drone hacks

478 Articles

These Maple Pod Inspired Drones Silently Carry Payloads

November 2, 2019 by 15 Comments

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) recently released a video showing their nature-inspired drone that is capable of breaking out into five separate smaller drones. The drones each have auto-rotating wings that slow their rate of descent, similar to seed pods from a maple tree. Due to their design, the drones are only made to be used for a one-way trip, with the five components each carrying a separate payload. The drones are designed to detach within a specified distance from their destination, allow the collective body to safely spiral downwards towards land.

In their paper published on the same subject, the researchers discuss how they optimized the balsa wood wings with servos, a LiPo battery, and a receiver attached to a 3D-printed body. Four are equipped with just these components, while the fifth also holds a 3-axis magnetometer, a Teensy 3.5 board, a GPS module, and a Pixracer controller.

They experimented with several motion capture setups and free-flight drop tests to verify their simulations on the models for the drones. Apart from simply detaching, they are also designed to cater to different mission profiles based on the environment they are dropped in.

We’ll admit that the implementation and design of the drones does seem fairly dystopian, especially when you wonder what could possibly be the payloads these drones are designed to carry. But in terms of nature-inspired robotics, the maple seed pod idea is pretty interesting.

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Planting 20 Million Trees, Using Drones, Cannons, And More Unconventional Ways

October 29, 2019 by 67 Comments

When YouTuber MrBeast hit 20 million subscribers, it kicked off the promise to plant 20 million new trees by 2020. While seeming rather mad for a single person to attempt such a feat, the channel has begun an organized effort under the banner of ‘Team Trees‘. With many famous and less famous YouTubers and other online personalities pitching in, along with a number of companies and organizations, it seems like it’s not as far-fetched of an idea as it first seemed.

We’ve embedded MrBeast’s video after the break where you’ll also find a video by Mark Rober, who teamed up a company called DroneSeed, who use large flying drones to distribute seeds contained in nutrition pods over large areas. Their focus is on reforestation after large wildfires and other events that leave the land devoid of trees. Of course, this being seeds, it will take quite a while for results to become visible.

The impatient Canadians over at Linus Media Group figured that they’d rather plant tree seedlings at a breakneck pace, cobbling together a nitrogen cannon that fires a nutrition pellet into the soil, creating the hole for the seedling, or alternately firing the pellet and seedling into the soil in one go from the breach-loading cannon. Obviously the results from the latter method are decidedly more questionable, taking a bit chunk out of the about 300 seedlings they were planning to add to the local nature.

Regardless of the method chosen, any significant reforestation around the world could be a crucial part of reducing the global increase of atmospheric CO2, and the climate challenges this creates.  With sources putting the total number of trees in the world today at about 3 trillion, 20 million more doesn’t seem like a lot, yet techniques we’re learning today to speed up the process of reforestation might play a major role in the near future.

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A Drone Sprouts Wings

October 21, 2019 by 5 Comments

While there are some fixed-wing drones in the hobby world, most of us around here think of the quadcopter when this word is mentioned. There have been some fixed-wings around, and lots of multi-rotors, but not much of a mix of the two. [Paweł] wanted to see what would happen if he mixed these two together, and created a quadcopter drone with retractable wings, essentially just to see what would happen.

This isn’t something that can convert from fixed-wing flight to helicopter-style hovering like a V22 Osprey or Harrier, either. The lift and thrust is entirely generated by the rotors, and the “wings” are essentially deployable air brakes that allow the drone to slow down quickly without consuming as much energy under propeller power alone. The air brake wings are designed to automatically deploy as a function of throttle position, too, so there’s a lot that could be built on this idea in the future, in theory.

[Paweł] notes that this design is somewhat controversial, and although few of us are in the drone racing community we can imagine how a functional change like this might impact in an arena such as that. He also only saw marginal performance increases and isn’t planning on perusing this idea much further. If you’re interested in a drone with “true” wings, though, check out this one which gets fired out of a grenade launcher.

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Military Gliders Are Making A Comeback, This Time In Unmanned Form

October 14, 2019 by 33 Comments

Sun Tzu said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” This is as true in the modern world as it was 2500 years ago, and logistics have helped win and lose many wars and battles over the centuries. To this end, Logistical Gliders Inc. is developing one-time use, unmanned delivery gliders, for the US Military.

