Quad resources & stories
The Gods must be crazy!!
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Darkwing Aerials intends to bring beer to attendees at the Oppikoppi music festival in South Africa. Through an iOS app beer lovers can live the dream while at the same time run the risk of wearing a 2.5Kg Drone for a hat!!. Yep, they can have a fresh brew delivered to them from above with the help of an octocopter. Don't you love it? Yet another hare brained idea from those bereft of the cerebral good stuff. Oh yes....this delivery drone is a UAV equipped with a release latch for dropping a payload – in this case, a can of cold beer...somewhere in your or your neighbour's vicinity. The Einsteins behind this venture chose a machine from SteadiDrone . |
Behold the manned Hexadecagon
| Every year Hyundai shows unique concepts for future mobility. Generally the ideas submitted are designed for use in busy cities across the globe. The prototypes are created by engineers from Hyundai working at the company’s research and development (R&D) centre in Korea for an internal contest called the ‘IDEA festival. Hyundai’s hexadecagon is one of the stand outs. At the 2013 IDEAs festival, the manned 16 blade multi-rotor looks a little unsafe but it does fly! Just for the record, the man in the machine is not actually in control. |  |
X6 now lands autonomously
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The German maker of the X6 (Aibotix GmbH) UAV today announced automated landing features for this model (about time considering much cheaper designs already have this). Autonomous landing is a sought after feature that adds a great deal of safety to multi-rotor craft (imagine 2kg falling on you from 100m) so this makes the X6 one of the safest and easiest to operate commercial UAV. Aibotix was founded by a team of drone entrepreneurs who have worked intensively on advanced image processing, sensor technology and robotics for many years. Today, Aibotix is represented in 14 countries and provides support and service worldwide. These typically cost $30,000 which also makes them very expensive. Read more... |
Enter the Dragon...Fly
| Festo is no stranger to mimicking birds, (You may recall how they captured the essence of a herring gull with the SmartBird) and now they continue the line of development with the creation of another robotic addition out of the Dragonfly family – enter the BionicOpter! This newcomer is a very smart device indeed, it doesn't need to tilt forward to smoothly transition from hovering to forward flight as with an RC helicopter. The BionicOpter is capable of maneuvering up and down, forward and backward, and to the side. By passing an electric current through the robot's four nitinol "muscles", the flyer can move from side to side and the tail can go up and down. This little baby has an ARM cortex at it's heart so indoor or outdoor flight stability is assured by the real-time automatic correction of in-flight vibrations. More... |  |
Star Trek - the quads
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The Paramount film “Star Trek – Into Darkness” which starts in May in Europe’s cinemas got a great piece of advance advertising when a swarm of 30 mini-helicopters equipped with the LED lights drew the Star Trek logo into the skies over London. The show was developed by Ars Electronica Futurelab from Linz (Austria) using Ascending Technologies GmbH (Munich) aircraft. AscTec Hummingbird quadrocopters by German manufacturer Ascending Technologies using on-board GPS with which they can autonomously find and hold their position produced the dazzling logo. The quads can form figures dynamically in the sky through positions transmitted by software developed by Ars Electronica Futurelab. More here... |
Adelante ATLANTE
| In Spain there’s a new drone aircraft in the skies. The ATLANTE UAS is the result of a program run by the Spanish Centre for Industrial Technological Development. The maiden flight was on February 28th - at the Rozas airfield in the city of Lugo. ATLANTE is equipped with a number of unspecified (secret squirrel) automated systems, sensors, and some other stuff. The cool thing is that it can take off from a make shift runway, or be launched from a catapult. Typically, like all things born out of tight budgets due to necessity, it meets standards set for manned aircraft , which means it can and will be allowed to fly in civilian airspace. |  |
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