Thomas J Coyle III's Posts (237)

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Seed-bomb drones could be the key to combating deforestation

Jacob Meister, Real Time Digital Reporter, Design Group

The purpose of drones and their opportunity for growth appears to be unconstrained.

“Seed-bombing” drones could soon be used to save billions of trees worldwide. The upstart United Kingdom-based BioCarbon Engineering hopes to dramatically slow industrial deforestation by replenishing forest floors with seeds.

Drones may soon be used as a tool in evaluating insurance claims caused by disasters after the FAA approved a request from USAA to take drones for a test drive in an effort to expatiate the claims process.

Electronic commerce colossal Amazon also got a nod from the FAA, with the company’s request to try out delivery drone flights.

Drones could soon help keep the peace in Lucknow, India after the city’s police force purchased the machines with goal of dispersing pepper spray.

Full article here Purpose of drones

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National Robotics Week 2015

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National Robotics Week 2015

Are you ready for National Robotics Week 2015? The sixth annual National Robotics Week event will be held April 4-12, 2015. RoboWeek 2014 was amazing and 2015 promises to be even better! Activities can be small, large, and everything in between. Check out our activity ideas below, think about what your group might like to do and help make 2015 our best year ever.


White House to screen Underwater Dreams, a story of skill and determination displayed by an underdog robotics team

The Purpose of National Robotics Week is to:
  • Celebrate the US as a leader in robotics technology development
  • Educate the public about how robotics technology impacts society, both now and in the future
  • Advocate for increased funding for robotics technology research and development
  • Inspire students of all ages to pursue careers in robotics and other Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math-related fields

Website here National Robotics Week 2015

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DIY Drones at 65,000 members!

3689642272?profile=originalIt's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 65,000!!!!

There were approximately 1.5 million page views in the last month! (we now get around 50,000 page views a day on average). It took us just 26 days to add these latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 37 minutes!

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially to the administrators and moderators who approve new members, blog posts and otherwise respond to questions and keep the website running smoothly.

Regards,

TCIII Admin

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A prototype hybrid quadcopter can fly several times farther than conventional battery-powered ones.

A new hybrid gas-electric aircraft could make drone delivery more practical. Developed by a startup called Top Flight Technologies, the six-rotor drone can fly for more than two-and-a-half hours—or 160 kilometers—carrying a payload weighing nine kilograms.

The aircraft’s range is many times that of any quadcopter on the market—the most popular type of drone for its maneuverability. Almost all quadcopters run on batteries, and can fly for only about 40 minutes between charges with a payload weighing just a couple of kilograms. The new drone can also fly more than twice as far as a radio-controlled, gasoline-powered helicopter of similar size.

Top Flight’s technology is distinct from what’s being developed by Google. The Google aircraft takes off vertically but then reorients itself and flies like an airplane. But the company isn’t saying much about how far the prototype drones can travel or how much they can carry. And demonstrations of the aircraft in Australia involved delivering relatively lightweight packages, such as dog treats, vaccines, and a first-aid kit.

The efficiency of Top Flight’s drone is made possible by using batteries to supplement the gasoline engine. Power can come from the batteries, from a gasoline generator, or from both at once. And because the gasoline engine doesn’t have to supply all of the power, it’s possible to use a much smaller and more efficient one. Unlike a hybrid car, however, Top Flight’s drone doesn’t capture energy from braking.

Top Flight isn’t the first to try hybrid technology with drones. The U.S. Army and Air Force, together with an Oregon-based company called Northwest UAV, have experimented with hybrid airplanes. A representative of Northwest UAV says the company is also working on a hybrid system for use with multi-rotor craft such as quadcopters.

Top Flight was founded and is advised by researchers from Draper Laboratories and MIT. It has selected a relatively simple type of hybrid engine, known as a series hybrid, in which there is no mechanical connection between the gasoline engine and the rotors. The engine serves only as a generator that charges the battery or supplies electricity to the electric motors. Long Phan, cofounder and CEO of Top Flight, says “future vehicles will fly well over three hours—we already have the new engine to do it.” The company is also developing object-avoidance technology and other safety features—which likely will be required for drones, at least in the United States (see “FAA’s Caution Not the Only Obstacle for Drone Delivery”). Phan says the company hopes to start selling its hybrid drones by the end of the year.