Reminiscent of the military gliders used in WW2, the gliders are designed to be dropped from a variety of aircraft, glide for up to 70 miles and deliver supplies to troops in the field. Specifically intended to be cheap enough to be abandoned after use, the gliders are constructed from plywood, a few aluminum parts for reinforcement and injection molded wing panels. There are two versions of the glider, both with huge payloads. The LG-1K, with a payload capacity of 700 lbs/320 kg and the larger LG-2K, with a payload capacity of 1,600 lbs/725 kg. Wings are folded parallel to the fuselage during transport and then open after release with the help of gas springs. The glider can either do a belly landing in an open area or deploy a parachute from the tail at low altitude to land on the crushable nose.

Gliders like these could be used to deliver supplies after natural disasters, or to remote locations where road travel is difficult or impossible while reducing the flight time required for conventional aircraft. Powered UAVs could even be used to carry/tow a glider to the required release point and then return much lighter and smaller, reducing the required fuel or batteries.

Drones are already used to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda and Ghana, and it’s possible to build your own autonomous unmanned glider. Check out the video after the break to see the big boys in action. Continue reading “Military Gliders Are Making A Comeback, This Time In Unmanned Form” →

Flying Batteries For Drones

October 12, 2019 by 22 Comments

Power is the bane of drone pilots. You’d like to fly longer which means a bigger battery. But a bigger battery will weigh more which leads to less flight time. You have to strike a balance and for most consumer drones that balance is about 20 minutes of flight time, more or less. Researchers at Berkeley have a different idea: don’t use a bigger battery, but simply replace the battery in flight.

The idea isn’t completely new. After all, many planes refuel in flight — a technically sophisticated operation, but it occurs every day. The scheme here is to have a primary battery and a secondary battery. When the secondary battery is low, the drone ejects it while running on the primary battery. Another secondary battery flies to the drone and docks with it becoming the new main power source.

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Use Jedi Mind Tricks To Control Your Next Drone Swarm

October 4, 2019 by 1 Comment

Controlling a single drone takes up a considerable amount of concentration and normally involves wearing silly goggles. It only gets harder if you want to control a swarm. Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Technology decided Jedi mind tricks were the best way, and set up swarm control using hand gestures. 

We’ve seen something similar at the Intel Booth of the 2016 Makerfaire. In that demo, a single drone was controlled by hand gesture using a hacked Nintendo Power Glove. The Skoltech approach has a lot of innovation building on that concept. For one, haptics in the finger tips of the glove provide feedback from the current behavior of the drones. Through their research they found that most operators quickly learned to interpret the vibrations subconsciously.

It also increased the safety of the swarm, which is a prime factor in making these technologies usable outside of the lab. Most of us have at one point frantically typed commands into a terminal or pulled cords to keep a project from destroying itself or behaving dangerously. Having an intuitive control means that an operator can react quickly to changes in the swarm behavior.

The biggest advantage, which can be seen in the video after the break, is that the hand control eliminates much of the preprogramming of paths that is currently common in swarm robotics. With tech like this we can imagine a person quickly being trained on drone swarms and then using them to do things like construction surveys with ease. As an added bonus the researchers were nice enough to pre-submit their paper to arxiv if any readers would like to get into the specifics.

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Gatwick Drone Incident: Police Still Clueless

September 27, 2019 by 32 Comments

Quietly released and speedily buried by Parliamentary wrangles over Brexit is the news that Sussex Police have exhausted all lines of inquiry  into the widely publicised drone sighting reports that caused London’s Gatwick Airport to be closed for several days last December. The county’s rozzers have ruled out 96 ‘people of interest’ and combed through 129 separate reports of drone activity, but admit that they are no closer to feeling any miscreant collars. There is no mention of either their claims at the time to have found drone wreckage, their earlier admissions that sightings might have been of police drones, or even that there might have been no drone involved at all.

Regular readers will know that we have reported extensively the sorry saga of official reactions to drone incidents, because we believe that major failings in reporting and investigation will accumulate to have an adverse effect on those many people in our community who fly multi-rotors. In today’s BBC report for example there is the assertion that 109 of the drone sightings came from “‘credible witnesses’ including a pilot and airport police” which while it sounds reassuring is we believe a dangerous route to follow because it implies that the quality of evidence is less important than its source. It is crucial to understand that multi-rotors are still a technology with which the vast majority of the population are still unfamiliar, and simply because a witness is a police officer or a pilot does not make them a drone expert whose evidence is above scrutiny.

Whichever stand you take on the drone sightings at Gatwick and in other places it is clear that Sussex Police do not emerge from this smelling of roses and that their investigation has been chaotic and inept from the start. We believe that there should be a public inquiry into the whole mess, so that those embarrassing parts of it which they and other agencies are so anxious to quietly forget can be subjected to scrutiny. We do not however expect this to happen any time soon.

Keystone Kops header image: Mack Sennett Studios [Public domain].