In a small-but-significant addition to its budding interest in robotics, San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has acquired KMel Robotics, a Philadelphia, PA-based startup that specializes in multi-rotor drones capable of coordinated, high-performance operations.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Are you the kind of drone pilot that wants to do things with your aircraft no one’s thought of before? If so, then Tower, the new open-source flight control app from 3D Robotics, could well be for you.
Unveiled today, Tower was designed to offer a broad range of ways to control a drone in flight, while also giving manufacturers and sophisticated pilots alike a way to add their own new features, or customize existing ones.
“Tower is the portal to your drone,” Brandon Basso, 3D Robotics’ vice president of software engineering, told VentureBeat. “It allows you to control [your] aircraft in very, very autonomous ways.”
Drones carrying cameras or infrared sensors have already found favor with farmers, police forces, and extreme sports enthusiasts. Now engineers are testing versions of the tiny craft that can do more than just observe.
Prototypes able to swoop down to scoop up water samples are being developed to help ecologists, the oil industry, and others track oil leaks or invasive species. Some can even perform rudimentary analysis on the water they collect.
Late for a meeting and worried you won’t find parking? Don’t worry: That drone flying above your car has got your back.
It may be some time before that wonderful vision of the future comes to pass, but Siemens thought enough of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth student Amir Ehsani Zonouz’s concept for “intelligent parking drone technology” to name it the winner of the company’s first-ever Mobility IDEA contest.
The Ghost drone, which has raised more than six times its campaign goal on Indiegogo weeks before its deadline, has raised some even bigger funds.
Ehang, the company behind Ghost, is announcing it has raised $10 million in new funding to expand its teams in China and Silicon Valley and to help it manufacture more units.
Torquing Group has just raised a bunch of money to fund the development of Zano, a drone that serves as your own personal paparazzi. You can use gesture controls to point where you want Zano to fly and shoot videos of you.
Naturally, this aerial photography gadget has caught a lot of attention. The company launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise $195,000 over 30 days. But in one day, more than 3,696 backers have pledged £652,513, or $1.02 million.
Dull, dirty, and dangerous. Those are the tasks robots are best for, but it also describes jobs with General Electric’s Field Services division, inspecting wind turbines and oil pipelines.
The Ambulance Drone is an all-purpose medical toolkit that can be automatically flown to any emergency situation and used to guide citizens to make non-technical lifesaving procedures.
How do you keep small drone aircraft safe in the world’s busiest national airspace? One idea is to have them use cellphone networks to feed data back to an air traffic control system made just for drones.
A startup called Airware is working with NASA on a project exploring how to manage the swarms of commercial drones expected to start appearing in U.S. skies. The four-year program will create a series of prototype air traffic management systems and could shape how widely commercial drones can be used. Airware’s main business is selling control software and hardware to drone manufacturers and operators.
CyPhy Works has been awarded a contract with the Air Force to build a small drone for search-and-rescue operations, its second military contract.
The Danvers, MA-based company said today that it will design and test the Extreme Access Pocket Flyer, a drone that’s about 7 inches by 7 inches wide and few inches thick. That makes it small enough to be easily carried by military personnel, who could use it to look for bombs without getting out of a vehicle.
The Pocket Flyer takes advantage of CyPhy Works’ core innovation: a fiber optic tether that allows the operator to remotely control and power the device over a secure and reliable connection. The pocket drone will also have a panoramic camera that will provide a video feed to the remote operator.
