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Digest

RigiTech Eiger UAV

With the advent of uncrewed logistics solutions in air, and on land and sea, it pays to understand there are fundamental differences between what logistics operators need of their UAS, and what conventional UASs (designed most often for imaging-based work) bring to the table...

Focus on...

Lidar

Various laser technologies are competing fiercely to reduce the size, weight and cost of sensors for uncrewed systems. Lidar ranging systems are a key technology for long-range sensing for driverless vehicles and autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs)...

Dossier

LOXO Alpha & Digital Driver

As far as harsh proving grounds for autonomy go, Switzerland sets the bar high. A mountainous nation, many Swiss highways and other intercity roads pass through tunnels that blot out GNSS signals and create cramped, traffic-congested spaces that are deeply...

In Conversation

Professor Barry Lennox

Decommissioning nuclear power plants is an immense task. The estimate for the Sellafield facility in Cumbria is £136 billion over more than a century. During the last 14 years, Barry Lennox, professor of applied control at the University of Manchester...

Platform One

Morphing robot covers more ground

A robot can cover diverse environments as adeptly as animals by changing form on the fly. The GOAT (Good Over All Terrains) developed at the CREATE lab at EPFL in Switzerland can spontaneously morph between a flat ‘rover’ shape and a sphere...

Platform One

Driving dataset combines weather and road conditions

Vaisala Xweather and NIRA Dynamics have developed a dataset that combines weather forecasting and computer vision with real-time data. The integration draws on data from NIRA Dynamics from billions of data points gathered from connected vehicles...

Platform One

Surfing underwater currents to reduce power

Underwater vehicles have to manage a complex environment of currents, fighting against many flows as they attempt to stay on course. Peter Gunnarson and John Dabiri at the California Institute of Technology have designed an underwater robot...

Platform One

Data transmission test on a high

Tests in Japan have shown successful data connection with an autonomous high altitude platform station (HAPS) flying at an altitude of 20km for the first time. The trial with Space Compass and NTT DOCOMO connected a 4G LTE base station on the ground with the HAPS...

New Products

UAV flies through dust, night and obstacles

WaveAerospace has constructed a heavy-lift multirotor capable of high-speed, long-endurance flight in very harsh conditions, including in obstacle-laden and GNSS-denied environments at night and in zero visibility. The company has been in active R&D...

Platform One

Hybrid vessel for Arctic Ice

Researchers in Florida have developed a hybrid system that combines uncrewed underwater, sea and air vehicles to monitor ice in the Arctic. Direct observation of the ice is challenging as satellite sensors have a coarse spatial resolution and cannot detect the fine fractal...