Full article here Hybrid power for drones 

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CNN Money

"Look ma', no hands!"

Auto parts maker Delphi has announced a plan for a team of engineers to make a trip from the Golden Gate Bridge to midtown Manhattan in a car that automatically drives itself.

The car, an Audi SQ5, will be equipped with all manner of autonomous driving technology, including radar, high-end microprocessors, and software to let the car make human-like decisions like exiting and enter highway traffic, navigating city streets or parking.

The technology used in this trip has been developed by Delphi (DLPH) and has been advancing rapidly. Delphi doesn't expect to build its own self-driving car but it does want to sell these features to automakers.

Some features are already being integrated into a number of high-end car models now available. But most of the tests of automated driving and self-driving cars have been conducted on test tracks or in short bursts on city streets. Delphi hopes that its cross country trip will allow it to gather far more data than those previous tests.

Full article here Self driving car 

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March 6, 2015

Inside a former bowling alley in Pittsburgh, the future of environmental protection could be taking flight. It’s 3.5 pounds of technology and it’s whipping around a vacant floor above a robotics lab.

“We can fly up to 40 miles an hour,” says Dick Zhang, the founder and CEO of Identified Technologies, a startup making drones for use in the oil and gas industry.

Zhang is showing off what he’s calling the ‘Boomerang’—basically a tiny, four-propeller helicopter programmed to return to a docking station. It’s rigged with several devices tucked inside a small carbon fiber body. It’s got a camera, an ‘optical flow’ sensor—the same technology a computer mouse uses to track its movement—and an ultrasound sensor.

“The ultrasound is basically a proximity sensor—'I'm close to the ground—I’m not close to the ground,'" Zhang says.

Zhang has already leased several units to oil and gas companies in the Marcellus Shale region. Right now, they’re using the flying bots to map and survey their sites.

The drones could also be outfitted with other sensors—ones that could detect plumes of harmful chemicals seeping out of oil and gas operations. That represents a growth opportunity, Zhang says.

“There’s a huge opportunity to get into methane detection,” Zhang says.

Full article here Environmental Monitoring

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Forbes

By Frank Bi and Ryan Mac

Less than two weeks after the Federal Aviation Administration unveiled its proposed regulations for commercial drones, one California-based drone company sealed its latest round of financing.

North America’s largest personal drone manufacturer, 3D Robotics, raised $50 million on Wednesday led by Qualcomm QCOM +0.47% Ventures. A valuation was not disclosed. The round was the largest amount raised by any U.S.-based consumer drone company to date.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its product development in both its hardware and software products. 3D Robotics will also work with Qualcomm to utilize the company’s Snapdragon processors.

Full article here 3DR raises venture capital again

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DIY Drones at 64,000 members!

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It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 64,000!!!!

There were approximately 1.6 million page views in the last month! (we now get around 53,000 page views a day on average). It took us just 26 days to add these latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 37 minutes!

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially to the administrators and moderators who approve new members, blog posts and otherwise respond to questions and keep the website running smoothly.

Regards,

TCIII Admin

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From SD Times

By Christina Mulligan

Commercial drones are taking software development by storm these days. Drone development is being looked at in all industries from agriculture, journalism, insurance, film, search and rescue, and even real estate. The Linux Foundation launched an open-source platform for drones late last year in order to bring developers the tools and resources they need to innovate and create affordable and reliable drones. SD Times caught up with Dronecode’s Technical Steering Committee chair Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell to get an update on Dronecode since its launch, and a look at the future of drones.

Full article here The Future of Drones

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The micro-flyer can operate in confined spaces and rapidly accumulate situational information

From naval-technology.com

Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Robotics Institute and Sensible Machines have developed a new small quadrotor designed for fire-fighting inside navy ships.

During a demonstration on a decommissioned US Navy vessel, the micro-flyer autonomously flew through dark, smoke-filled compartments to detect fires and trace victims.

The drone has been built for deployment by the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) as part of the damage control technologies for the 21st century (DC-21) project.

