drones

The Geran-4 one-way attack drone uses speed and altitude to evade low-cost interceptors Ukraine depends heavily upon.

Where do America's X-plane projects fit in an era of cheap drones?

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) began regularly deploying drones two years ago and has since expanded their use in a way that has outpaced its documented policy and evaded existing local and state oversight…

With the job of launching giant tubes packed with explosives and extremely expensive national security payloads on top, if anywhere could use lasers, it's the Cape.

Russia is deploying jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones against Ukraine. Here’s how they differ and why they are much harder to intercept.

Scaleout deploys decentralized AI-driven learning to military bases and drones.

How DJI achieves its exceptional margins, from a teardown of two popular drones.

Artist’s rendition | Image:The Verge, Getty Images The Wing Hummingbird 7000W-B delivery drone weighs less than 15 pounds. It has 16 propellers - four for horizontal movement and 12 for vertical - a top speed of 60 miles per hour, a carrying capacity of up to 2.7 pounds, and a delivery radius of about six miles. It is authorized by the FAA for beyond-line-of-sight piloting. As a feat of engineering, it is impressive. So far I've mostly used it to send people potatoes. It all started a few Sunday mornings ago when my neighbor Will added me and a half dozen other local dads to a group chat. I only recognized a few of the numbers. "Anyone looking for dumb stuff to entertain the kids?" he … Read the full story at The Verge.

Wildfire detection from space and firefighting drones featured among the finalists honored in the $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition. Although no team walked away with either of the two grand prizes, such technologies could prove helpful as the world grapples with the growing costs of worsening wildfire disasters. The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. A second Autonomous Response Prize track challenged teams to autonomously detect and put out a high-risk fire located somewhere within rural Alaska while ignoring decoy fires—all within 10 minutes of the fire igniting. “We want to be able to prepare and provide tools for firefighters to really allow them to do the best job,” said Andrea Santy , program director of XPRIZE Wildfire , in an interview with Ars. “They're great at what they do, but it's unfair to continue to put them in harm's way when there's technology coming online that can help keep them safe, keep communities safe, and protect ecosystems.” Read full article Comments

As European militaries adapt to the use of AI and drones in modern warfare, a NATO-backed startup is helping to deploy AI-driven target detection and selection that can run on small drones for surveillance and attack missions. The company, Scaleout Systems, was originally founded by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2018, and initially focused on training and deploying machine learning models directly on the hardware available in commercial trucks and other vehicles. But once Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the company pivoted toward defense applications. “With the war in Ukraine and a shifting world, we realized that this technology can be very important to operationalize edge data and sensor data for machine learning to make sure that NATO allies have found that strategic advantage,” Andreas Hellander, cofounder and CEO of Scaleout Systems, told Ars. Read full article Comments