 2.75 lbs*
loaded weight =5.0lbs (2.25 lbs of battery/payload)
EPO Wings and fusalage contruction
Carbon Fiber Tail Boom and wing spars
flight times well in excess of 1 hour. make that 2 hours!
WASHINGTON — Thousands of unmanned aircraft systems – commonly known as drones – could be buzzing around in U.S. airspace by 2015 because of a law passed last year, aiding in police investigations, scientific research and border control, but also raising safety and privacy concerns among some lawmakers and advocacy groups.
Already, drones are in use to count sea lions in Alaska, to conduct weather and environmental research and to monitor drug trafficking across our borders. In fact, 327 drones already have been licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly over U.S. soil.
But the FAA expects that number to increase to 30,000 by 2020, fueling what could become a $90 billion industry.
A FRENCH postgraduate student has completed seven months research at Harper Adams University developing an unmanned aircraft for use in agriculture.
Marc-Alexandre Favier, from Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, came to Harper Adams as part of his Masters in Mechatronic Systems – Engineering from the University of Osnabruck in Germany.
He will return to Germany on May 1 where he will give a presentation in Berlin on the research he has carried out during his time at Harper Adams, near Newport.
The 27-year-old designed a prototype Unmanned Air System (UAS) to be used as an eye in the sky for farmers who often have to manage and monitor livestock on very large and remote estates.
He used an AR Drone 2 with a camera attached to the bottom to allow the user to get a bird’s eye view and came up with a computer program which instructs the drone to locate, recognise and track livestock.
Although the drone can be controlled via WiFi on a computer, the aim is for farmers to be able to control it using an iPhone or smartphone.
Marc-Alexandre said: “The number of robots for professional use is increasing significantly so it is very important for Masters students to be up-to-date with robotics – it’s the future and the present.”
He said his prototype was designed with Scottish sheep farmers in mind, many of whom spend large amounts of time and cover many miles monitoring their livestock.
“The idea is to combine using a quad bike with an unmanned aerial vehicle to help the shepherd not to have to spend too much time managing his flock,” he added.
“I have therefore developed a functional prototype drone to recognise and track sheep.”
Marc-Alexandre, who hopes to work in the area of field robotics once he completes his Masters, said he had thoroughly enjoyed his time at Harper Adams.
“I want to thank Harper Adams and the people who work here,” he added.
“There were two reasons I wanted to come to Harper Adams. Firstly, to improve my English and to learn about English culture, and secondly, because Harper Adams is investing in the area of field robotics.
“I have had a very nice time here because you are living around nature but at the same time it is like living in a city because there is a lot of activity at Harper Adams and in the surrounding area.
“Harper Adams has also opened my eyes to Asia because I have worked with fellow researchers from China. This has been a very good experience and I have learnt about Chinese culture and gained extra knowledge from them.”
At a remote-controlled model airplane field in Sarasota, Fla., Justin Woody was struggling to operate a mini-copter.
It was not a toy but an unmanned air vehicle, a drone, and Woody was getting hands-on training on how to fly a variety of them at a three-day session offered by the new Unmanned Vehicles University.
Woody is one of the current crop of students at Unmanned Vehicles University, the only institution in the United States to offer post-graduate engineering degrees, both masters and doctorate, in unmanned aerial vehicle systems. The program, which is the first of its kind, is the brain-child of retired U.S. Air Force colonel and F-4 pilot Jerry LeMieux.
The arrest of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was carried out, in part, with the help of a remote controlled robot. Such an operation highlights the growing uses of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) in anti-terrorist and other operations. Northrop Grumman Corporation’s CUTLASS robot, developed by its division in Coventry, U.K. is designed to provide remote handling and surveillance of hazardous threats and is intended to replace British Army’s Wheelbarrow robot for bomb disposal.
Demoed in 2007, the CUTLASS boasts a modular design with a three-fingered gripper at the end of a manipulator arm which is engineered for nine degrees of freedom to allow it to operate in tight spots, such as a car interior. It's equipped with six wheels that can carry it over soft and hard terrain in all weather conditions and allow it to creep along at slow speeds for delicate operations or travel at up to 12 km/h (7.4 mph) when speed is required.
