Building a drone’s hardware and software from scratch is tough and expensive, but open source drone kits are inflexible. So to power businesses looking to customize drones for commercial uses from agriculture to industrial inspections, Airware has raised a $25 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins. The money will fund the launch of Airware’s drone operating system later this year, including autopilot hardware, navigation, software, and cloud infrastructure for storing and analyzing data from a drone’s sensors.
En Allemagne, un nombre important de bâtiments et d'infrastructures (ex : ponts) ont besoin de rénovation en raison du vieillissement des structures et de la mise aux normes environnementales. Les chercheurs de l'Institut Fraunhofer pour le contrôle non destructif de Sarrebruck (IZPF, Sarre) souhaitent mettre les drones volants au service de l'inspection des bâtiments en question.
Israeli-developed 3D printing technology is helping a Latvian company enable extreme sports enthusiasts take the ultimate selfie — a drone that follows them and shoots video of their performances from the air as they do triple wheelies, a “360” on a skateboard, ride the surf, or any of their other adrenaline-pumping activities.
Using 3D printers developed in Israel by Minnesota-based Stratasys — which merged with Israel’s Objet 3D Printers in 2012 — Helico Aerospace Industries, the company behind the AirDog, has been “printing” components of just the right size and shape for a drone that is taking the sports world by storm.
Drones distract, drones deliver and drones do battle. But what else can drones do? That was the question facing entrepreneur Christian Sanz when he began building his own drones a few years back, and after exploring various possibilities, including delivery and also simply drawing together audiences of curious spectators, Sanz found a big need drones are perfect for that wasn’t being addressed: data collection. Now, his startup Skycatch has raised a new $13.2 million round of venture funding to support that mission.
Researchers are using a smartphone as the brains behind a small, inexpensive drone—the phone enables it to find its way around enclosed indoor spaces without using GPS or a remote guide. Although it’s still at an early stage, the so-called SmartCopter could eventually make it safer and cheaper to scout out disaster scenes before human responders plunge in.
