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Anduril’s Anvil is a drone-bashing machine designed to take out UAVs mid-flight

08 Oct

Palmer Luckey has moved on after being ousted from Facebook. His second act as a founder is California-based manufacturer, Anduril. Based in Irvine, the upstart has raised over $ 41 million since 2014. They’ve developed the Anvil, a quadcopter designed for short, fast flights up to 100 mph. The Anvil is equipped with sensors to identify, track, and intercept targets.

According to Luckey, the best way to respond to the threat of a drone illegally entering unauthorized airspace, especially military bases, is to physically smash into and disable it. ‘All the soft kill systems are a waste of time,’ Luckey told Bloomberg in an interview, referring to a spate of anti-drone technologies that have recently surfaced.

Equipped with electro-optical and infrared sensors, that are effective both in daylight and at nighttime, rotors on the bottom, and strategically-placed flight-critical parts, the Anvil takes out hostile drones from below. An operator can authorize an attack through a handheld remote while viewing a live feed. One main issue is the damage sustained to the Anvil as a result of a high-speed impact. Luckey believes in their durability and is not too concerned.

Anduril is already working on larger, faster versions of the Anvil that will target a small aircraft, helicopters, and even cruise missiles. It remains to be seen if crashing into rogue unmanned vehicles will be an effective solution to securing airspace. Said Luckey, via Twitter, ‘the best way to kill fast drones piloted by hostile humans is with even faster drones piloted by AI. The United States cannot allow the skies of the world to turn into the Wild West, our ability to take out aerial threats in a matter of seconds is part of the solution.’

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Drone owners in the US will soon need external registration numbers on their UAVs

14 Feb

The FAA will require drone operators in the United States to display their registration numbers on the outside of their small UAVs starting on February 25, 2019. The new regulation revises an existing policy that allows drone owners to put a UAV’s registration number inside of the device’s battery compartment.

Drone operators in the US must register their aerial vehicle with the FAA, at which time they’re given a registration number. Since launching the registration requirement, the FAA has permitted drone owners to conceal their identifier within an enclosed compartment on the drone, assuming the compartment could be opened without using tools.

This permission aimed to ‘grant flexibility to the diverse types of small unmanned aircraft commercially available.’ However, an interim final rule published on the Federal Register today notes that the FAA has revised that permission and, starting on February 25, will require the registration number to be located on the drone’s exterior.

According to the FAA, it has revised its rule due to government security agency and law enforcement concerns that explosive devices could be hidden within small drones. In a situation like this, first responders who are required to open a drone’s battery compartment in search of the registration number are at risk of injury.

The new interim rule states:

Requiring small unmanned aircraft owners to place the registration number on an external surface of the aircraft helps to mitigate this risk because a first responder can view the number without handling the aircraft, or by using other technologies that allow for remote viewing of the aircraft’s external surface.

The rule change goes into effect on February 25, but the public is able to submit comments on the new requirement until March 15. Comments can be submitted using the Regulations.gov website or by mail and hand delivery to the West Building Ground Floor at 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE, Washington, DC.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Graffiti by Drone: Team of Spray-Painting UAVs to Make Huge Mural in Berlin

05 Jul

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Taking to the skies in Berlin, a set of color-coded drones aims to make the biggest spray-painted mural ever made (at least by robots) using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with programmed paintings. And this is just the beginning: painting drones could enable civic artwork in hard-to-reach places, and eventually serve practical applications, re-coating infrastructure and architecture.

Designed by architect (and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab) Carlo Ratti’s, the Paint By Drone system employs sets of four drones, each loaded with its own paint tank. Like a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key [Black]) system much like modern printers, each contributes a layer to the piece. Together, these layers can add up to a full spectrum of color possibilities.

Ratti’s team has used drones before — as tour guides at MIT, for instance — and is now experimenting with ways to engage them with other activities in the built environment, testing their limits in a more public and large-scale setting. In this case, the sheeting that wraps scaffolding, ordinarily left blank and dull (or used for advertising) can be dynamically turned into something beautiful.

The drones can be adapted to work with different inputs, allowing passers by to submit designs, for instance, or to select sections of canvas to paint. For now, they are being deployed on a surface stretched across scaffolding, but the idea is to ultimately enable public art in more places — precision-guided small drones can reach high up on (or under) structures like bridges that would be difficult (and dangerous) for people to access directly.

More on the mechanics of the system: “A central management system regulates the drones’ operations in real-time, from image painting to flight, using an advanced monitoring system that precisely tracks the UAV’s position, detecting multiple devices simultaneously. Furthermore, a protective net placed on the scaffolding’s’ cover allows the drones to move into a safe space. Drones can draw content submitted digitally, via an app. The artistic input can come from either crowdsourced platforms or from a curator orchestrating the contributions of several people.”

“Paint by Drone represents a next step,” in their research, reports Carlo Ratti Associati, “on both vertical drawing and open-source design, which includes projects such as OSARC (Open Source Architecture) at the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial and the Vertical Plotter system featured at Milan Expo 2015’s Future Food District, which entered the Guinness World Record as the world’s largest plotted image. The new concept pushes the previous boundaries of time and space, having the potential to be installed in just a few hours in a city and paint on any surface.”