Tag: patent
Boeing Counters Contingencies for Smaller Drones
So you’re operating a UAV, and the engine quits. Is it certain death for your drone? Boeing says ‘no’. According to their patent application, “Larger UAVs and manned aircraft often have redundant systems for communication (e.g., SATCOM) and navigation (e.g., inertial navigation) that enable them to respond to jamming and other contingencies without losing communication and navigation. That is, they have many spectral degrees of freedom. On the other hand, small UAVs typically cannot tolerate the weight, […]
UAS-In-A-Box Adapts to Various Missions
When you leave your base for the field and plan to use a long-range drone, you pack a long-range drone. It will have characteristics of a UAV designed for long, continuous flight and will be able to stay up for a while. However, it will have the maneuverability of a bucket of gravel. What if your mission parameters change in mid-stream, and you need a drone with way more pep, agility, and a smaller girth? […]
When Pigs Fly – NOWs Replace SOWs and COWs
Notwithstanding our technological prowess, Mother Nature has a sinister sense of humor, and stuff happens beyond our control. When disaster strikes, it is crucial to establish a communication grid as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bandwidth-hungry networks help coordinate search and rescue, law enforcement and recovery personnel. Sure, there exist “cellular on wheels” (COWs) and “system on wheels” (SOWs), which are carted on trucks into hotspots, but what if there are no roads, or personnel […]
Boeing Introduces Remote Charging Stations
Suppose you are tasked with inspection and maintenance of a pipeline. Sure, you can send out a team of engineers with camping gear to march up and down the pipeline, looking for rust and leaks. Or, you could have one drone flying back and forth doing the same job. The latter sounds like an impossible task, given that a drone’s battery lasts between 15 and 20 minutes. “Not on my watch”, said Boeing’s Spanish branch. […]
First Successful FAA Drone Delivery? There’s a Google Patent for That
Today will go down in history: a new distribution channel has arrived. While it is not as glorious as the Inter-Webs, getting deliveries by drone is kind of a big deal. What took 90 minutes of arduous driving now takes 20 by a little flying machine. Emergency supplies, fresh medicine, and not to forget, warm pizza and cold beer, are all within a closer, more palpable and environmentally-friendly reach. Australian drone manufacturer Flirtey was the […]
Robust Communication Protocol Improves Drone Experience
So you have your expensive drone in the sky and want streaming video to your pilot, the camera operator, the client’s tablet and the client’s girlfriend’s laptop. That’s a lot of signal for the drone to transmit, not to mention the signal it expects to receive from the pilot. Not all signals are the same. Thus, DJI has applied for a patent for “cyclically repeating time division multiplexing”, an oscillation of “I’m listening” and “Here […]
Spy Drone Echolocates to Map Room in 3-D
Bats do it, subs do it, and vision-impaired people do it too. So why can’t a drone echolocate? This little drone can, and will give you an accurate layout of any enclosed space in three dimensions. The secret lies in the drone’s ‘sonar bubble’, generated by shooting ultrasonic waves from ‘sonar lobes’ that overlap, giving a stereo data stream to the controller that generates a “3-D spatial imaging of the physical environment in which the […]
Privacy-centric Image Processing Obscures the Innocent
With more drone surveillance comes more privacy issues. This patent application tries to mitigate the deleterious consequences to balance out the benefits and convenience of this new technology. Just like Google Maps fuzzes out faces and license plates, this invention aims to block out irrelevant data from surveillance footage taken not only by drones, but by CCTV cameras and manned aircraft. This may be more of a PR patent than anything else, since it’s hard […]
Falling Drone Damage Limited Thanks to Autorotation
Autorotation landing for a drone means a softer impact at crash.
Draganfly Propellers Remove Easily, Folding Drone Ensues
Clockwise prop for the clockwise motor, counterclockwise prop for the counterclockwise motor Patent.