A.P. Moller Maersk A/S, o simplemente Maersk, tiene en su gigantesca flota algunos de los barcos más grandes del planeta. Moviendo millones de toneladas de contenedores, hidrocarburos o lo que se tercie, su especialidad son las cosas gigantes. Y sin embargo podría ser una de las primeras multinacionales en encontrarle utilidad a los drones.
La compañía danesa ya ha realizado algunos cálculos y otras cuantas pruebas con esos pequeños teledirigidos voladores, y ha llegado a la conclusión de que podrían servirle para ahorrar hasta 9.000 dólares por año y barco en costes de operación.
Civilian drone activity has increased exponentially as drones become more easily accessible and affordable. With more drones in the sky every day, there have been some creative and sometimes dangerous attempts to disable drones. The reasons for disabling a drone can vary from boredom and curiosity to privacy and safety concerns. To be clear, the Center for Technology Innovation does not condone or promote the act of harming drones.
La batalla de Captieux duró sólo unos segundos, y terminó en una derrota decisiva para el invasor.
El dron enemigo, que volaba hacia una instalación militar francesa al sur de Burdeos, fue detectado fácilmente en el radar. Una cámara de vídeo integrada confirmó su identidad, y un rápido estallido de la emisión de radiofrecuencia interrumpió sus señales de comunicación, desviándolo de su objetivo.
Era la primera vez que este grupo de pequeñas empresas británicas hacía una demostración a nivel internacional de su sistema de defensa antidron, dijo Mark Radford, director ejecutivo de Blighter Surveillance Systems, fabricante del sistema.
Sky-Futures, the drone startup that flies drones around oil rigs and gas pipelines and analyses the captured data to spot problems before they become a problem, has raised an additional $5.7 million. This follows an earlier $3.8 million Series A back in May.
Backing comes from Bristow Group, a helicopter service provider to the energy industry who have invested $4.2 million, while existing investor MMC Ventures followed on with $1.5 million in funding.
If the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allows the widespread use of commercial drones, the skies could soon buzz with swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles–especially in dense urban cores. That means drones will be tasked with autonomously avoiding collisions, as their numbers will be too high to rely on human air-traffic controllers at all times.
The Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory is just one team of more than 130 working with NASA to solve how to manage drone traffic. The traffic-management system, which will be under development for the next few years, will help drones communicate with each other and avoid potential collisions.
Intel has acquired Ascending Technologies, a maker of smart Firefly drones that can see and sense the environment around them.
Brian Krzanich, chief executive of Intel, demonstrated the drones last year at the company’s keynote speech at the 2015 International CES. The drones were able to sense humans and other objects and avoid running into them.
In a blog post, Intel said it sees unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an important computing platform of the future. That’s why the world’s biggest chipmaker is interested in them.
La empresa postal está probando el uso de drones para evaluar su viabilidad para el reparto en algunas zonas de difícil acceso y en condiciones climatológicas adversas.
Drone startups are hot. In Q2’15 funding reached an all-time high and in Q3’15 we’ve already seen Series B fundings to two drone startups: SkyCatch, which raised $22.1M from Avalon Ventures and Riverwood Capital; and EHANG, which raised $42M from GGV Capital, GP Capital, and others. We’ve identified 10 more early-stage drone startups that are likely to raise in the next 12 months.
All these companies have raised in 2014 or 2015 year-to-date, have less than $15M in total funding, and show other positive metrics, including high investor quality or recent news mentions.
Drones could become useful for surveillance and remote monitoring in many industries, and perhaps one day will even ferry the latest Amazon order to your front door. But there’s one big limiting factor: drones can stay in the air for only so long on a charge.
Not the latest model developed by the Boston-based drone maker CyPhy Works, though. Called Parc, the drone can perform aerial surveillance indefinitely, using a “microfilament” that transmits power and data. Of course the fact that it’s tethered means the drone can’t travel very far. CyPhy Works expects it to be used for reconnaissance or as a communications relay.
Commercial drones are starting to be used for tasks like inspecting oil rigs and crops. But they still require a highly skilled human pilot, and even those that are semi-autonomous usually use prebuilt maps or access the data over a wireless link.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are making drones more independent. They have demonstrated a small drone that can build its own 3-D map of an unfamiliar environment with minimal help from a human operator, and then plan its own routes around a space and its obstacles autonomously.
