Tag: DRONE

The Raven, a U.S.-built spy drone, is little more than a glorified model airplane with a camera. It has a range of just over six miles, has to be launched by hand (i.e., firing up the engine and throwing it into the air), and has no capacity to carry weapons of any kind. Still, it's military equipment, and thus subject to the Arms Export Control Act. A Philippine man named Henson Chua ...

DARPA has a fancy new spy drone that looks almost exactly like a hummingbird (provided you don't get too close to it). The tiny robot is able to zip through the sky, performing feats of aerial acrobatics similar to what an actual hummingbird is capable. The hope is that, when deployed, it won't draw much attention and will be able to find a perch near a potential target. The current version can ...

Today's high-profile celebrities may have perfected the art of avoiding paparazzi on the streets of Beverly Hills, but they might want to turn their attention skyward, as well. That's because celebrity photo agency Splash News is developing a camera-equipped drone aircraft to track the rich and famous from above. "It would strike fear in the hearts of every celebrity having a birthday party," ...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials patrolling the Mexican border will soon have an extra set of eyes to keep watch over our frontiers with the launch of a new fleet of Predator drones. As Reuters reports, the first wave of unmanned aircraft will take off from Corpus Christi tomorrow, and will allow border protection agents to remotely conduct surveillance over the entire U.S.-Mexican ...

DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) is always looking for the latest and greatest (and most 'Terminator'-like) in military and weapons technology. The creepy, high-tech government branch's latest project, dubbed Persistent Close Air Support (or PCAS), is all about speeding up and simplifying the act of raining death from above. As it stands today, when a soldier on the ground in ...

How seriously does the Department of Homeland Security take illegal immigration? So seriously, apparently, that it's ready to turn the Texas border into Tora Bora. According to the AP, the government will begin deploying unmanned surveillance drones to the U.S.-Mexico border in a revamped attempt to stem the flow of illegal aliens entering the country. So far, Homeland Security has obtained ...

Share On Monday, Boeing revealed its newest unmanned spy plane, a boomerang-shaped, drool-inducing object that looks straight out of a Michael Bay film. The sleek Phantom Ray is 36-feet long with a 50-foot wingspan, and takes off this December. This bad boy can hit 614 mph while hovering around 40,000 feet, but its purpose seems a bit obscure. Fast Company reports that, aside from being ...

Share As unmanned drone attacks play an increasingly integral role in America's war on terrorism, controversy surrounding the legality of the operations has gained steam. In response to the public outcry, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on Wednesday, during which legal experts voiced their opinions on, and displeasure with, the mysterious drone program. ...

According to Wired, a new U.S. Army aircraft takes the best elements of helicopters, drones and snipers, and wraps them into one package. Dubbed the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), it's an unmanned Vigilante helicopter with a high-powered sniper rifle mounted onto a highly stabilized turret. Originally, the ARSS was designed for urban warfare, since it can hover down small streets ...

A "routine test flight" for a U.S. Navy Fire Scout helicopter drone recently turned into three hours of surveillance and a successful drug bust. According to Popular Science, the MQ-8B Vertical Take-off and Landing UAV (VTUAV) drone caught a boat suspected of carrying cocaine on its radar. With the aid of the remote surveillance, the USS McInerney and U.S. Coast Guard vessels were able to close ...

Those mad geniuses at MIT have come up with a concept for a floating display that's left us floored. Utilizing small drone helicopters, MIT's SENSEable City Lab hopes to create a flying, multi-dimensional display system called Flyfire that can present dynamic images in living color. Each drone is equipped with LEDs and would apparently float in sync with the rest of its robot comrades. Check ...

Thanks to a new fleet of unmanned aircraft, British fugitives must now look above their heads instead of just over their shoulders. According to Engadget, the U.K. Home Office is rolling out a fleet of unmanned security drones, and this new task force has nabbed its first criminal. Merseyside police, who've been learning the ropes of piloting drones for about six months now, recently used ...

AR.Drone by Parrot The crowd that formed around the hovering, slightly tilting AR.Drone seemed as excited as the French developers did about their creation. Based on augmented reality gaming, the dragonfly-like, four-propellered 'quadricopter' boasts two on-board cameras that sense surrounding objects -- trees, people, walls -- and integrate them into gaming. While no software has been ...

Years of top secret R&D and millions of dollars of military hardware has been thwarted -- by a $26 program you can buy on the Internet. Insurgents in Iraq have figured out how to use off the shelf software to intercept video feeds from unmanned drones, like the Predator, on the battlefield. Yesterday, Lt. Gen. David Deptula announced that this summer, American military personnel found ...

All that time spent gaming may not be time spent poorly after all, according to Joystiq's story of one young man. Last Friday, while being interviewed by Democracy Now! about his new book, 'Wired for War,' author P.W. Singer related the story of one young man who has found success in the military, thanks to the hours he'd logged in front of computer monitors and TV screens. According to Singer, ...