Lifeboat Foundation

Recharging Drones in only 45 minutes.

Recently, Autel Robotics released a new drone charging platform that allows drones to take on multiple recursive missions independent of weather across a wide variety of industrial applications, including industrial energy inspection, natural disaster monitoring, and more.

Continue reading “A New Tilt-Rotor VTOL Drone Transitions to Fixed-Wing Flight With Zero Input” »

For the first time in medical history, a drone has played a crucial part in saving a life during a sudden cardiac arrest.

An autonomous drone delivers a defibrillator – and saves the life of a cardiac arrest patient. Swedish drone company Everdrone says it’s a medical history first – but the grateful patient says that it’s a technology that should be used everywhere.

For heart attack patients, seconds count: the minutes that an ambulance can take to reach a patient in cardiac arrest can mean the difference between life and death. Autonomous drones offer a game-changing solution. Autonomous drone specialists Everdrone operate the drone delivery system in Region Västra Götaland, supported by Vinnova, Swelife and Medtech4Health. Their innovative solution has been developed with Center for Resuscitation Science at Karolinska Institutet, SOS Alarm and Region Västra Götaland.

Now, the technology can claim a life saved. In Trollhättan, Sweden on December 92,021, an Everdrone autonomous drone delivered a defibrillator that helped save the life of a 71-year-old man.

Indiana-based startup DRONEDEK has developed a smart mailbox that can automatically receive and protect goods from delivery drones.

When thinking of the power of the Ingenuity drone on Mars, which has done more than a dozen flights on the Red Planet to scout ahead of the Perseverance rover, imagine what it would be like to fly a similar machine over the moon.

But without a substantial atmosphere to speak of — the moon is essentially “airless” — such a hovering drone needs a completely different way to stay above ground than on Mars. The early-stage design, being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes using the moon’s static charge to keep the vehicle flying.

The moon’s electrical properties are well-known to science, as it produces such qualities as hovering dust — especially at the line of daylight and darkness. Small rovers on the moon haven’t been used yet at all, although we have seen a few on the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu.

Continue reading “Hovering Moon Rover Concept Uses An Electric Field To Float” »

SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) departed Port Canaveral on January 1st, heading to sea on the first day of the year for SpaceX’s first launch of 2022.

With a launch manifest that’s never been more jam-packed and seemingly achievable, it’s no surprise that SpaceX is wasting no time kicking off what could be its third record-breaking year in a row. Barring delays, drone ship ASOG will arrive about 640 km (400 mi) downrange at its recovery site – just northeast of the Bahamas – a day or two before Falcon 9’s first launch and landing attempt of the year. Known as Starlink 4–5 (Group 4 Launch 5) and scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC), Thursday, January 6th, it will be SpaceX’s 34th dedicated Starlink launch since May 2019.

Perhaps more importantly, if the mission goes to plan and doesn’t have rideshare payloads, SpaceX will start 2022 having just launched its 1997th Starlink satellite, including two prototypes that came to be known as Tintin A and B and kicked off the constellation’s in-space hardware testing phase in February 2018. Excluding all prototypes, Starlink 4–5 will mark the launch of more than 1900 (1922) nominally operational Starlink satellites.

To help first responders find people during disasters, researchers are training a search and rescue drone to listen for human screams — and then locate their source.

Help from above: Drones are proving incredibly useful for search and rescue operations. If a person is lost, sending a drone over an area to look for them is faster than trying to cover the same ground with people or dogs.

It’s also safer to use a search and rescue drone if the person happens to be trapped in a disaster zone, such as the site of a wildfire or in a collapsed building.

Defense company Raytheon has clinched a US Navy contract to provide engineering and technical services for the Evolved Seasparrow Missile and NATO Seasparrow Missile programs, the Pentagon has said.

A press release by the Department of Defense on December 30 stated, “Raytheon Company [of] Tucson, Arizona, is awarded a $55,121,826 modification to a previously awarded contract for engineering and technical services in support of the Evolved Seasparrow Missile and NATO Seasparrow Missile Systems programs.”

The contract combines purchases for the US government (99%); and those of Japan and the United Arab Emirates (1%) under the Foreign Military Sales program.

Sometimes, good things come in small packages. Extremely tiny packages such as a microrobot that can pollinate fields of crops, help rescue people, and so on. Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are already working on that and they’re making significant progress.