Northrop Grumman claims that its ability to accommodate a wide range of payloads, sensors and tools to suit multiple missions allows CUTLASS to operate without the need for a second robot, providing savings of 50 percent when compared to maintaining and operating two separate UGVs over the life of the vehicle.
It also means that CUTLASS can get the job done without having to return to the incident control point for additional tools during operations. The company says this results in a vehicle that can deal with hazardous situation up to four times quicker than other UGVs.
"[The CUTLASS] is more dexterous, cost effective and, as a package, four times faster than any other UGV," said Greg Roberts, managing director, defence and security, Northrop Grumman Information Systems Europe. "The vehicle is already in service across the U.K. and has proven itself to be robust and capable in the most demanding environments. We look forward to exploiting the potential opportunities for exporting this capability into international markets."
The CUTLASS will be exhibited at the Counter Terror Expo that will be at the National Hall, Olympia, London, April 24-25.
Building your first quadcopter is almost a rite of passage for anyone interested in DIY drones these days. The availability of boards like the Ardupilot make it a lot easier to get started. However, seven masters students at Queen Mary University of London just raised the bar for the competition. They built a solar powered Quadcopter, which they dubbed Solar Copter.
While there have been numerous solar-powered aircraft, this seems to be the first solar powered helicopter in the world. Based around a unique frame design you can see a lot of potential for surveillance, search and rescue, and long term deployments in areas of the world where the sun shines a lot more than it does back in London.
You can even think further afield at Mars exploration, while prototype Mars aircraft have flow at altitude here on Earth most are aimed at long range exploration. Basing a fleet of light-weight small solar-powered quadcopters which would be launched from a future lander is an interesting possibility.
The project team of Aly Abidali, Jibran Ahmed, Shakir Ahmed, Irmantas Burba, Pourshid Jan Fani, George Kowfie, and Kazimierz Wojewoda hope to keep working on the Solar Copter after they graduate.
A clique of 25 vineyard owners and farmers, always looking for ways to economize, had gathered on a Wednesday in November at an experimental winery owned by the University of California (Davis). There, at 11 a.m., they watched an unmanned helicopter called RMax lift off from a small grassy field. It showered 40 long rows of grapes from 2-gallon tanks mounted along each side of the fuselage, its sprayers pushing the liquid directly onto the crops. A tractor rigged to spew pesticide or fertilizer can douse the same area, just over an acre, in an hour. The drone did it in less than six minutes.
The RMax, built by Yamaha, has been a fixture in Japan since the 1990s. It sprays nearly half that country’s rice crops, part of the Japanese government’s solution to assist its elderly farming population and prevent pesticides from wafting into residential areas. The drones can fly much closer to the crops; the downwash from the buzzing rotor blades helps coat both the tops and bottoms of leaves, unlike more expensive piloted aircraft. American wineries, for now, rely largely on lumbering tractors, which are slowed by challenging terrain.
With 1 million acres of grapes in the United States, it’s a “tremendous opportunity” for the drone helicopter to change the way farmers do business, says Steve Markofski, the new business planner for Yamaha Motor Corp. USA, who attended the demonstration. And wineries are just the beginning.
In the Cub Scout outlaw pinewood derby, anything goes as long as the car fits on the track.
Frankencar is an Arduino-controlled, 400-Watt torque monster that smokes the competition. It was pieced together using VEX Robotics hardware, an outrunner brushless motor, an Arduino Nano, and various other components. A key feature is that Frankencar knows when it’s close to the finish line so it can slam on the brakes.
The video above is a great example of the sort of action you’ll see at RoboGames. Tomorrow kicks off the 10th year of the event, a three-day extravaganza of robots and technology. The dozens of competitions cover everything from line following and fire fighting to weight lifting and mech warfare.
If you’re in the Bay Area, consider stopping by for at least a few hours; it’s going to be a blast. If you can’t make it, leave a comment below with the competition you’d like to see photos of and I’ll do my best to cover it.
