Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds9EcRBZzWE

One of the most critical aspects of SpaceX’s quest for the reusability of its space hardware is the recovery of its booster. To achieve this, SpaceX decided to land its boosters on the sea. However, the boosters land on large drone ships to prevent losing the booster and transport it back to land.
After many successful landings and recovery of the boosters, the large and dependable drone ships have become a vital link in SpaceX’s dream to make space travel affordable. SpaceX recently added another drone ship to the pair it had in service.
Join us as we explore SpaceX’s insane new drone ship!
To the armchair engineer, landing a rocket in the sea is suicide as many things can go wrong. To start with, when floating on the sea, the drone ship or barge is small compared to all the land available for the booster to land on.
Compounding the problem is that the drone ship itself can be rocked about on the sea, more than 300 km off the coast.
So, combining the size and instability of the drone ship, the booster can miss the drone ship and crash into the sea, making it harder or even impossible to recover.
However, many things have gone wrong as SpaceX tried to land a rocket on land, with several boosters crashing and bursting into flames.
Apart from that, SpaceX has very good reasons to prefer a sea landing for its boosters, and the reason has to do with fuel.
Fuel is a critical component on any mission because the engineers have to balance carrying enough quantity of it and keeping the rocket as light as possible. As you can imagine, the Falcon 9 rockets are heavy, at more than half a million kilograms which means fuel is a premium.
This is how it breaks down:
When you launch to space and the booster returns, you need to slow down the speed from more than 8,000 km/h down to zero. This is done by reigniting the engine, and it requires fuel.
The fuel has to come from the leftover after boosting the upper stage.
This is where it gets interesting.
If you blasted a payload to low orbit, for example, you would have more than enough fuel for the landing. However, if the mission was destined for beyond Earth’s orbit, you will need more fuel because you have to launch faster. This will leave you with no fuel for the landing.
This will be a big blow to SpaceX’s dream of reusing its boosters. Recall that the company wants to launch missions to Mars, which will require lots of fuel to attain the speed necessary for launch but not enough fuel for landing.
However, there is a way out of this problem with the aid of geography.
When SpaceX launches from Florida, the rocket heads East over the Atlantic Ocean. So making the rocket land at sea and not having to return to the launch site will reduce the fuel required because the distance is shorter.
This means for more ambitious launches, it makes sense for SpaceX to land on the sea.
As Musk put it at a conference, “For half our missions, we will need to land out to sea. Anything beyond Earth is likely to need to land on the ship.”
Now, what motivation does SpaceX have to land and reuse its boosters?
The motivation is money. SpaceX wants to save money on its launches, and refurbishing a rocket saves time and costs a fraction of building a new one.
Just how much money is SpaceX saving?
We might never get an actual figure because it is a trade secret, but it is a play on several factors.
For example, to save some fuel for landing, it means you have to reduce your payload. For the Falcon 9 that means a reduction of up to 40 percent in revenue, according to Musk’s tweet:

Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is <40% for F9 & recovery & refurb is <10%, so you’re roughly even with 2 flights, definitely ahead with 3

Continue reading “FINALLY! SpaceX Is Testing Their New Starship Droneship!” »

Contractor Northrop Grumman is wants to transition this DARPA swarming program to the Army.

The transaction-based communications system ensures robot teams achieve their goal even if some robots are hacked.

Imagine a team of autonomous drones equipped with advanced sensing equipment, searching for smoke as they fly high above the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once they spot a wildfire, these leader robots relay directions to a swarm of firefighting drones that speed to the site of the blaze.

But what would happen if one or more leader robots was hacked by a malicious agent and began sending incorrect directions? As follower robots are led farther from the fire, how would they know they had been duped?

Continue reading “Blockchain technology could provide secure communications for robot teams” »

The future of package delivery, taxis, and even takeout in cities may be in the air—above the gridlocked streets. But before a pizza-delivery drone can land safely on your doorstep, the operators of these urban aircraft will need extremely high-resolution forecasts that can predict how weather and buildings interact to create turbulence and the resulting impacts on drones and other small aerial vehicles.

While scientists have been able to run simulations that capture the bewilderingly complex flow of air around buildings in the urban landscape, this process can take days or even weeks on a supercomputing system—a timeline far too slow (and a task far too computationally expensive) to be useful to daily weather forecasters.

Continue reading “GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis” »

For a long time fixed wing VTOL drones were tricky to work with, but with the availability of open source flight control and autopilot software this has changed. To make experimentation even easier, [Stephen Carlson] and other researchers from the RoboWork Lab at the University of Nevada created the MiniHawk, a 3D printed VTOL aircraft for use a test bed for various research projects.

Some of these project include creating a longer wingspan aircraft by combining multiple MiniHawks in mid-flight with magnetic wing-tip mounts, or “migratory behaviors”. The latter is a rather interesting idea, which involves letting the craft land in any suitable location, and recharging using wing mounted solar panels before continuing with the next leg of the mission. With this technique, the MiniHawk could operate on mission almost indefinitely without human intervention. This is a departure from some other solar planes we’ve seen, which attempt to recharge while flying, or even ditch batteries completely, which limits operation to sunny weather conditions.

Continue reading “3D Printed VTOL Craft Can Land And Recharge Itself, And Team Up With Other Drones” »

When people think about the search for life beyond Earth they often think about looking beyond our solar system and even beyond our galaxy. But what about looking closer to home? Titan, Saturn’s largest moon has a dense atmosphere, an internal liquid water ocean, and stable bodies of liquid methane on its surface. While we have not found any evidence of life on Titan, its chemistry and environment make it an interesting place to explore. Europa is a moon of Jupiter with a water-ice crust and liquid ocean underneath. Its atmosphere is very thin, but it’s composed mostly of oxygen.

Zibi (Elizabeth) Turtle is the principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission which will land a drone-like vehicle on Titan to conduct sorties to sample and examine sites around Titan. Morgan Cable is also on the Dragonfly Team, and both Zibi and Morgan are working on the Europa Clipper mission which will perform reconnaissance of Europa to investigate whether it could have conditions suitable for life. Join Zibi and Morgan, along with SETI Institute planetary astronomer Franck Marchis for their discussion about what makes Titan and Europa such intriguing places to search for clues about the origins of life in our solar system.

Continue reading “Clues to the Origins of Life in Our Solar System” »

Leading defense company Baykar has unveiled for the first time its newly designed drone that can hover, take off and land vertically at Turkey’s largest technology and aviation event, Teknofest.

The flight tests of the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are due to be completed soon. Mass production and delivery phases are expected to start in 2022.

The new UAV does not need a landing track and can take off from several different places, including naval or mobile platforms, said Burak Özbek, an air vehicle design engineer at Baykar, which is already known worldwide for its landmark Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı drones.

Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia have recently developed an innovative system for human-swarm interactions that allows users to directly control the movements of a team of drones in complex environments. This system, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv is based on an interface that recognizes human gestures and adapts the drones’ trajectories accordingly.

Quadcopters, drones with four rotors that can fly for long periods of time, could have numerous valuable applications. For instance, they could be used to capture images or videos in natural or remote environments, can aid search-and–rescue missions and help to deliver goods to specific locations.

Continue reading “DronePaint: A human-swarm interaction system for environment exploration and artistic painting” »

The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China, hope that the technique – which uses liquid metal to mimic natural muscle movements — could also help to administer drugs inside the body and underwater drones.

Researchers created an artificial muscle using liquid metal that allows it to expand and contract and hope one day to use the technology to help humans.