Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers in China are using drones as nodes in the development of an airborne quantum communications network. The article describes how such a network, using a quantum drone would be nigh unhackable.

Mass surveillance, drone swarms, cyborg soldiers, telekinesis, synthetic organisms, and laser beams will determine future conflict by 2030.

Including technology that cuts out footage of your neighbor’s house.

In an unexpected last-second change, SpaceX has moved Falcon Heavy Flight 3’s center core landing on drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) from 40 km to more than 1240 km (770 mi) off the coast of Florida.

Drone ship OCISLY is already being towed to the landing site, necessary due to the sheer distance that needs to be covered at a leisurely towing pace. The current record for distance traveled during booster recovery was set at ~970 km by Falcon Heavy center core B1055 in April 2019. If successful, Falcon Heavy center core B1057 will smash that record by almost 30% after sending two dozen spacecraft on their way to orbit. Falcon Heavy Flight 3 is scheduled to lift off in support of the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) mission no earlier than 11:30 pm ET (03:30 UTC), June 24th. A routine static fire test at Pad 39A will (hopefully) set the stage for launch on Wednesday, June 19th.

Breakthrough demonstrations using defective diamonds, high-flying drones, laser-bathed crystals and other exotica suggest practical, unhackable quantum networks are within reach.

• By Anil Ananthaswamy on June 19, 2019

There’s less traffic in the skies, right?

RENO, Nev. (AP) — The city of Reno has announced some downtown street closures as NASA resumes a series of drone tests in high-density urban settings.

Beginning Friday, Lake Street will be closed from 1st to 2nd streets from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. through June 20, and again June 23–25.

Chism Street also will be closed from Dickerson to 2nd Street from June 14-July 2.

Continue reading “Reno streets closing; NASA resumes drone testing” »

Animals of all shapes and sizes have whiskers of some sort. Cats and dogs and rodents have them. Seals have them too. Some birds have them, as do insects and fish. Whiskers have shown up across such a diversity of animals because they’re an efficient and effective method of short range sensing. Besides just being able to detect objects that they come into direct contact with, whiskers can also sense fluid flows (like the speed and direction of moving air or water), and they work even if it’s dark or foggy or smoky.

While we’ve seen some research on whiskers before—I’m sure you remember the utterly adorable ShrewBot—there hasn’t been too much emphasis on adding whiskers to robots, likely because lidar and cameras offer more useful data at longer ranges. And that’s totally fine, if you can afford the lidar or the computing necessary to make adequate use of cameras. For very small, very cheap drones, investing in sophisticated sensing and computing may not make sense, especially if you’re only interested in simple behaviors like not crashing into stuff.

Continue reading “Sensitive Whiskers Could Make Small Drones Safer” »

Thousands of tech fans descended on the Mojave desert for the conference, a public offshoot of Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos’ previous invitation-only MARS conferences (the acronym stands for “Machine Learning, Robotics, Automation and Space”).

It resembled a tech summer camp, replete with offerings of cutting-edge technology demos, talks and social events.

Continue reading “Amazon conference showcases robots and social uses of artificial intelligence” »