Shop from over 2,500 Popular Brands We Offer at the OpticsPlanet Online Store - More Coming Soon! Get the latest news and analysis in the stock market today, including national and world stock market news, business news, financial news and more. Video via The Verge . Inside Project Loon: Google's internet in the sky is almost open for business. Raven Aerostar's Loon Balloons are staying aloft for as. 1 nation electronics llc 101communications inc 1075776 ontario inc 11/30 elo touchsystems inc 1213891 ontario ltd 136963 canada inc 184th air refueling wing. Vista Research Raven Industries Stock![]() View a full directory of Motorhomes manufacturers, including all Motorhomes prices, used Motorhomes values, specs and more. BibMe Free Bibliography & Citation Maker - MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. Looking for MSDS information regarding the chemicals in a commercial product or a material safety data sheet (MSDS)? Here is THE most complete MSDS list on the. Unmanned Flight: The Drones Come Home. At the edge of a stubbly, dried- out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy sky. ![]() It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon—a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone- hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering images of a nearby highway. Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock- jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2. Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight- foot wingspan but weighs just 9. ![]() Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and infrared, and a GPS- guided autopilot. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be exported without a U. S. He plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad car. A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 3. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three- foot- wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 2. Manta helps millions of small businesses get found by more customers. Verify customers can find your business for FREE. Get MSRP, retail prices, used values and specs for Power Boats, Sail Boats, Personal Watercraft, Outboard Motors & Boat Trailers. The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to operate. To navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and clicks targets on a digital map; the autopilot does the rest. To launch the Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. An accelerometer switches on the propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that launches it. The stench from a nearby chicken- processing plant wafts over the alfalfa field. ![]() After the deputy sheriff clicks on the laptop, the Falcon swoops lower, releases a neon orange parachute, and drifts gently to the ground, just yards from the spot Johnson clicked on. One was hobbyists who flew radio- controlled planes and choppers for fun. The other was the military, which carried out surveillance missions with unmanned aircraft like the General Atomics Predator. Then came 9/1. 1, followed by the U. S. The Pentagon armed the Predator and a larger unmanned surveillance plane, the Reaper, with missiles, so that their operators—sitting in offices in places like Nevada or New York—could destroy as well as spy on targets thousands of miles away. Aerospace firms churned out a host of smaller drones with increasingly clever computer chips and keen sensors—cameras but also instruments that measure airborne chemicals, pathogens, radioactive materials. The U. S. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank Global. Security. org. Pike suspects that the F- 3. Vista Research Raven Industries NewsLightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”At least 5. China, Israel, and Iran, have their own manufacturers. Aviation firms—as well as university and government researchers—are designing a flock of next- generation aircraft, ranging in size from robotic moths and hummingbirds to Boeing’s Phantom Eye, a hydrogen- fueled behemoth with a 1. More than a thousand companies, from tiny start- ups like Miser’s to major defense contractors, are now in the drone business—and some are trying to steer drones into the civilian world. Predators already help Customs and Border Protection agents spot smugglers and illegal immigrants sneaking into the U. S. NASA- operated Global Hawks record atmospheric data and peer into hurricanes. Drones have helped scientists gather data on volcanoes in Costa Rica, archaeological sites in Russia and Peru, and flooding in North Dakota. So far only a dozen police departments, including ones in Miami and Seattle, have applied to the FAA for permits to fly drones. But drone advocates—who generally prefer the term UAV, for unmanned aerial vehicle—say all 1. U. S. They hope UAVs will soon become essential too for agriculture (checking and spraying crops, finding lost cattle), journalism (scoping out public events or celebrity backyards), weather forecasting, traffic control. Even with an FAA permit, operators can’t fly UAVs above 4. All that may change, though, under the new law, which requires the FAA to allow the “safe integration” of UAVs into U. S. Brown, a former astronaut who is now an aerospace consultant in Dayton, Ohio, helps bring drone manufacturers and potential customers together. The success of military