Lifeboat Foundation

China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week – the world’s first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It’ll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles.

The Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard began construction on the Zhu Hai Yun last July in Guangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, it’s the first carrier of its kind, a self-contained autonomous platform that will roll out with everything necessary to perform a fully integrated operation including drone aircraft, boats and submersibles.

Continue reading “China launches an autonomous mothership full of autonomous drones” »

UK’s National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) is launching trials to fully automate the corrosion inspection of electricity transmission pylons with the help of autonomous drones.

NGET owns 21,900 steel lattice pylons that carry overhead transmission conductor wires in England and Wales. Transmission pylon steelwork conditions can deteriorate through corrosion, so periodic assessments are made to understand the health of the network. NGET inspects around 3,650 steel lattice pylons each year, capturing high definition still color images of steelwork using helicopters and manually-operated drones.

Two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets have completed back-to-back Starlink launches less than 24 hours apart, successfully delivering 106 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

Originally scheduled just a handful of hours apart, slight delays eventually saw Starlink 4–13 and Starlink 4–15 settle on 6:07 pm EDT, May 13th and 4:40 pm EDT, May 14th, respectively. Entering the final stretch, launch preparations went smoothly and both Falcon 9 rockets ultimately lifted off without a hitch.

The series began with Starlink 4–13 on Friday. SpaceX chose Falcon 9 B1063 to support the Starlink launch and the booster did its job well, wrapping up its fifth launch since November 2020 with a rare landing aboard drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY). Since SpaceX permanently transferred OCISLY from the East Coast to the West Coast in mid-2021, the drone ship has only supported five booster recoveries. Save for an unusual East Coast Starlink launch in May 2021, Falcon 9 B1061 has also primarily been tasked with supporting SpaceX’s West Coast launch manifest. With only one older pad – Vandenberg Space Force Base’s (VSFB) SLC-4 complex – available to SpaceX, the company’s West Coast Falcon launches are also considerably rarer than its East Coast missions.

Anyone else find it fascinating that we have all this tech and still can’t compete with nature?

A trio of researchers at City University of Hong Kong has developed a tiny drone based on the maple seed pod. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Songnan Bai, Qingning He and Pakpong Chirarattananon, describe how they used the maple seed pod as an inspiration for increasing flight time in under 100-gram drones.

Maple seed pods are well known for their helicopter-type design. As they fall from the tree, they spin like a helicopter rotor with no engine, increasing their distance from the tree as they are blown afar. In this new effort, the researchers sought to take advantage of the efficiency inherent in the structure of the maple seed pod to increase flight time for tiny drones. To that end, they built a tiny drone that can spin like the maple seed pod to keep aloft. The resulting drone could fly for nearly twice as long as those with a traditional four-rotor design.

Continue reading “Tiny drone based on maple seed pod doubles flight time” »

With drone-in-a-box (DiaB) solutions emerging as a growth segment within the drone industry, Norway-based Nordic Unmanned has entered into an acquisition agreement with DiaB specialist DroneMatrix.

This partnership will enable both companies to scale their commercial offerings through new services and solutions.

A technological demonstration from China recently presented the power of super drones that track objects and people with high precision. The remote-powered vehicles, developed by scholars from Zhejiang University, were deployed into a thick bamboo forest to test their capabilities.

A video released by the researchers shows that the drones maneuvered effectively over the complex obstacles of the forest. The demonstration of the machines creeped out many audiences, as the precision and navigation of the drones exceeded far more than those of the technologies we see today.

Continue reading “Palm-Sized Drone With Flight Performance Like in Sci-Fi Films Can Attack Humans in Pack [WATCH]” »

A swarm of 10 bright blue drones lifts off in a bamboo forest in China, then swerves its way between cluttered branches, bushes and over uneven ground as it autonomously navigates the best flight path through the woods.

The experiment, led by scientists at Zhejiang University, evokes scenes from science fiction —and the authors in fact cite films such as “Star Wars,” “Prometheus” and “Blade Runner 2049” in the opening of their paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

“Here, we take a step forward (to) such a future,” wrote the team, led by Xin Zhou.