Unleash 2025 with Archibald Montgomery Low’s visionary spark—where drones, TV, and rocket bikes foretold a future we’re only just embracing.
Category: drones – Page 3
Embodied AI enables robots and autonomous drones to interact with the real world, but how does it work?
Researchers at Australia’s Monash University are using a common medicine cabinet antiseptic in unique battery chemistry that could soon power drones and other electric aircraft, according to a school news release.
The team is tapping Betadine, a common brand name for a topical medication used to treat cuts and other wounds, in research garnering surprising results.
“… We found a way to accelerate the charge and discharge rates, making them a viable battery option for real-world heavy-duty use,” paper first author and doctoral student Maleesha Nishshanke said in the release.
British soldiers have successfully trialled for the first time a game-changing weapon that can take down a swarm of drones using radio waves for less than the cost of a pack of mince pies.
The Radio Frequency Directed Energy Weapon (RFDEW) development system can detect, track and engage a range of threats across land, air and sea.
RFDEWs are capable of neutralising targets up to 1km away with near instant effect and at an estimated cost of 10p per shot fired, providing a cost-effective complement to traditional missile-base air defence systems.
RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) (Image: © Alain Herzog CC BY SA) EPFL researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.
AIE has introduced the 40ACS Wankel engine, a compact and powerful solution that can be used in aerospace and robotics.
A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.
The group describes their robot in a paper published in the journal Nature. Aimy Wissa, an aerospace engineer at Princeton University, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue suggesting possible ways the innovation could be used in real-world applications.
Some types of drones, such as those with rotors, can rise straight up off the ground—others that are powered with forward-facing rotors or engines that push exhaust out the back must either race along a runway or catapult to get airborne. For this new project, the research team developed a new design for getting such craft into the air—jumping using spring-like legs.
Advanced Navigation and MBDA are creating a GPS-free drone navigation system using NILEQ’s neuromorphic sensors for terrain positioning.
Researchers from Seoul National University College of Engineering announced they have developed an optical design technology that dramatically reduces the volume of cameras with a folded lens system utilizing “metasurfaces,” a next-generation nano-optical device.
By arranging metasurfaces on the glass substrate so that light can be reflected and moved around in the glass substrate in a folded manner, the researchers have realized a lens system with a thickness of 0.7mm, which is much thinner than existing refractive lens systems. The research was published on Oct. 30 in the journal Science Advances.
Traditional cameras are designed to stack multiple glass lenses to refract light when capturing images. While this structure provided excellent high-quality images, the thickness of each lens and the wide spacing between lenses increased the overall bulk of the camera, making it difficult to apply to devices that require ultra-compact cameras, such as virtual and augmented reality (VR-AR) devices, smartphones, endoscopes, drones, and more.