UAVs, he contends, has created “an appetite for more, more, more!” Brown’s Power. Point presentation is called “On the Threshold of a Dream.”Dreaming in Dayton. Drone fever is especially palpable in Dayton, cradle of American aviation, home of the Wright brothers and of Wright- Patterson Air Force Base. Even before the recent recession, Dayton was struggling. Over the past decade several large companies, including General Motors, have shut down operations here. But Dayton’s airport is lined with advertisements for aerospace companies; an ad for the Predator Mission Aircrew Training System shows two men in flight suits staring stoically at a battery of computer monitors. The city is dotted with drone entrepreneurs. His firm, UA Vision, manufactures a delta- wing drone called the Spear. Made of polystyrene foam wrapped in woven carbon fiber or other fabrics, the Spear comes in several sizes; the smallest has a four- foot wingspan and weighs less than four pounds. It resembles a toy B- 1 bomber. Smith sees it being used to keep track of pets, livestock, wildlife, even Alzheimer’s patients—anything or anyone equipped with radio- frequency identification tags that can be read remotely. In the street outside the UA Vision factory a co- worker tosses the drone into the air, and Smith takes control of it with a handheld device. The drone swoops up and almost out of sight, plummets, corkscrews, loops the loop, skims a deserted lot across the street, arcs back up, and then slows down until it seems to hover, motionless, above us. Smith grins at me. A bronze statue of a bedraggled winged man, Icarus, adorns the entrance—a symbol both of aviation daring and of catastrophic navigation error. In one of the labs John Raquet, a balding, bespectacled civilian, is designing new navigation systems for drones. GPS is vulnerable, he explains. Its signals can be blocked by buildings or deliberately jammed. In December 2. 01. CIA drone crashed in Iran, authorities there claimed they had diverted it by hacking its GPS. Raquet’s team is working on a system that would allow a drone to also navigate visually, like a human pilot, using a camera paired with pattern- recognition software. The lab’s goal, Raquet repeatedly emphasizes, is “systems that you can trust.”A drone equipped with his visual navigation system, Racquet says, might even recognize power lines and drain electricity from them with a “bat hook,” recharging its batteries on the fly. On the first try the drone, buzzing like a nest of enraged hornets, flips over. On the second it crashes into a wall. Finally the quad- rotor wobbles into the air and drapes a hook over a cable slung across the room. Down the hall from Raquet’s lab, Richard Cobb is trying to make drones that “hide in plain sight.” DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has challenged researchers to build drones that mimic the size and behavior of bugs and birds. Cobb’s answer is a robotic hawk moth, with wings made of carbon fiber and Mylar. Piezoelectric motors flap the wings 3. Fashioning bug- size drones that can stay aloft for more than a few minutes, though, will require enormous advances in battery technology. Cobb expects it to take more than a decade. The Air Force has nonetheless already constructed a “micro- aviary” at Wright- Patterson for flight- testing small drones. It’s a cavernous chamber—3. Micro- aviary researchers, much of whose work is classified, decline to let me witness a flight test. But they do show me an animated video starring micro- UAVs that resemble winged, multi- legged bugs. The drones swarm through alleys, crawl across windowsills, and perch on power lines. One of them sneaks up on a scowling man holding a gun and shoots him in the head. The video concludes, “Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal: micro air vehicles.”What, one might ask, will prevent terrorists and criminals from getting their hands on some kind of lethal drone? Although American officials rarely discuss the threat in public, they take it seriously. The militant Islamic group Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, says it has obtained drones from Iran. Last November a federal court sentenced a Massachusetts man to 1. Washington, D. C., with drones loaded with C- 4 explosives. Exercises carried out by security agencies suggest that defending against small drones would be difficult. Under a program called Black Dart, a mini- drone two feet long tested defenses at a military range. A video from its onboard camera shows a puff of smoke in the distance, from which emerges a tiny dot that rapidly grows larger before whizzing harmlessly past: That was a surface- to- air missile missing its mark. In a second video an F- 1. The answer to the threat of drone attacks, some engineers say, is more drones. Artificial- vision systems designed by Procerus would enable one UAV to spot and destroy another, either by ramming it or shooting it down. But Griffiths believes the ultimate decision to attack will remain with humans. Another Man’s Nightmare. Today's Stock Market News and Analysis. CLOSEXPlease confirm your selection. You have selected to change your default setting for the Quote Search. This will now be your default target page. Are you sure you want to change your settings?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
Categories |