diydrones.com

Newly emerged virgin honey bee queens become inseminated in flight by multiple male honey bees (drones) in elevated regions called Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs). They can persist in the same place for dozens of years - longer than the life of any queen (a couple years) and much longer than the life of a drone (21-32 days!). Since drones and queens arrive at DCAs from multiple colonies, it is believed that DCAs exist so that queens can maximize the genetic diversity in their colony. In 2015, I wrote about multirotor pilots encountering DCAs in a blog post called "Drones Make Love Not War" (http://www.beehacker.com/wp/?p=1243).

The fighter is a 10kg fixed-wing flight platform (hand parachute/VTOL), which is easy to carry,friendly to operate,stable and durable. The fighter is positioned as a heavy-duty,long-endurance fixed wing,which greatly reduces the difficulty of aerial survey,further liberates productivity and improves the efficiency of aerial survey The open flight control cabin is compatible with Pixhawk flight control and supports mounting of Sony A7R2 4200W pixel full-frame camera The maximum support is 12s@22000mah lithium polymer battery,which can achieve ultra-long range and high-quality shooting effect Using proper control point cooperatively,the final mapping would satisfy 1:1000 and 1:2000 aerial survey standard,which realized a wide-ranging application such as geography surveys,farmland,forestry land and grassland protection,power line inspection,environment protection,water conservancy and etc

Unlike contemporary drones, which generally use a single camera mounted on the bottom of the drone (to measure lateral drift or motion), insect vision systems measure optical flow in all directions. If the optical flow sensing of a contemporary drone is analogous to one optical mouse looking down, an insect vision system is analogous to hundreds or thousands of optical mice aimed different directions to cover every part of the visual field. Biologists have identified a number of different flight control “stratagems”, essentially holistic combinations of flight paths, resulting optical flow patterns, and responses thereto that let the insect perform some sort of safe flight maneuver. I wonder what other implications there are of this to machine vision and to artificial intelligence in general… Third, this is very good news for nano drones, or even future insect-sized “pico” drones- if we just need a few thousand pixels and a hundreds of MIPS of processing throughput, current semiconductor processes will allow us to make a vision system within a small fraction of a gram that supports this.

Snipe 2 is hand-tossed into the air to an altitude of approximately 60 meters and then slowly descends to the ground—unless it finds a rising air current called a thermal (see Figure 2) and exploits it to soar higher. It also showed RL’s advantage at this task over a strong baseline algorithm based on control and replanning, an instance of a class of autonomous thermaling approaches predominant in prior work, in a series of field tests. Sensors let sailplane sUAVs reliably recognize when they are flying through a thermal, and techniques like POMDSoar let them soar higher, even in the weak turbulent thermals found at lower altitudes. Samuel Tabor, a UK-based autonomous soaring enthusiast, has developed the alternative control-based ArduSoar approach and helped build the software-in-the-loop integration for Silent Wings.