Author: markdickinson

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Britain approves $3.3M for consortium to develop drone swarm technology
by Allen Cone
Washington (UPI) Apr 1, 2019

Britain's government has awarded a $3.3 million contract for a consortium to develop drone swarm technology for the military as part of the Many Drones Make Light Work project.

The swarms are planned to operate alongside Britain's F-35 and Typhoon combat aircraft, Britain's Defense Ministry announced Thursday. Funding comes from the Defense and Security Accelerator.

The consortium is led by Blue Bear Systems Research, a world leader in autonomous system solutions. IQHQ, Plextek, Airbus and the University of Durham are also part of the contracted team.

The 18-month “integration concept evaluation” phase will culminate in live flight demonstrations to the military. Twenty unmanned aerial systems will be produced into the final stage of development and will ultimately be managed by the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory.

“The MOD continues to ..

Tamara DietrichContact ReporterStaff writer

Meteorology professor and drone researcher Phillip Chilson has a vision, and it goes something like this:
A network of 30-foot mesonet towers is stationed throughout the country to sample air pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. There’s also a complementary network of ground stations, both autonomous and manned.
Every hour or two, stations launch drones that fly up a mile or so to take measurements inside the Earth’s energetic and extremely complex boundary layer — a region not easily studied using current technologies. This helps build a vertical profile of the lower atmosphere.
That data is fed back to the ground stations, then ingested into forecast computer models.

When a drone sniffs out an approaching storm or some threatening disturbance, more vehicles will launch — an intelligent swarm of drones that coordinate with each other on how best to interrogate that region of the atmosphere, gathering more data, stil..

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Autonomous drones have begun to ferry blood samples between clinics and labs in the skies over North Carolina, according to a recent report from Wired.

The drone service, run by UPS with drone technology from Matternet, made its first flight last Tuesday at Raleigh’s WakeMed Hospital, according to the report.

The drone can carry up to five pounds and completes its flight in approximately three minutes, a significant reduction from the 30 minutes it would take for a driver to make the journey by car, according to Wired.

While the drone is designed to work autonomously, all flights are monitored by a remote pilot-in-command who can intervene if necessary, according to the report.

The blood-sample toting drones will take about 10 flights daily to start, according to Wired, with the chance to increase if service picks up.

The service was born from the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program which aims to test the safe integration of drone tech into commercial airspace..

Technology companies using remote sensing and big data to tackle some of the problems affecting Nigerian farmers are facing regulatory restrictions, IFE OGUNFUWA writes

Research has shown that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are immensely useful in executing tedious tasks such as video coverage, land survey, data collection in mining, agriculture, property inspection, parcel delivery and construction.

However, many Nigerian farmers and drone operators are facing regulatory and market entry pushback in their quest to commercialise drone services.

In the agricultural space, the use of drones in farm mapping and improving the overall crop yield in a country faced with food insecurity, erosion and irrigation challenges and low agro-export is daunting.

This is despite the fact that the concept of using drones has gained traction and government acceptability in other African countries like Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania, among others.

Some of the challenges Nigerian farmers face are the ina..

CHIANG RAI – A team of UK scientists, including researchers at the University of York, are in Chiang Rai Province researching how to apply drone technology to prevent the spread of a fungal coffee rust disease (Hemileia Vastatrix) which devastates coffee crops around the world.

Coffee plants are vulnerable to a fungal disease known as coffee leaf rust or Hemileia Vastatrix which poses an ongoing problem to farmers in the coffee-growing industry.

Coffee is grown in many areas of the developing world and if a coffee plantation is wiped out by coffee rust disease it can destroy an entire family’s livelihood. Many farmers can’t afford expensive fungicides that could prevent coffee rust.

Little Protection

The research team have been working in the coffee growing regions of Northern Thailand to test how to use drones to spot the disease early and prevent its spread.

There is huge consumer demand for coffee world-wide and, according to the British Coffee Association, we now drink around ..