Indiana State University officials are hopeful that a recent informational meeting will be an integral step in developing a partnership with emergency responders. ISU officials on Friday met with local and state leaders to introduce them to two centers that are being established. Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett and Joe Wainscott, executive director of the Indiana Department of Homeland...
PC-AffineTrans is a tool for precise coordinate transformations from one coordinate reference system into another. The transformation is performed as an Affine transformation, where a two sets of matched 3D points are used as a basis for calculation of transformation parameters. This kind of transformation is also often called Helmert Transformations. 9 transformation parameters are calculated from the two...
Spaceflight now reports X37B almost ready to go again. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Two months after a sister ship successfully concluded a demo flight, the U.S. military’s second robotic X-37B space plane is in Florida preparing for blastoff March 4 on another secret mission, according to an Air Force official. The 29-foot-long, 14-foot-wide space plane is being readied...
Aerodata International Surveys (AIS) has captured the city of Sydney late January at 10 cm ground resolution using its revolutionary VisionMap A3 camera. Not only the flight mission burned nearly half the carbon dioxide if a conventional aerial survey camera was used but it also provided oblique viewing thanks to the camera unique sweeping technology. A part of the...
Shamila Janakiraman Business and Technology Next month will witness a grand event in Bengaluru. Organized by the Ministry of Defense, AeroIndia 2011 a biennial Air Show is scheduled to take place from the 9th to 13th of February 2011. Aero India is Asia’s premier show held every two years at the Yelahanka Air Force Station in Bengaluru, India. As...
April 11-14 * Hilton Alexandria Mark Center, Alexandria, VA www.UAVEvent.com UAV technology is the future of the military – find out what you need to know at IDGA’s 7th Annual UAV Summit. This premiere UAV event is now open for registration. Based on feedback from the UAV community, the UAV Summit includes topics not covered anywhere else including Small...
Reported here earlier this month and spreading, like well, pun intended wildfire around the web today. The story of a First Person View (FPV) flight undertaken with fireworks onboard. By no means the first and probably not the last. When I was about 10 we had a chap who made violins for a living and free flight models for...
A report published by China Aviation Journal, China has successfully launched its own space plane prototype, the news came out shortly after the US Air Force announced the successful test of their advanced X37B space plane, which is widely regarded as a next-generation super weapon that is even more dangerous than atomic bomb. This story has now been deleted....
Watchdog.org reports potential coastal patrol duties for unidentified UAS, I expect the queue to fly these will be quite long. BY JIM DOOLEY — The state and a private contractor are installing extensive new security and surveillance measures at harbors and shorelines that include planned use of unmanned aerial drones, according to public records. Neither the contractor nor state...
The Metropolitan Fire Brigade showed off its newest firefighter today (27 Jan) with a display by a hi-tech, remotely controlled aerial camera platform capable of hovering above fires, detecting hotspots and sending real-time vision back to a central control station. In a year that marks the centenary of the professional firefighter in Victoria, CyberQuad sets the standard for innovation...
With thanks again to the Sierra Vista Herald SIERRA VISTA — A panel of staff from the Army Aviation Center of Excellence out of Fort Rucker, Ala., likely will lead the investigation into why an unmanned aerial vehicle crashed north of Fort Huachuca on Monday. At some time around 6 p.m., a Shadow UAV unit crashed about 900 meters north...
The Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude jet-powered UAV completed its operational test flights in December, a senior Air Force official said. Analysts are currently poring though data gathered during the initial operational test and evaluation flights, and a final report is due to Air Combat Command in March, the officer said in an e-mail on Tuesday. The Global...
Another great story from the Wired Danger room, apparently the Beast of Kandahar is back. It returns from the skies! Back in 2009, the Air Force confirmed that it had a mysterious stealth drone, the Lockheed RQ-170, flying over Kandahar in Afghanistan — the subject of much online speculation and grainy photography. Now, after something of a lull, the...
