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It would be hard to overestimate the damage done to the drone industry by the various organizations that represent general aviation in North America. AOPA, EAA and COPA have all put the onus for sense and avoid entirely on the drone industry and claim their members have no responsibility to accommodate this growing industry. Sense …
Everyone is researching new battery chemistries that will push drones into the next category of flight endurance. There is an expectation that this new chemistry is just around the corner. While this may be true, it's not guaranteed. The problem is that the industries driving the development of next-generation batteries are very different than the …
There is a lot of discussion these days about electric cars and the future of the internal combustion engine. Slowly, electric cars are creeping into our consciousness. You probably know one or two people who have one, brave early adopters helping to work out the bugs. Even though I still drive a car with an …
Our lives have been defined - no transformed, by the availability of cheap, powerful, and ubiquitous computing power. Whether it is the multicore gigahertz processors that power my phone and laptop; or the scores of micro controllers that make just about everything in my car work - everywhere you look there's a computer doing something …
XPONENTIAL (AUVSI for those of us who have been around for a while), has come and gone for another year. 2019 was just as busy as previous years. The same core exhibitors were there this year as in past years and there is a fair amount of churn at the periphery. Lots of small companies …
This past September, Airware surprised everyone by suddenly closing. The surprise was heightened by the fact that, only a few days prior, they had announced the opening of their Tokyo office and a partnership with Mitsubishi. When I first heard of Unmanned Innovation, later to be known as Airware, they were just one of a …
The bi-annual Farnborough International Airshow wrapped up a couple weeks ago. I've lost track of how many MicroPilot has attended. It’s certainly more than 15 years since we attended Farnborough for the first time. The highlight of the flight demonstration portion of this year's show was a loop by a C-130 Hercules. This certainly upstaged …
RF is your enemy. Both your GPS receiver and your datalink are sensitive to RF interference. RF interference will increase the time it takes for your GPS receiver to lock, increase the likelihood that you lose lock and reduce your GPS receiver’s position accuracy. Note that RTK (or carrier phase) GPS receivers are especially sensitive …
It seems that everyone is working on some sort of transitioning UAV these days. Combining a fixed wing aircraft and some sort of multirotor seems to be the thing to do. The resulting vehicle combines the multirotor’s ease of takeoff and landing with most of the speed and endurance of a fixed wing UAV. There …
Continue reading "Transitioning Vehicles – Looks Can be Deceiving"
Understand your failure modes and corner cases. We often see drones designed with too little attention paid to failure modes and corner cases. It's hard to cover all the ‘what ifs’ but once your system is in the market, how well you cover all the exception cases will play a large role in determining your …
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