A lot has been made of the dangers of drones mixing with other aircraft, but one team of engineers is exploring how they can guard planes from threats rather than present new ones by developing drones that can shepherd birds away from flight paths like robotic aerial sheepdogs.
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Airbus' Zephyr program has claimed another record, with a production model unmanned solar-powered aircraft touching down after more than 25 days in the air. That voyage is the longest unmanned flight ever made, and was achieved on this particular vehicle's maiden voyage, no less.
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NASA has tested three new noise reduction technologies on a series of Acoustic Research Measurement (ARM) flights, and managed to cut airframe noise during landing by more than 70 percent.
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Quadcopters are most stable with their four propellers arranged in a square configuration, with one prop at each corner of the square. Such a setup makes it difficult for the aircraft to fit through tight spaces, however. That's where the Quad-Morphing drone comes in.
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Autonomous aerial vehicles known as High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS) can soar at the edges of space for long periods of time. Now, UAVOS has conducted test flights of its ApusDuo prototype, an autonomous, solar-powered aircraft with flexible wings that bend and bounce to keep it aloft.
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You might remember RoboBee, an insect-sized robot that flies by flapping its wings. Unfortunately, though, it has to be hard-wired to a power source. Well, one of RoboBee's creators has now helped develop RoboFly, which flies without a tether.
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Another small electric airplane took to the skies recently in the form of Bye Aerospace's Sun Flyer 2, which made its maiden flight on April 10. The two-seater prop-driven aircraft has a 3.5-hour flight duration thanks to its six lithium-ion battery packs and is intended as a pilot trainer.
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The dinosaur Archaeopteryx is widely regarded as one of the earliest ancestors of modern birds, but the question of whether or not it could actively fly has been debated for decades. Now, scientists have taken X-ray scans of fossil specimens, and concluded that the answer is yes – sort of.
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Around 4,500 miles (8,300 km) separate the Pacific coasts of Japan and Silicon Valley, a distance far beyond the reach of current non-military drones. But a new event called the Pacific Drone Challenge has thrown down the gauntlet to those in the business of driving the technology forward.
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Airbus's Perlan Mission II took another step to the edge of space yesterday as it set a new record in the skies over Patagonia to become the first engineless glider to soar to over 52,000 ft (15,800 m), surpassing the previous record of 50,727 ft (15,462 m) set by the unpressurized Perlan 1 in 2006.
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