Using the RGB-D camera, or depth camera as a primary sensor to create a map of fire areas, the micro-flyer can operate in confined spaces and rapidly accumulate situational information.

ONR DC-21 programme manager Thomas McKenna said: "With the micro-flyer, we wanted to show that it could autonomously navigate through the narrow hallways and doors, even in dense fire smoke, and locate fires.

"It succeeded at all those tasks."

Accumulated information is transmitted to the ONR's prototype humanoid robot Shipboard Autonomous Fire-fighting Robot, which then collaborates with humans to fight fires and undertake evacuation procedures.

"The micro-flyer can operate in confined spaces and rapidly accumulate situational information."

CMU Robotics systems scientist Sebastian Scherer said: "Flying autonomously through narrow doorways in darkness and smoke poses a number of technical challenges for these small drones.

"But this capability, known as fast lightweight autonomy, will have numerous applications beyond shipboard fires, such as investigation of building fires and inspection of hazardous chemical tanks and power plant cooling towers."

The ONR's project is supported by a small business innovation research grant to Sensible Machines, with Robotics Institute acting as the subcontractor.

Full article here naval fire fighting drone

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IEE Spectrum

By David Schneider

Last week, a small drone belonging to a federal worker crashed on the White House grounds. Just what caused the little flyer to head off to one of the most security-sensitive sites in the world is not certain, but in any event the results were pretty harmless. Still, the incident sparked much interest in the White House’s aerial defenses should someone want to use a small drone of this kind to do real mischief.

The New York Times reported that the ill-fated drone, a DJI Phantom, was “too small and flying too low to be detected by radar,” according to government officials. So how might the U.S. Secret Service—or others worried about drone incursions to the properties they oversee—detect them? I contacted T. Adam Kelly, the CTO of DeTect, a specialty radar company based in Panama City, Fla., to discuss this issue.

Kelly told me immediately that the notion that a DJI Phantom is too small to detect with radar is, well, not exactly correct. Sure, you can’t detect one with ordinary radar, but Kelly’s company, among others, has been making systems capable of doing just that. The tricky part, he says, is not so much in sensing the subtle radar returns but in distinguishing a small drone from the many birds that your radar will also pick up.

“You’d just be floored by how many birds there are around,” says Kelly. “And you’re looking for this one incident in this mass of activity.”

Despite the difficulty, Kelly says it’s indeed possible to distinguish small drones from birds, by measuring the motion of the targets and other subtle aspects of each radar return and then applying machine intelligence to the problem. That is, you can automate the process of picking out any targets that don’t match what you’d expect for a bird or other source of radar clutter. Kelly’s company has done this, for example, for a client in Spain who needed to monitor what was in the air at a UAV-testing site.

Full article here Detection of small Drones

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Robin Murphy is the director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University.

by Elaine Pittman / January 29, 2015

Robin Murphy is a leader in the field of disaster robotics, having started working on the topic in 1995 and researching how the mobile technologies have been used in 46 emergency responses worldwide. She has developed robots that have helped during responses to numerous emergencies, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. As director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, Murphy works to advance the technology while also traveling to disasters when called upon to help agencies determine how robots can aid the response. The center’s first deployment was in response to 9/11, which also was the first reported use of a robot during emergency response.

Full article here Robot Assisted S&R 

              
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DIY Drones at 63,000 members!

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It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 63,000!!!!

There were approximately 1.7 million page views in the last month! (we now get around 57,000 page views a day on average). It took us just 24 days to add these latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 35 minutes!

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially to the administrators and moderators who approve new members, blog posts and otherwise respond to questions and keep the website running smoothly.

Regards,

TCIII Admin

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By Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press

Herding cattle. Counting fish. Taking an animal's temperature. Applying pesticides.

When it comes to drones, "your imagination can go pretty wild in terms of what would be possible," says Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union.

This month, the Federal Aviation Administration issued the first permit for agricultural use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Steven Edgar, president and CEO of ADAVSO, says his Idaho-based business will use a lightweight, fixed-wing drone to survey fields of crops.

