DARPA

Courtesy: DARPA In the future of urban warfare, swarms of autonomous drones and ground vehicles will win battles before they even begin. DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program recently tested a swarm of 250 unmanned vehicles in a mock city at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi. The …

LiquidPiston and its MIT grad CEO Alec Shkolnik have spent greater than a decade on a revolutionary design that inverts the rotary engine that Felix Wankel created in 1960.  The result’s a small, highly effective, multi-fuel succesful engine: one which LiquidPiston believes will assist drone producers improve flight endurance by greater than 50%. …

The American army’s high think-tank is as soon as once more wanting to researchers to create new and higher drone mitigation options. Last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued a Request for Information (RFI) to “identify promising [drone]-sensing and -neutralization technologies that could augment or complement [DARPA’s Mobile Force Protection …

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)has awarded researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Creare LLC with a $1 million grant from  to develop a extremely refined autonomous flight management system to navigate unmanned aerial automobiles (UAVs) in unknown dynamic environments, similar to crowded city areas, or in harmful or …

A fixed-wing drone backed by DARPA soared into history books last month after achieving a world-duration flight record for drones in its class. Manufactured by Vanilla Aircraft, the diesel-fueled VA001 flew for nearly 56 uninterrupted hours at an altitude of 6,500 to 7,500 feet after being launched on Nov. 30 …

Photo courtesy of DARPA The U.S. military’s top think-tank is thinking of ways to map and track potentially harmful drones over major American cities. Last month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced the launch of the Aerial Dragnet program “to provide persistent, wide-area surveillance of all [drones] operating below …

An anti-UAV company’s drone-dropping launcher proved to be Top Gun during a recent industry competition. Start-up firm OpenWorks Engineering won the Best UAS Interdiction Award at the Countering Unauthorized Unmanned Aircraft Systems Challenge in August. The company’s flagship product, SkyWall, stopped the most drones out of seven finalists. Staged at Quantico …