This weekend in over 75 cities, NASA is hosting the Space Apps Challenge. Citizens from around the world will collaborate to tackle challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and the exploration of space.
Hello, I am Frank Magazu. I am 16 years old and go to school in Pasco, Florida. I make robots with the Arduino and got interviewed by my school district. Here is a video of me. Thanks for helping me become proficient at robotics as well as electronics and programing in general.
Thank you Frank! You made our day with your email. Keep up with the great work you and your professor are doing to inspire more people in getting involved in diy robots.
Don’t be surprised if you hear a buzzing sound in the hallways of South Hall this semester; it’s the sound of the future, in the form of small student-piloted unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
This semester, a small team of School of Information students is experimenting with drones: becoming familiar with drones’ capabilities and imagining their future applications. The eight students, who call their group the “Drone Lab,” are working together in a South Hall classroom to develop open-source software for their drones and then testing them in the classroom, in the building’s atrium, and (occasionally) on the South Hall lawn.
“Drones have a pretty bad reputation,” admitted Dave Lester, a second-year MIMS student; when most people hear the word “drone,” they imagine high-tech killing machines or government surveillance. “We’re trying to do something a little different in Drone Lab,” said Lester, who was formerly the assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. “We’re interested in the technical capabilities of drones, but also thinking through the socially good things that we can use drones for.”
“It’s a terrible, awful shame that many people only think of drones as flying objects that deliver weapons to targets,” said associate professor Coye Cheshire, Drone Lab’s faculty sponsor. “Just like airplanes, rockets, cars, and boats—you can tie a weapon on to any of those things, or you can do something interesting and maybe even helpful or good with them.”
Consumer-grade quadcopter
The students’ drones wouldn’t be capable of high-altitude surveillance, even if they were interested in it, since its range is limited to a couple hundred feet. The students are working with the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, a consumer-grade drone priced at about $300 that’s a step above a model airplane, but many steps below military or civilian surveillance drones. The AR.Drone is a quadcopter—a small helicopter with four rotors—and it comes equipped with a high-definition 720p forward-facing camera, a downward-facing camera, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a pair of ultrasound altimeters, a rechargeable battery, and a 1GHz 32-bit processor running the Linux operating system. Parrot makes a few accessories, like a GPS sensor and a longer-lasting battery, and some hackers have figured out ways to attach additional devices, like environmental sensors.
Out of the box, the AR.Drone can be controlled by a smartphone app and piloted like a remote-controlled plane—but the real power is the ability to install your own software on the drone itself, allowing it to fly autonomously. When the students upload a specific set of instructions to the drone, it can fly off and perform specialized tasks on its own, reacting to what is sees and senses. “These are basically computers that can fly,” explained Lester.
The students started by installing node.js, a new software platform designed for building fast, scalable network applications in JavaScript, along with the node-ar-drone module. There is a growing community of developers writing and sharing open-source software modules for AR.drones; the I School Drone Lab is building on this foundation and sharing their own software modules with the community.
Not droning on
Working with drones first-hand has sparked the students’ imaginations for the non-military possibilities presented by drones. For several of them, the starting point was the March 2012 “launch” of TacoCopter.com, a drone-based service that purported to deliver fresh tacos to patrons who had ordered from their GPS-enabled smartphone. Although TacoCopter turned out be a hoax, automated food delivery is really just the tip of the iceberg.
“Our students are finding new and innovative ways to use the devices to do interesting things,” said professor Cheshire. “For example, can you get a quadcopter to pick up and deliver objects on demand? Can you program the device to recognize hand gestures and other motions, and then respond in various ways?”
“There are lots of uses for drones that people may not typically think of when they hear the term,” said Lester. His teammate Elliot Nahman, also a second-year MIMS student, agreed. “I’m particularly interested in strapping sensors to it,” said Nahman. “Maybe you can use it in building science, to gather temperature profiles across a very tall space. Or there’s the potential for pollution monitoring: you can fly around the city and gather pollution data that would otherwise be difficult to collect.”