The Sierra Vista Herald reports an airframe down. SIERRA VISTA — Fort Huachuca personnel responded to a crashed unmanned aerial vehicle Monday evening. Radio scanner communications were initially heard at about 6 p.m. The unmanned Shadow aircraft was found about two-and-a-half miles north of the Rugge-Hamilton Airfield off of Canelo Road, where it and other UAVs operate out of,...
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is working to design and build unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) as small as a bird, or even a large insect, according to Mikel Miller, chief scientist for the Munitions Directorate AFRL at Eglin Air Force Base. “There’s an insatiable desire for UA systems right now,” Miller said during a presentation at the Institute...
Wireds Danger Room reports that the much touted Gorgon stare does not work. This story is likely to run and run as the Gorgon Stare was also due to be fitted to the Blue Devil blimp. Perhaps it will work better when flying slower. In a draft report dated Dec. 30 and obtained by rogue military analyst Winslow Wheeler,...
More first flights from Turkey, this time a potential armed helicopter. Said to be designed for hot and high operations. We are not sure about the belt drive to the main rotor. Turkish Aerospace Industries TAI, has developed this mini rotary wing UAV in a short time. The first test flight was succesfully completed and flown 150 meters. The...
Brief video clip of Kate Alhola flying an ARdrone using a Nokia N900 phone. The interface was designed by Kate using Qt and she says being an engineer, it’s designed for an engineer. The ARdrone is continuing to spread throughout world, how long till AR.drone 2? Bookmark It Hide Sites
A chance of fame and maybe fortune for your UAV a place in the 9th annual edition of the richly illustrated international UAS yearbook, is up for grabs. Produced in co-ordination with military and government organizations, as well as recognised national and international non-profit associations and working groups, with the objective to give the global UAS community a yearly...
Register for AUVS-Australia’s Unmanned Systems Conference and also receive admission to CASA’s Regulator Conference on UAS Developments in Civil Airspace and the Way Ahead and Avalon 2011, the Australian International Airshow and Defence Exposition. AUVS-Australia is hosting its first international conference, AUVS-Australia’s Unmanned Systems Conference, attracting delegates from around the world. The focus of the event is developing awareness...
A recent Washington Post article by Peter Finn contains the following statement:- For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration – which controls the national airspace – requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns...
Open source autopilot project,OpenPilot has almost been in existance for 12 months and is moving fast. Following their success on Floss weekly the team decided to start a podcast of their own. In the first episode the team talk about Python on a Chip integration to the code base and the upcoming CopterControl board. OpenPilot flight hardware is designed...
The following from Rich Hanson of the AMA. For the past three years the AMA has participated in the rulemaking process aimed at establishing federal regulations for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS). We’ve worked directly with the FAA in an effort to ensure that these regulations will not have a detrimental impact on the aeromodeling community, and we are...
Oh what a tangled web we weave. An amazing story of skulldugary and intrigue. The sUAS market place is currently packed with snake oil salesmen and products that don’t do anything like what they say they do on the tin. For anyone wanting to buy a small civilian system the best advice would be see it fly at least...
Despite the widely reported Maimi Dade Police trial of the Honeywell T Hawk it seems likely that Pentagon acquisitions chief Ashton Carter may cancel the UAS project. Not suprising really, we learnt at a UAS event in 2010 the performance figures in real world use of the T Hawk and its easily beaten by many civilian multirotor platforms. Especially...
Advanced Ceramics Research (http://www.acrtucson.com) closed a grant round of funding from Department of Defense. The company is located in Tucson, Arizona. Advanced Ceramics Research is a company that received a Department of Defense SBIR/STTR grant for a project entitled: Low Cost Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The abstract given for this project is as follows: An...
With U.S. defense spending likely to drop, Thousand Oaks-based Teledyne Technologies, a $1.6 billion military-industrial conglomerate, is rearranging itself to bolster its commercial camera sensor lines and shift toward the defense spending that’s farthest from the chopping block. Just before the end of 2010, Teledyne sold its Continental Motors division, a maker of piston engines for small commercial aircraft,...
