Expert Corner

Wireless Charging of Drones (UAVs)

/31^st August 2017, April Glaser/ Most hobby and commercial drones can fly for only about 20-30 minutes max. That’s because batteries eventually die. And the larger and more powerful the battery, the heavier the craft, which in turn needs more battery power to fly. But there are a number of projects taking off now aiming to keep drones in the air much longer by harnessing solar energy, as well as a technology known as wireless energy transfer. If drones don’t need to recharge, they won’t have to land.

Agriculture Drone (UAV) for Spraying Fertilizer and Pesticides

/25^th July 2017, Prof.Swati D Kale,Swati V Khandagale,Shweta S Gaikwad, Sayali S Narve, Purva V. Gangal/ Unmanned aerial vehicles have become cheaper because many control functions can be implemented in software rather than having to depend on expensive hardware. This even allows multiple UAVs to be used for a single application. In this case, the UAVs must have communication facilities so that they can communicate with each other. This can easily be achieved by equipping an UAV with a wireless mesh node. In this scenario, the UAV swarm can be considered to be a highly mobile wireless mesh network.

Aerial Survey Mapping Drones

Drones in Smart Cities - Overcoming Barriers through Air Traffic Control Research

/8^th May 2017, Aditya Bist, Maxxwell Chatsko, Avani Goyal/ Identified Technologies is a Pittsburgh-based startup founded in 2013 that offers a smart drone aerial mapping system called Boomerang, which provides continuous tracking and monitoring of commercial construction sites. The Boomerang Drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that represents a safer, cheaper, faster, and more accurate method of surveying and mapping active projects compared to alternative methods relying on manned surveyor crews, helicopters, and/or airplanes.

Drones in Smart Cities - Overcoming Barriers through Air Traffic Control Research

/14^th March 2017, Aislan Gomide Foina, Raja Sengupta, Patrick Lerchi, Zhilong Liu, and Clemens Krainer/ AIRCRAFT operate in National Air Space (NAS), which are controlled by governments worldwide. The underlying principles involving control systems and services have engaged the control and operations research community since 1950. Today, both the global and United States (US) NAS may be on the brink of a transformation in scale. In 2012, the US Bureau of transportation statistics recorded 209,000 General Aviation and 7,400 Commercial Cargo/Transit aircraft.

DARPA Supports Development of Degradable Cargo Delivery Drones for Mission Critical Supplies

/19^th January 2017, DRONE MARKET WATCH^TM/ Delivering humanitarian services in hard to access areas remains extremely challenging. Agencies engaged in these activities are hampered by two major obstacles: a lack of reliable information on humanitarian needs in inaccessible areas, and challenges in gaining access to areas beset by insecurity and conflict. To address this situation, humanitarian actors need new methods to properly account for needs in hard to access areas and devise ways to deliver services to the populations located in these areas.

Drone (UAV) Technology in the European Union (EU) as Part of the Digitalization Process

/30^rd November 2016, DRONE MARKET WATCH^TM/ The drone hype should not drown a deeper examination in the technology behind the drone phenomenon – that remains surprisingly nascent. Commercial drone technology is advancing all the time and each innovation leads to new capabilities, more applications, and more widespread use of these machines.

Real-Time Drone Position and Pose Detection Using RGB-D Camera

/5^th September 2016, Isabella Gonzalez, Mohit Hingorani, Oytun Ulutan/ Object detection and tracking is one of the most fundamental problems in computer vision. In recent years drones have become widely available and are being used for purposes ranging from military, air delivery as well as for art making. This project aims at developing a novel way of tracking drones and their orientation with respect to the camera. It can essentially replace more expensive tracking systems such as opti-tracking. The algorithm consists of a depth based contour finder to detect clean contours.

The Current State of Drone (UAV) Research in the European Union (EU)

/16^th June 2016, DRONE MARKET WATCH^TM/ The potential business opportunities generated by the drone industry has eventually pushed for the mushrooming of research and development activities at EU, national and regional level. However, many of these activities emerged in a disparate manner hampering the creation of necessary synergies between them, thinning their disruptive potential.