Lifeboat Foundation

Drone services company DroneUp has been approved for an industry-first FAA Waiver for flight over people and moving vehicles to support drone delivery of COVID-19 test kits anywhere in the U.S.

Scaling drone delivery throughout the country will require flight over people and moving vehicles, something that U.S. drone regulations currently prohibit without a waiver. Now, DroneUp, LLC announces that it has been approved “for the Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) Section 107.39 Operation Over People Waiver allowing the unrestricted flight over non-participating persons and moving vehicles to support the drone delivery of COVID-19 test kits,” according to a press release.

“DroneUp’s 107.39 waiver is the first to allow drone delivery operations over people anywhere in the United States without predefined operating areas, locations, or routes. The waiver is also a first to allow unrestricted delivery overflight of moving vehicles.”

DroneSeed will be allowed to operates drones beyond visual line of sight.

DroneSeed, a company that uses fleets of drones to reforest areas burned in wildfires, received approval in October from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its heavy-lift drones to operate Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and to expand its use of heavy-lift drone swarms to California, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Continue reading “FAA gives approval for company to use swarms of drones to reforest burned areas” »

The latest rescue took place last month, when sherriff’s deputies found a missing 93-year-old woman in a dark field in Missouri – using a DJI drone with a thermal imaging camera. That brings the total to more than 500 lives saved by drones, according to DJI’s project counting the lives that would have been lost without direct intervention of drone technology.

DJI began the project back in 2017 when they published a paper called “Lives Saved: A Survey of Drones in Action” which found that even back in 2016 – 2017, drones saved lives at the rate of nearly 1 per week. That first paper has evolved into the DJI Drone Rescue Map, which allows viewers to explore rescue incidents all over the world.

The project was started in response to bad press about drone technology. Research has shown that a negative drone event – even one that later is found to be inaccurate or untrue – averages more than 10x the publicity than a positive drone event. That’s a problem for a new industry struggling against negative public perception and fears over privacy issues and misuse of drone technology.

Landing pads, special mailboxes and more: A future where delivery drones buzz through neighborhoods could prompt architects and builders to rethink.

Aevum’s RAVN-X targeting “smallsat” market with 2021 Space Force launch.

The Marine Corps is looking for industry sources to produce a man-portable system capable of launching swarms of kamikaze drones over contested battlefields, according to a new notice.

In a request for information published earlier this month, Marine Corps System Command detailed a fresh need for an “individually operated, man-portable, anti-materiel, anti-personnel ground-launched loitering munition system” for fielding to grunts in the coming years.

The so-called Organic Precision Fire-Infantry (OPF-I) capability will consist of a fresh infantry-operated system capable of launching drones that can conduct explosive strikes and are “capable of swarming” over a 20-kilometer range for up to an hour and a half, according to the notice.

It seems some countries are now switching to drone swarms.

From Syria to Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, this new method of military offense has been brutally effective. We are witnessing a revolution in the history of warfare, one that is causing panic, particularly in Europe.

Continue reading “‘Like horse-mounted cavalry against tanks’: Turkey has perfected new, deadly way to wage war, using militarized ‘drone swarms’” »

A trio of researchers at Johannes Kepler University has used artificial intelligence to improve thermal imaging camera searches of people lost in the woods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, David Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, describe how they applied a deep learning network to the problem of people lost in the woods and how well it worked.

When people become lost in forests, search and rescue experts use helicopters to fly over the area where they are most likely to be found. In addition to simply scanning the ground below, the researchers use binoculars and thermal imaging cameras. It is hoped that such cameras will highlight differences in body temperature of people on the ground versus their surroundings making them easier to spot. Unfortunately, in some instances thermal imaging does not work as intended because of vegetation covering subsoil or the sun heating the trees to a temperature that is similar to the body temperature of the person that is lost. In this new effort, the researchers sought to overcome these problems by using a deep learning application to improve the images that are made.

Continue reading “Using artificial intelligence to help drones find people lost in the woods” »

Dog saved by drone.

“It was kind of like losing your child,” said the owner of the missing golden retriever dog.