This week, India announced an effort to protect the rare one-horned rhino from poachers by using drones to patrol the borders of the vast Kaziranga National Park. In additon, a recent TIME Magazine article listed dozens of socially beneficial applications of drones:
“In Costa Rica they’re used to study volcanoes. In Japan drones dust crops and track schools of tuna; emergency workers used one to survey the damage at Fukushima…. Farmers are already using drones to monitor their crops; a weekly overhead picture of a field can give them the information they need to use less chemicals and water on the plants, saving money and the environment. Scientists use drones for wildlife conservation, mapping the nests of endangered species without disturbing them. And energy companies use drones to monitor electric pylons and gas pipelines.”
“So far the list of applicants for permission to fly drones [in the U.S.] consists mostly of universities, public agencies and drone manufacturers,” reports TIME Magazine. “According to its FAA application, Washington State’s department of transportation wants to try using drones for avalanche control. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to use a helicopter drone to take air samples. The Forest Service wants drones to help fight fires.” In addition, delivery companies like FedEx have been salivating for years over the possibility of employing drones.
Legal and privacy concerns
The spread of drones has raised a number of new regulatory and policy questions, led by widespread concerns about privacy. The Drone Lab team is studying the legal and social implications of drones and thinking about policies that could balance the benefits of the technology with its potential dark side.
“Drones are likely to have a profound impact on the future, but right now they exist in a sort of legal gray zone,” said Dave Lester. Our current laws were mostly designed for a previous generation’s technology, and it’s not always clear how they apply to technological innovations.
“As a society, it’s important that we figure out how to deal with flying devices with cameras,” said professor Cheshire, whose research focuses on the social impacts of information technologies. “I’m pushing the students to think through the privacy implications of autonomous flying cameras, while also looking for more helpful and useful applications for them—such as wildlife management, event photography, and more.”
Regulation of drones is also concerned with the safety of the airways. Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forbids the commercial use of drones without specific authorization, although the FAA is working on new regulations to allow commercial drone flights by 2015.
Breaking the boundaries
The widespread availability of a drone that can be purchased—and programmed—by everyday people is a very recent breakthrough. At the moment, they’re primarily a high-end toy, “but the implications are potentially profound, in terms of how we interact with our environment, with other people, and with the world,” observed Dave Lester.
“Flying the drone lets me see the world from a new perspective, and hacking on it helps me understand how this technology can be a platform for creativity,” he said. “So many interesting applications are possible; it’s a very liberating personal technology.”
It’s remarkable how the MIT Hobby Shop presages aspects of the hackerspace movement…
In the 1937-38 academic year, Vannevar Bush, then Vice President of MIT, granted a group of 16 MIT students permission to use a room in the basement of building 2. With equipment they found around the Institute they set up a wood and metal shop in the 16-foot by 22-foot area. The club members chose the name “Hobby Shop” based on their belief in the philosophy that the well rounded individual pursued interests outside their profession – hobbies.
Now in its 75th year, we take a look back how the Hobby Shop began, and evolved to what it is today.
Imagine if a ScanEagle had been available during Katrina. It could permit the clever separation of Search from Rescue. It could be in the air early and look for stranded rooftop victims. Then larger passenger helicopters would not be risking lives and wasting fuel looking for people.
You could first fly the UAV to search for those most needing immediate evacuation, and then the rescue helicopters would fly straight to their next high priority victim.
It looks like FEMA or municipalities can contract with these organizations to put a team on the ground in 24 hours. This could be an ideal way to affordably have “eyes in the sky” available during an MCI or disaster.
The two big hurdles to wider domestic use of UAV’s are regulation, acceptance, and pilot training. The FAA is currently working out regulation to allow civilian use of UAV’s in the USA.
The next challenge is acceptance. Some states are already proposing regulations to ban UAV’s. In my state of Missouri they are concerned about surveillance and privacy, so they are trying to ban UAV’s, perhaps without a full appreciation for their potential value. Oregon is looking at doing the same thing.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has bumped back its timeline for a much-anticipated rule on integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the U.S. national airspace system according to HAI.
