Autonomous Flight

Airbus, a French company, has its eyes set on the unmanned aerial vehicle market with their Zephyr high altitude drone. You may be familiar with Airbus as a company who develops passenger aircraft, like the A380 that was recently captured by a drone while taking off, commercial jets, and even helicopters. Their goal is entirely different with this project as the Zephyr S and Zephyr T offer a wide range of possibilities.

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In the near future, one marine could have the ability to send out multiple drones from a single tablet. These aircraft would have the ability to swarm the enemy, jamming their communications and eradicating designated targets. The end goal is to have up to 15 drones in the air, each flying for hours at a time without needing to land.

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Drones are without a doubt the future of delivery with faster and more efficient transit times. The problem with current ideas is that all of them are the same, they carry light payloads over short distances. Dronamics looks to separate themselves from the pack with a cargo drone called Black Swan that can carry payloads weighing up to 800 pounds over a range of 1,550 miles.

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The Mystic drone developed by Airlango is the new Mavic clone on the block but has two eye-catching downward facing motors in the front and one stand out feature that separates it from the pack. Powered by AI, this drone has different intelligent flight modes that allow the Mystic to fly autonomously.

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Drones light shows are nothing new, we have seen them popping up at different events since Lady Gaga’s halftime performance at Super Bowl LI when synchronized drones took to the sky for a light show. The technology company behind these drone performances is Intel, and just the other day ABSA Bank rehearsed a small show above the Johannesburg skyline.

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Two of the newest and most fascinating areas of technology are drones and 3D printers. Both of these fields offer high potential in the future as they can solve many of humanities current problems more efficiently. With this being said, what would happen if you combined the two? According to Euronews, researchers at the University of Leeds in the UK have shown us a concept of what this could look like as flying 3D printers repair damaged roads.

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(Semi) autonomous drones are nothing new. DJI drones have countless (semi) autonomous flight features, applications like DroneDeploy turn your aircraft into a map-making slave, and large drones fly by themselves over fields tending to crops. Something new that has come about from researchers at the University of Zurich is a self-flying race drone capable of making agile flight maneuvers.

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Most of our readers will be familiar with the Skydio R1 drone that flies fully autonomously. The R1 drone is quite large and packs 13 cameras and a lot of processing power in order to fly itself and avoid obstacles. Compare that to the Crazyflie 2.0 nano quadcopter that also flies autonomously but easily fits in the palm of your hand.

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Students get excited about tech when they realize they can actually build and program drones. One of the companies that really get that is Parrot with their special drone education program focussed on kids. The students at Temple University didn’t need Parrot, however, they just dove right it and are figuring out how to build an autonomous or self-flying drone using K’Nex. Isn’t that awesome?

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This video was just uploaded to YouTube and it shows you how the Skydio R1 drone views the world as it is following you completely autonomously. This is called the “Voxel view” and it is the view that the R1 drone creates with help of the 12 obstacle avoidance cameras and the one main 4K camera primarily meant to track the subject.

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Researchers from the University of Zurich have found a way to let drones fly autonomously through the city without the unmanned aerial devices crashing into things.

Instead of outfitting the drones with ‘heavy’ sensors and radar or with power hungry GPU’s, the researchers preloaded the drones with data that was collected from cars and bicycles to help the drone understand the urban environment and to teach it how to fly autonomously through the city without crashing into other road users or buildings.

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