AscendingTechnologies
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Intel buys German drone company Ascending Technologies
Intel has signed on the dotted line to acquire Ascending Technologies, a German drone company specializing in detect-and-avoid systems for UAVs. Ascending Technologies helped Intel show off during its CES 2015 keynote with a game of "drone ping pong," which demonstrated a hovering drone that automatically moved away from approaching people and obstacles. The flying robot, called the AscTec Firefly, was equipped with six of Intel's RealSense depth cameras.
Watch how Intel's depth cameras let you play 'drone ping pong'
It's all good and fun when you get to fly a drone, but there are times when you wish it could fly around by itself without crashing into things. As we found out at Intel's CES keynote just now, one solution to this is to equip the machine with depth cameras; and in Ascending Technologies' case, it went with six of Intel's RealSense depth cameras for its AscTec Firefly. The result is a drone that pushes itself away when people approach it, which allowed the demonstrators to humor the audience with a game of "drone ping pong": one player would walk up to the Firefly to pass it to another player. We also watched another Firefly clear an obstacle course autonomously, but trust us, the first demo is more entertaining (but maybe creepy for some). See for yourself after the break.
Quadrocopter fleet stuns Londoners with giant hovering Star Trek logo (video)
Before quadrocopters become Skynet's roaming recon fleet, they'll begrudgingly entertain us, and in a recent promotional enterprise, a swarm braved the London "spring" to remind us of the imminent launch of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Over the weekend, drone masters Ars Electronica Futurelab sent a party of 30 LED-tagged AscTec Hummingbirds halfway to Hoth, and used the relative darkness of Earth Hour to set an approximately 300-foot high Star Trek logo twinkling over Tower Bridge. A video of the event can be found below, complete with epic music and movie cut-scenes sure to send even the most Vulcan of trekkers to sickbay with hysteria. If anyone behind the promotion is reading -- please, whatever you do, just don't give them phasers.
Secom offers a private security drone, serves as our eyes when we're away
Modern security cameras are rather limited: if an incident doesn't happen within a pre-defined field of vision, a company won't know what's happening until it's too late. Secom is giving anxious offices a rare solution in what's supposedly the first airborne drone for private security. Its customized Ascending Technologies quadrotor can take to the air if there's a break-in and record what's happening, even in areas that would normally represent blind spots. The automaton can also track moving subjects with a laser sensor and knows enough to keep its distance. Japanese firms wanting Secom's robot sentry will have to wait until after April 2014, when they can rent one at about ¥5,000 ($58) per month; the investment could be worthwhile just to freak out a few would-be burglars.
LaserMotive's unnamed quadrocopter hovers for 12 solid hours using lasers alone
Protip: $900,000 goes a long way, particularly when you're dumping practically all of it into a single investment (Hello Kitty lap warmers notwithstanding). LaserMotive, the company lauded for bringing home nearly a million bucks in the 2009 NASA-sponsored Space Elevator Games, has just broken an endurance record for laser-powered hovering with its unnamed Pelican. This here quadrocopter is designed to get energized by converting beams into power via a set of photovoltaic panels on its underside, and in a recent test, lasers were able to keep it afloat for over 12 hours. It never hovered much higher than 30 feet, and it barely moved from left to right while in the air, but we're guessing it was marginally more interesting than watching paint dry. All jesting aside, the milestone makes it a lot more feasible for the company to get this technology into UAVs used in the military -- "for example, laser-powered copters could perform on-the-road reconnaissance missions when convoys travel through a combat zone." And if you're looking to take home something similar on a far smaller scale, there's always the AR.Drone.
