Mars helicopter bound for the Red Planet takes to the air for the first time

The Mars 2020 mission is on track for launch next year, and nesting inside the high-tech new rover heading that direction is a high-tech helicopter designed to fly in the planet’s nearly non-existent atmosphere. The actual aircraft that will fly on the Martian surface just took its first flight and its engineers are over the moon.

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Koala-sensing drone helps keep tabs on drop bear numbers

It’s obviously important to Australians to make sure their koala population is closely tracked — but how can you do so when the suckers live in forests and climb trees all the time? With drones and AI, of course.

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Boeing’s ‘Wingman’ drone buddies up with pilot-flown jets

It’s already tomorrow in Australia, seemingly in more ways than one. It’s the 27th already, yes, but they’re also working in putting together AI-flown companion jets for their fighters. Why didn’t we think of that? It’s a Boeing Australia joint, but maybe they’ll contract out to the U.S. facilities and we can snake one off the line. I know a guy.

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That night, a forest flew: DroneSeed is planting trees from the air

Wildfires are consuming our forests the institutions and technologies to keep these environments healthy have suffered decades of neglect. DroneSeed is a Seattle-based startup that aims to combat this problem with drones, artificial intelligence, and biological engineering. And it’s even more complicated than it sounds.

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First ever drone-delivered kidney is no worse for wear

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit.

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Inspired by spiders and wasps, these tiny drones pull 40x their own weight

If we want drones to do our dirty work for us, they’re going to need to get pretty good at hauling stuff around. But due to the pesky yet unavoidable restraints of physics, it’s hard for them to muster the forces necessary to do so while airborne — so these drones brace themselves against the ground to get the requisite torque.

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African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Harley-Davidson is opening a Silicon Valley R&D center to power EV production With a $10 million round, Nigeria’s Paga plans global expansion Samantha Stein Contributor More posts by this […]

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Parrot responds to the Mavic Air with its own folding drone

This morning, Parrot unveiled the Anafi, a new drone clearly targeted at DJI’s Mavic line. According to the French company, the new portable UAV is the product of two years of development and a “wish list of user feedback and a biomimetic design inspired by insects.” Like the Mavic, the 0.7-pound drone is foldable, for […]

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DARPA wants new ideas for autonomous drone swarms

The Defense Department’s research wing is serious about putting drones into action, not just one by one but in coordinated swarms. The Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program is kicking off its second “sprint,” a period of solicitation and rapid prototyping of systems based around a central theme. This spring sprint is all about “autonomy.”

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University of Michigan opens up its M-Air UAV testing facility to students

If you wanted to test a drone at the University of Michigan, your options were extremely limited — think “at night in a deserted lecture hall.” Not anymore: the school has just opened up its M-Air facility, essentially a giant netted playground for UAVs and their humans.

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DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

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