Lifeboat Foundation

Municipalities regularly have to check for pollution in local waterways, often utilizing crews of workers in boats. The new Nixie system is intended to make things much quicker, simpler and ultimately cheaper, using a water-sampling drone instead.

Developed by New York-based startup Reign Maker, the hardware end of the setup consists of the pole-like Nixie Base sampling device, that has a docking mechanism at the top and a 500-ml (16.9-oz) water collection bottle in a lockable holder at the bottom. It’s designed to work with a client-supplied and-operated DJI Matrice 600 or Matrice 300 RTK multicopter drone – for an extra fee, Reign Maker will provide a pilot and drone.

In either scenario, the drone’s operator begins by hovering the copter over another shore-based worker, who attaches the Base to the undercarriage of the unmodified aircraft. Attaching it involves simply pulling down on a lever at the bottom of the Base to open its docking mechanism, making sure that the mechanism is properly engaged with the drone, then releasing the lever to close and secure it.

After the program was first revealed in 2019, the Air Force’s then-Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper stated he wanted to see operational demonstrations within two years. The latest test flight of the Skyborg-equipped Avenger shows the service has clearly hit that benchmark.

The General Atomics Avenger was used in experiments with another autonomy system in 2020, developed as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program that sought to develop drones that could demonstrate “collaborative autonomy,” or the ability to work cooperatively.

Video from PRO ROBOTS. 😃

-robot avatars.

Continue reading “Mind reading helmet | Boston Dynamics | High Tech News” »

Photo: Stark Ackerman.

A team of researchers working at Johannes Kepler University has developed an autonomous drone with a new type of technology to improve search-and-rescue efforts. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their drone modifications. Andreas Birk with Jacobs University Bremen has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the team in Austria.

Finding people lost (or hiding) in the forest is difficult because of the tree cover. People in planes and helicopters have difficulty seeing through the canopy to the ground below, where people might be walking or even laying down. The same problem exists for thermal applications—heat sensors cannot pick up readings adequately through the canopy. Efforts have been made to add drones to search-and–rescue operations, but they suffer from the same problems because they are remotely controlled by pilots using them to search the ground below. In this new effort, the researchers have added new technology that both helps to see through the tree canopy and to highlight people that might be under it.

Continue reading “An autonomous drone for search and rescue in forests using optical sectioning algorithm” »

Thousands of drones flying through the air need to be managed so it doesn’t end in disaster.

Tiny electric rocket ships.

Unique Rapid Ascent Drones (RADs) can be used as a firework alternative and for light painting, but could also revolutionize space flight.

Continue reading “Rocketship-Like Light-Painting Drones Could Be the Future of Space Flight” »

Chipmaker patches nine high-severity bugs in its Jetson SoC framework tied to the way it handles low-level cryptographic algorithms.

Flaws impacting millions of internet of things (IoT) devices running NVIDIA’s Jetson chips open the door for a variety of hacks, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or the siphoning of data.

NVIDIA released patches addressing nine high-severity vulnerabilities including eight additional bugs of less severity. The patches fix a wide swath of NVIDIA’s chipsets typically used for embedded computing systems, machine-learning applications and autonomous devices such as robots and drones.
Impacted products include Jetson chipset series; AGX Xavier, Xavier NX/TX1, Jetson TX2 (including Jetson TX2 NX), and Jetson Nano devices (including Jetson Nano 2GB) found in the NVIDIA JetPack software developers kit. The patches were delivered as part of NVIDIA’s June security bulletin, released Friday.

The RavnX is the world’s biggest drone and the company behind it hopes this massive UAV will change the way satellites get to space.