Tag: drone

Dutch police training Eagles to grab drones out of the sky

On By A.P.In drone, eagleLeave a comment

For hundreds of years in the skies over Asia, people have used eagles to hunt down prey with deadly results.

That tradition has been in decline for decades, but now the bird’s keen eyesight, powerful talons and lethal hunting instincts are being used to take out a new kind of 21st-century vermin: drones.

The animal-vs.-machine moment is brought to you by Guard From Above, which describes itself as “the world’s first company specialized in training birds of prey to intercept hostile drones.”

The Hague-based company’s latest customers are Dutch police, who have been looking for ways to disable illegally operating drones. A police spokesman told Dutch News.nl that the effort remains in a testing phase, but he called the use of birds to combat drones a “very real possibility.”

“It’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem,” national police spokesman Dennis Janus told Reuters.

He added: “People sometimes think it’s a hoax, but it’s proving very effective so far.”

The rise of drone technology has been matched in speed by the rise of anti-drone technology, with companies creating radio jammers and “net-wielding interceptor” drones to disable quadcopters, according to the Verge.

“For years, the government has been looking for ways to counter the undesirable use of drones,” Guard From Above’s founder and chief executive, Sjoerd Hoogendoorn, said in a statement. “Sometimes a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem is more obvious than it seems. This is the case with our specially trained birds of prey. By using these birds’ animal instincts, we can offer an effective solution to a new threat.”

A video released on Sunday by Dutch police shows an eagle swooping in at high speed to pluck a DJI Phantom out of the air using its talons. The drone is immediately disabled as the bird carries it off.

“The bird sees the drone as prey and takes it to a safe place, a place where there are no other birds or people,” project spokesman Marc Wiebes told Dutch News.nl. “That is what we are making use of in this project.”

Said Hoogendoorn, according to Reuters: “These birds are used to meeting resistance from animals they hunt in the wild, and they don’t seem to have much trouble with the drones.”

Janus, the police spokesman, told the Associated Press that the birds get a reward if they snag a drone.

Eagles’ talons, as the New York Daily News points out, are known for their powerful grips; it’s unknown whether they could be damaged by a drone’s carbon-fiber propellers.

HawkQuest, a Colorado nonprofit that educates the public about birds of prey, says eagles have enough power to “crush large mammal bones” in animals such as sloths.

“Scientists have tried to measure the gripping strength of eagles,” HawQuest notes. “A Bald Eagle’s grip is believed to be about 10 times stronger than the grip of an adult human hand and can exert upwards of 400 psi or pounds per square inch.”

According to a study cited by Wired in 2009, raptor talons are not merely powerful, but also finely tuned hunting instruments:

“…accipitrids, which include hawks and eagles, have two giant talons on their first and second toes. These give them a secure grip on struggling game that they like to eat alive, ‘so long as it does not protest too vigorously. In this prolonged and bloody scenario, prey eventually succumb to massive blood loss or organ failure, incurred during dismemberment.’”

A handler in the video, the Daily News notes, claims the birds are adequately protected by scales on their feet and legs, but researchers hope to equip the animals with another layer of defense.

The potential impact on the animals’ welfare is the subject of testing by an external scientific research institute.

“The real problem we have is that they destroy a lot of drones,” Hoogendoorn said, according to Reuters. “It’s a major cost of testing.”

The decision about whether to use the eagles is still several months away.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/01/trained-eagle-destroys-drone-in-dutch-police-video/

Mind-controlled drones promise a future of hands-free flying

On By A.P.In brain, brain computer interface, drone, The FutureLeave a comment

There have been tentative steps into thought-controlled drones in the past, but Tekever and a team of European researchers just kicked things up a notch. They’ve successfully tested Brainflight, a project that uses your mental activity (detected through a cap) to pilot an unmanned aircraft. You have to learn how to fly on your own, but it doesn’t take long before you’re merely thinking about where you want to go. And don’t worry about crashing because of distractions or mental trauma, like seizures — there are “algorithms” to prevent the worst from happening.

You probably won’t be using Brainflight to fly anything larger than a small drone, at least not in the near future. There’s no regulatory framework that would cover mind-controlled aircraft, after all. Tekever is hopeful that its technology will change how we approach transportation, though. It sees brain power reducing complex activities like flying or driving to something you can do instinctively, like walking — you’d have freedom to focus on higher-level tasks like navigation. The underlying technology would also let people with injuries and physical handicaps steer vehicles and their own prosthetic limbs. Don’t be surprised if you eventually need little more than some headgear to take to the skies.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/25/tekever-mind-controlled-drone/?ncid=rss_truncated

NASA develops biodegradable drone

On By A.P.In drone, environment, NASALeave a comment

By Peter Shadbolt for CNN

A bio-drone that dissolves after use leaving no trace it ever existed may sound like the stuff of a James Bond film, but NASA and a team of researchers are actually building one.

Made from a substance that combines mushroom fibers and cloned paper wasp spit, the drone might resemble a propeller-powered egg carton, but its designers say it has the ability to fly into environmentally sensitive areas and leave almost no trace.

Lynn Rothschild, the NASA developer guiding students from Stanford-Brown-Spelman working on the project, says the drone could be made to disappear simply by ditching it into a stream or puddle.

She said her interest in unmanned aerial vehicles was sparked by work on environmentally sensitive areas in her Earth Science group at NASA.

“Periodically, UAVs get lost — for example on coral reefs or in other sensitive habitats,” she said in an interview with the project team.

“As I started to hear about this, I thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be useful if the UAV was biodegradable, so if it crashed somewhere that was sensitive, it wouldn’t matter if it dissolved.”

The mushroom-like substance known as mycelium, which makes up the chassis of the drone, is being hailed as the new plastic — a plastic that has the advantage of degrading quickly.

The team grew cellulose “leather” to coat the fungal body of the flying craft and then covered the sheets with proteins sourced from the saliva of paper wasps — a water resistant material that the insects use to cover their nests.

The circuits are printed from silver nanoparticle ink in an effort to make the machine as biodegradable as possible.

Despite a heavy preponderance of biological parts, the team said the project had its limits.

“There are definitely parts that can’t be replaced by biology, ” said Stanford University’s Raman Nelakanti.

At its first short flight at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston, the team used a standard battery, motor and propellers to fly the drone.

Nevertheless, the team is working on making other parts biodegradable and is studying how to build its sensors from modified E. coli bacteria, the bacteria most commonly found in the intestines of humans and animals.

The team said that ultimately the drone could be sent into areas where it might not be expected to return such as wildfires or nuclear accidents, sending data and never coming back.

While the parts degrade naturally, the team also experimented with enzymes that would help the drone self-destruct, breaking it down further on impact.

Creating a drone that does not infect the environment has been another challenge for the team.

“If you have living organisms acting as biosensors and the plane crashes, there certainly could be problems as the plane interacts with the environment,” Rothschild said.

“Hopefully people could think of this in advance, and design such that this never becomes a problem.

“For example, on crashing, the cells might die. Or the cells could be attenuated. There are all sorts of other processes to keep them from contaminating the environment. But that, to me, is the largest concern with a biological UAV – having living things on the UAV.”

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/tech/innovation/nasa-dissolving-drone/index.html?hpt=hp_c4