Tag: Drones

In future, an automatic device could service human blood vessels. Industrial infrastructure also needs regular monitoring. Flying support is nothing new, but now a Swiss startup has developed a maintenance drone with 360° aerial mobility, which can get just about anywhere. It’s all possible thanks to two tiltable propellers installed at the side and an additional rotor at the...

Edible drones would be a lifesaver. Meanwhile, a Japanese team is testing whether drones can protect against lightning. A drone was placed in a Faraday cage with additional lightning conductors. As thunder clouds gathered, the drone was sent 300m skywards attached to a wire cable, which had a ground connection. The difference in the electric field strength at the...

In future, circuit boards for PCs could be made from mushrooms. Now, an EU-financed research team is attempting something even more daring. They are building components for mobile machines from edible materials. People in remote places could be given drones for dessert while other drones deliver vaccinations to endangered animals. Work is already underway to create a sprayable sensor...

Historical smells no longer belong to the past. Methane, however, is odourless, and usually slips undetected into the atmosphere. Traditional methods of recovering the greenhouse gas, where people with handheld devices scour rubbish depots or faulty pipelines, are expensive. Yet methane can be deployed as a sustainable energy source to produce hydrogen. Cue a Michigan-based startup which has developed a patented drone complete...

A faulty tap is easy to spot. Wind turbines and solar panels are trickier, but drones can help. Now, a Hamburg-based startup is focusing on the predictive maintenance of machines, with potential issues forecast up to a year in advance. Using real and virtual models, the company’s software creates a digital twin of the machine in question. A maintenance...

A faulty ceiling light is easy to spot, and all you need to change it is a ladder. With wind turbines, however, it isn’t quite so easy to see what’s wrong, and maintenance takes place at vertigo-inducing heights. Usually, anyway. Now a startup from Bristol is changing all that. Its self-piloting drones inspect wind turbines from the air, taking...

Every second is vital. In the event of a heart attack, receiving immediate treatment can be the difference between life and death. According to a Swedish research team, defibrillators could soon be delivered by drone. In emergencies they can be on the scene quickly, irrespective of traffic or terrain. Recently, the pilotless aircraft were sent out to accident sites...

Knowing how to make fire catapulted mankind to the top of the food chain. And now, from our evolutionary summit, we find ourselves confronted with a different problem: knowing how to bring it under control. Wildfires are regularly devastating vast areas of land, a danger for animals and humans alike. In California recently drones were deployed for the first...