Category Archives: UAV

Watching the Watchers: Are You The Star Of an Encrypted Drone Video Stream?

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Small aircraft with streaming video cameras are now widely available, for better or worse. Making eyes in the sky so accessible has resulted in interesting footage that would have been prohibitively expensive to capture a few years ago, but this new creative frontier also has a dark side when used to violate privacy. Those who are covering their tracks by encrypting their video transmission should know researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev demonstrated such protection can be breached.

The BGU team proved that a side-channel analysis can be done against behavior common to video compression algorithms, as certain changes …read more

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High-Speed Drones Use AI to Spoil the Fun

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Some people look forward to the day when robots have taken over all our jobs and given us an economy where we can while our days away on leisure activities. But if your idea of play is drone racing, you may be out of luck if this AI pilot for high-speed racing drones has anything to say about it.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has been working for the past two years to develop the algorithms needed to let high-performance UAVs navigate typical drone racing obstacles, and from the look of the tests in the video below, they’ve made a lot …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: All About Drones

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In the future, drones will fill the skies. The world is abuzz (ha!) with news of innovative uses of unmanned aerial vehicles. Soon, our flying robotic overlords will be used for rescue operations, surveillance, counter-insurgency missions, terrorism, agriculture, and delivering frozen dog treats directly from the local Amazon aerodrome to your backyard. The future is nuts.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about unmanned aerial vehicles. This is a huge subject, ranging from aeronautical design, the legal implications of autonomous flying machines, the true efficiency of delivering packages via drones, and the moral ambiguity of …read more

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Flying Defibrillators

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It’s a sad reality that, by and large, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) doesn’t save lives. Despite all the “you could save a life” marketing aimed at getting people certified in CPR, the instances where even the prompt application of the correct technique results in a save are vanishingly rare, and limited mostly to witnessed arrests in a hospital. Speaking from personal experience, few things are sadder than arriving on-scene as a first responder to see CPR being performed by a husband on his wife and knowing that no matter what we do, it’s not going to end well.

The problem is …read more

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Automate the Freight: Maritime Drone Deliveries

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Ships at sea are literally islands unto themselves. If what you need isn’t on board, good luck getting it in the middle of the Pacific. As such, most ships are really well equipped with spare parts and even with raw materials and the tools needed to fabricate most of what they can’t store, and mariners are famed for their ability to make do with what they’ve got.

But as self-sufficient as a ship at sea might be, the unexpected can always happen. A vital system could fail for lack of a simple spare part, at best resulting in a delay …read more

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Amazon Gets a Patent For Parachute Labels

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Delivery by drone is a reality and Amazon has been pursuing better and faster methods of autonomous package delivery. The US Patent and Trademark Office just issued a patent to Amazon for a shipping label that has an embedded parachute to ensure soft landings for future deliveries.

The patent itself indicates the construction consisting of a set of cords and a harness and the parachute itself is concealed within the label. The label will come in various shapes and sizes depending upon the size of the package and is designed to “enable the workflow process of shipping and handling to …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Underwater Glider Offers Low-Power Exploration

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[Alex Williams] created his Open Source Underwater Glider project as an entry to The Hackaday Prize, and now it’s one of our twenty finalists. This sweet drone uses motor-actuated syringes to serve as a ballast tank, which helps the glider move forward without the use of traditional propellers.

Unlike most UAVs, which use motors to actively move the craft around, [Alex]’s glider uses the syringes to change the buoyancy of the craft, and it simply glides around on its wings. When the craft starts getting too deep, the syringes push out the water and the glider rises toward the surface …read more

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