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The Air Force’s Skyborg team flew two General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger stealth drones on the “multi-hour” Oct. 26 flight over California. One of the Ave… See more.

Two stealth drones soared over Edwards Air Force Base in California last week, offering some encouraging evidence that the U.S. Air Force’s new drone “brain” not only works—it works with a bunch of different drone types.

The Air Force hopes to install the Skyborg autonomy core system in a wide array of unmanned aerial vehicles. The idea is for the ACS to steer armed drones with minimal human control—even in the heat of battle. That way the drones can fly as robotic wingmen for manned fighters without demanding too much of the busy human pilots.

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You are on PRO Robots Channel and in this digest roundup you will see: immortality technology, artificial muscles for robots, a robot chef printing food on a 3D printer, a home robot from Amazon and what it did not please the experts, Honda’s plans to create robots, rockets and flying cars, the unusual drone Prometheus, NASA’s mission to Jupiter, Samsung neuromorphic chip, unusual robots. Exhibition of the latest robotic weapons in the U.S., Boston Dynamics is preparing to release new robots every 3–5 years, unusual experiments with four-legged robots and more. Watch the video to the end and write in the comments, which news interested you more than others?

Continue reading “The Newest Robots and Future Technologies: All the OctoberTechnology News in One Issuet” »

An image supposedly showed a work of Day of the Dead sky art consisting of drones shaped like a sombrero-wearing skull.

Will drone deliveries be a practical part of our future? We visit the test facilities of Wing to check out how their engineers and aircraft designers have developed a drone and drone fleet control system that is actually in operation today in parts of the world. Here’s how their VTOL drone works and what it’s like to both load and receive a package carried by an autonomous aircraft!

Shot by Joey Fameli and edited by Norman Chan.
Additional footage courtesy of Wing.
Music by Jinglepunks.

Continue reading “How Google’s Wing Drone Delivery Aircraft Works” »

Drones trained using “privileged expert” achieve amazing abilities.

Japanese UAV startup A.L.I. Technologies test flies a prototype drone motorcycle capable of top speeds of 100 kmh for up to 40 minutes.

Why does this not sound like a necessarily great idea? A startup in Japan has unveiled a one-person drone intended to be flown like a motorcycle, hurtling through the air and around corners at top speeds of 100 kmh.

Continue reading “Japanese startup test flies a one-person drone motorcycle” »

In service since 2,002 the Stryker combat vehicles have been constantly upgraded in light of changing warfare techniques. When deployed in Iraq, these combat vehicles had to be protected from the rocket-propelled grenades but were recently found to be lacking against unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Europe. As warfare moves at lightning speed from drones to drone swarms, General Dynamics, the manufacturer of Stryker vehicles, is looking to arm the vehicle with a directed energy weapon.

To accelerate the pace of this upgrade, the defense manufacturer has teamed up with Los Angeles-based Epirus Inc., which has developed a counter-electronics system, Leonidas, capable of handling single as well as multiple threats.

A team from the University of Zurich has trained an artificial intelligence system to fly a drone in a virtual environment full of obstacles before setting it loose in the real world, where it was able to weave around obstacles at 40 kph (25 mph), three times as fast as the previous best piloting software. Lead researcher Davide Scaramuzza, Director of the Robotics and Perception Group, says the work, carried out in partnership with Intel, could revolutionize robotics by enabling machines to learn virtually.

A paper describing the project, Learning high-speed flight in the wild, was published this month in the journal Science Robotics.

Continue reading “This Hotshot AI Drone Can Speed Through Complex Environments Thanks To New Kind Of Virtual Training” »

It seems inevitable that sooner or later, the performance of autonomous drones will surpass the performance of even the best human pilots. Usually things in robotics that seem inevitable happen later as opposed to sooner, but drone technology seems to be the exception to this. We’ve seen an astonishing amount of progress over the past few years, even to the extent of sophisticated autonomy making it into the hands of consumers at an affordable price.

The cutting edge of drone research right now is putting drones with relatively simple onboard sensing and computing in situations that require fast and highly aggressive maneuvers. In a paper published yesterday in Science Robotics, roboticists from Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich along with partners at Intel demonstrate a small, self-contained, fully autonomous drone that can aggressively fly through complex environments at speeds of up to 40kph.