A proposed rule should go to the Office of Management and Budget — one of the final steps in the rulemaking process — by July 1, according to a new Department of Transportation report on significant rules. That July target is nearly four months later than was estimated in a report issued last month. DOT said that “unanticipated issues requiring further analysis” caused the delay. Under the agency’s newest timeline, the rule would be published in the Federal Register on Oct. 17.
The FAA, which will begin to license UAVs for commercial use in 2015, forecasts that 30,000 will fly American skies within the next 20 years.
Since humans are responsible for much of the damage to coral reefs, it makes sense that we should try and help repair them. That’s exactly what a team from the Herriot-Watt University’s Centre for Marine Biodiversity and Biotechnology is attempting to do with the development of underwater “coralbots.” Now anyone can add their support to this worthy effort with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign that will help make the robots a reality.
The research team has already built a couple of prototype coralbots that can be equipped with onboard camera, computer, and flexible arms and grippers. These would come together to allow the robot to reattach healthy pieces of coral back onto a reef to help speed up the healing process. This time-consuming task is currently performed by scuba divers – or not at all. It also makes repairing reefs at greater depths difficult or impossible.
The team’s plan is to develop a swarm of robots that would autonomously navigate across a damaged coral reef and transplant pieces of healthy coral as they went. The Heriot-Watt researchers says they have already tested their coralbot prototypes at sea but need help both with developing the computer vision system that would allow the robots to visually identify healthy bits of coral and with configuring a manipulator arm with which the robots could pick up and place the coral pieces in the right spot.
The team is hoping to raise US$107,000 to allow them to put all the pieces together and build two robots to publicly demonstrate the feasibility of the technology on a coral reef in a public aquarium. They hope that this will help attract further funds to ultimately realize their goal of producing a team of eight coralbots that could be used on coral reefs around the globe.
Given the nature of the project, backer rewards are limited to recognition of involvement in the form of names printed on the project’s website or the robots themselves. But the real reward is the warm fuzzy feeling you’ll get from knowing you’re helping preserve one of the planet’s most important ecosystems.
WHITEVILLE — It is well past 8 p.m. on a Thursday, and engineers James Palmer and Cy Brown are a long way from their day jobs at Raven Research and Development in Lafayette.
Palmer and Brown are in the middle of an expansive rice field in rural St. Landry Parish. It is pitch dark and mostly quiet.
They are on a mission.
“We do this every weekend,” said Brown, who is the team’s computer operator. “We will be out here all night.”
Armed with state-of-the-art gear, computers, infrared cameras and thermal imaging scopes, they are hunting.
Their target is a herd of wild hogs that has been devastating a local farmer’s rice and soybean crops.
Enter the “Dehogiflier,” the name Palmer and Brown have given their invention.
It is a domestic drone that can fly above dense, grassy fields and see into the night. The drone is almost silent and deadly accurate.
“It’s not really hunting,” Palmer said. “There is not much sport to it. It’s about getting the maximum advantage in order to get rid of the hogs.”
Across the country, drone technology, once used only by the military, is being developed for many other practical uses from taking aerial real estate photographs to monitoring oil pipelines.
Right here in southwest Louisiana, Brown and Palmer have come up with their own groundbreaking application that may one day help farmers control this extremely destructive species.
SHEPHERD-MIL, a UAV with different applications for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance missions will be featured along with other products and systems at the exhibition.
EXPAL will participate in HOMSEC 2013, displaying some of its most innovative solutions in the security area. Among
other products, SHEPHERD-MIL, an UAV which looks like a native bird with the same flight performance, will be featured. This UAV is characterized by the glide-ratio and noiseless motor that make it invisible, silent and unobtrusive in sensitive missions. SHEPHERD-MIL was initially developed as a bird strike avoidance system, and currently is used in situations where the safety and protection are key.
SHEPHERD-MIL is equipped with cameras and geolocation software. The system is especially suitable for border surveillance missions, firefighting, and anti-drug trafficking operations amongst others. Furthermore, EXPAL has adapted and integrated the SHEPHERD-MIL into its Fire Support System (TECHFIRE), transforming the SHEPHERD-MIL into a specific version, Unmanned Forward Observer (UFO-UAV) that functions as a complement for the forward observer.