Drone technology, already used in other countries, can make farmers more efficient by helping them locate problem spots in vast fields or ranchlands. Increased efficiency could mean lower costs for consumers and less impact on the environment if farmers used fewer chemicals because drones showed them exactly where to spray.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group, says agriculture could account for 80 percent of all commercial drone use, once government regulations allow it. That could be a while. The Federal Aviation Administration has been working for years on rules that would balance the desire for commercial flights of small drones with the need to prevent collisions involving manned aircraft.


Full article here Drones and the American Food Supply

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3689635225?profile=originalFrom CNN:

Washington (CNN) The man operating the drone that crashed on the White House grounds called the U.S. Secret Service on Monday morning to "self-report" his involvement in the incident.

The drone's owner and operator is a government employee who said he was using the drone recreationally, a Secret Service source told CNN. He was interviewed by Secret Service agents and has been fully cooperative, Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary said in a statement Monday afternoon.

"Initial indications are that this incident occurred as a result of recreational use of the device," Leary said.

The Secret Service locked down the White House shortly after 3 a.m. after an officer on the south grounds of the White House spotted the drone, described as a two-foot wide "quad copter," flying above the White House grounds before crashing on the southeast side of the complex. The officer saw the drone flying at a very low altitude.

The drone was believed to have flown over the White House residence after taking off in a neighborhood east of the White House, a Secret Service source told CNN.

A second source said the flight path had not been fully confirmed by investigators.

The Secret Service will continue to investigate the incident through "corroborative interviews, forensic examinations and reviews of all other investigative leads," Leary said.

Full article here White House Drone

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Drone policy in the U.S. is a mess: the Federal Aviation Administration is currently grounding commercial use of unmanned aircraft while letting any amateur imbecile — like this guy — fly freely. Meanwhile, the agency keeps missing deadlines to propose a plan for integrating drones into civilian skies.

The situation is a source of frustration to researchers, photographers and companies, which have been stuck twiddling their thumbs even as other countries leap ahead in developing new industries tied to unmanned aircraft. But if it’s any consolation, there’s now an explanation for the FAA’s arbitrary approach.


Full article here Explanation

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From TechCrunch

By Matt Burns

SkySpecs has solved the biggest problem with drones: avoiding obstacles. With the company’s first product, launching today at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield 2015, drones become aware of their surroundings and will automatically avoid objects. If a person walks towards the spinning blades of death, the drone will casually back out of the way. If there is a tree in the way, the drone will avoid it.

Best of all, this system works with existing drone platforms.

Full article here SkySpecs' Guardians

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Drone startups swoop up millions

3689632883?profile=originalCNNMoney

It's not exactly a surprise that both parties -- consumers and VCS -- are shelling out a lot for drones.

Recent drone campaigns on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have blown fundraising goals out of the water. AirDog, an auto-follow drone, raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter with a goal of just $200,000. PlexiDrone, an aerial photography device, raised over $1 million with a goal of $100,000 on Indiegogo.

And VC dollars have flowed to this sector, too. Some in sizable financing rounds -- like Unmanned Innovations (known as Airware), which raised $25 million in July.

Venture capital funding for drone-related startups is very much on the rise. It totaled $412 million in 2014 -- up 44% from 2013, according to PrivCo preliminary 2014 data. That makes it the fastest growing tech sub-sector behind cybersecurity.

PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh said that though the sector is still very nascent, funding amounts like Unmanned Innovations and Ghost Drones bode well for VC drone investing in 2015.

Full article here Drone Startups

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DIY Drones at 62,000 members!

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It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 62,000!!!!

There were approximately 1.6 million page views in the last month! (we now get around 53,000 page views a day on average). It took us just 24 days to add these latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 35 minutes!

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially to the administrators and moderators who approve new members, blog posts and otherwise respond to questions and keep the website running smoothly.

Regards,

TCIII Admin

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3689631912?profile=originalFrom Architecture News

By Evan Rawn

Many have come to associate drones with the looming unmanned aircraft deployed in the defense industry, but as technology continues to improve drones have gotten smaller and progressively less expensive. Consumers can now purchase their very own drone for as little as $600 or less and the technology is already proving to be useful for a wide variety of purposes, including possible uses for architects in everything from site analysis to construction.

Full article here Drones

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