Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: drones

2025 UP.Partners Moving World Report

Emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robotics, are rapidly transforming industries and revolutionizing transportation, logistics, and other sectors, driven by decreasing costs, economic incentives, and significant investments.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Emerging Technologies 🚁 Q: How are drones revolutionizing delivery services? A: Drones are delivering millions of goods with insane energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and convenience, exemplified by Google’s Wing program partnering with Walmart and DoorDash, and Zipline saving half a million lives delivering medicine worldwide. đŸ€– Q: What roles can humanoid robots fill in the workforce?

New approach allows drone swarms to autonomously navigate complex environments at high speed

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are now widely used worldwide to tackle various real-world tasks, including filming videos for various purposes, monitoring crops or other environments from above, assessing disaster zones, and conducting military operations. Despite their widespread use, most existing drones either need to be fully or partly operated by human agents.

In addition, many drones are unable to navigate cluttered, crowded or unknown environments without colliding with nearby objects. Those that can navigate these environments typically rely on expensive or bulky components, such as advanced sensors, graphics processing units (GPUs) or .

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University have recently introduced a new insect-inspired approach that could enable teams of multiple drones to autonomously navigate complex environments while moving at high speed. Their proposed approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, relies on both a deep learning algorithm and core physics principles.

Official Trailer

It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies and militarized police roam the wrecked streets, while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence. In this ingenious mixture of visionary science fiction and speculative nonfiction, Academy Award¼-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy) transports us to a future foreshadowed by the terrifying realities of our present moment. Two-time Academy Award¼ nominee Samantha Morton (In America, Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) plays a survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past—a past that happens to be our present, visualized through contemporary footage interconnecting today’s global crises of authoritarianism, unchecked big tech, inequality, and global climate change. 2073 is an urgent, unshakable vision of a dystopic future that could very well be our own.

The Dawn of Tesla’s Robotaxi Network & Automated Transportation

Tesla’s launch of a robo-taxi network marks the beginning of a significant transportation disruption that will transform mobility, economy, geopolitics, and urban landscapes with the widespread adoption of electric autonomous vehicles ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Transportation Revolution.

🚗 Q: How will Tesla’s Robotaxi network impact transportation? A: Tesla’s Robotaxi network in Austin, Texas marks the ignition point for transportation disruption, with multiple companies competing to provide taxi rides without human drivers, potentially capturing 80–90% market share in 10–15 years.

đŸ›ąïž Q: What industries will be disrupted by autonomous electric vehicles? A: Autonomous electric vehicles will disrupt the oil and agriculture industries, as vehicles are the number one users of crude oil, and corn is the top agricultural product in the US, used to produce ethanol for gasoline.

🌆 Q: How will urban planning change with the rise of autonomous vehicles? A: Cities will repurpose parking spaces for retail, living areas, and solar panels, transforming urban planning and enabling new forms of transportation, including drones and aircraft.

Environmental Impact.

Continue reading “The Dawn of Tesla’s Robotaxi Network & Automated Transportation” | >

Zelensky: Ukraine agrees deals for ‘hundreds of thousands’ of drones

Ukraine has concluded deals with European partners and a US defence company to step up the production of drones, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday. Zelensky said Kiev has “reached an agreement with one of the leading American companies to significantly increase our joint efforts” on drones, which have become central to Ukrainian defence efforts against Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Drones capture devastating coral loss as bleaching wipes out most reef life

New research has revealed alarming coral mortality rates of 92% after last year’s bleaching event at Lizard Island on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, marking one of the highest coral mortality rates ever documented globally.

The study Coral bleaching and mass mortality at Lizard Island revealed by drone imagery’ has been published in Coral Reefs.

The team assessed the impact of the Fourth Global Coral Bleaching Event, declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in April 2024, which caused extensive bleaching and mortality across the reef system.

/* */