Gizmodo: Aussie Ravens Have Had Enough of Alphabet’s Delivery Drones. “Alphabet’s drone delivery service, Wing, has seen booming business in parts of Australia, but there has been an unforeseen complication: our volatile bird population. Reports of Wing’s delivery drones being mercilessly attacked by ravens have caused the company to cease operations in parts of Canberra.”
NewsDirect: Experience World’s First-Ever Virtual Walk-Through of UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu (PRESS RELEASE). “With the exclusive approval granted by the Peruvian Government to fly drones through the magnificent site of Machu Picchu, Cityneon leveraged on the team’s state-of-the-art Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology to capture the best-in-class cinematic and visual assets of the invaluable UNESCO World Heritage Site, to create an immersive experience consisting of outstanding virtual reality, sophisticated augmented reality system and in-person interaction elements.”
Drone DJ: Nigerian TikTok star, 22, lands Finland drone job through social media videos . “At first, Ignatius Asabor’s journey from Nigeria to Finland could sound like feel-good fiction. ‘You can’t imagine how happy I am,’ he tells you with his trademark toothy grin. But dig deeper, and you realize it’s a story of ambition, hard work, and tenacity. It also serves as a case in point that social media can be a very powerful tool in landing your dream job. Ignatius was born in 1999 in the Nigerian village of Utagba-Ogbe (Kwale). Last week, the 22-year-old engineer shifted base to Oulu, Finland. Filling the gap between the two coordinates are a curious mind, scrapyard robotics, and a ton of TikTok videos.”
KnowTechie: Alphabet’s Wing drone has now delivered over 10,000 cups of coffee. “In a blog post on the company’s website, Wing celebrated its success ahead of the company’s two-year anniversary in September. The company, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is quickly approaching 100,000 deliveries overall. Of those near 100,000 deliveries, more than 50,000 have come in one city in the last eight months alone.”
The Drive: Use Our New Tool To Explore Thousands Of FAA Drone And Unidentified Aircraft Incident Reports. “We are excited to announce the launch of our new interactive tool that maps and makes searchable thousands of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and unidentified aircraft incident reports. The vast dataset is drawn from information compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration. Some of the reports are highly unusual, going far beyond typical low-altitude drone mishaps.”
Vanderbilt School of Engineering: Grad student adds drone imagery to toolbox for post-disaster recovery. “A new online gallery of photos taken in the days, weeks and months following the March 2020 regional tornados is the work of an engineering graduate student who wants to make disaster recovery more equitable. Daniel Perrucci, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering, used bird’s eye imagery from drones as well as street-level photography to document pockets of recovery in East Nashville and Mount Juliet, which is about 17 miles of the city. The storms were of the same strength, caused similar damage and the same number of fatalities in each area.”
Australian Aviation: Google Drones To Fly Coffee To Offices In Queensland. “Google’s drone delivery service, Wing, will soon be delivering coffee to offices in Logan, Queensland. The development is possible because the business will soon extend its service beyond residential homes to include commercial business locations in a dozen suburbs – up from just three currently. Wing first launched in Canberra last year and currently allows for the delivery of packages that weigh less than 1.5 kilograms from a variety of retailers who sell household goods.”
NPR: Success! NASA’s Ingenuity Makes First Powered Flight On Mars. “Orville and Wilbur would be proud. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has made the first-ever powered flight on another planet, 117 years after the Wright Brothers’ historic flight on this planet. The flight itself was modest. The 4-pound helicopter rose 10 feet in the air, hovered briefly, and returned to the Martian surface. An images taken from the craft showed Ingenuity’s shadow on the surface and another taken from the Perseverance rover showed an airborne Ingenuity.”
CNN: Drones could help fight coronavirus by air-dropping medical supplies. “These are dangerous times for people with chronic health conditions. They often need to visit hospitals for treatment or to collect medication, but during the pandemic that means increased risk of exposure to coronavirus. In Africa, a US startup says it is reducing that risk by using drones to deliver medical supplies to local clinics, and freeing up hospital beds in the process.”
The Verge: Self-flying drones are helping speed deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines in Ghana. “The threat of COVID-19 has prompted many countries to draft new and emerging technologies to fight the pandemic, with the latest example taking flight in Ghana. This month, COVID-19 vaccines were delivered by drone for the first time in the West African nation, allowing the medicine to reach remote areas underserved by traditional logistics.”
Motherboard: Military Unit that Conducts Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “A division of the Iowa Air National Guard that carries out overseas intelligence missions, performs reconnaissance, and conducts strikes with Reaper drones recently bought access to location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ smartphones, Motherboard has found. The tool, called Locate X, lets users search by a specific area and see which devices were present in that location at a particular point in time.”
ABC News (Australia): Drones count koalas faster and cheaper than manual spotting methods: study. “A team with a drone was able to spot koalas more effectively and cheaply than a team using more traditional methods, such as studying the forest floor for traces of koala scat, or shining spotlights into trees at night to catch a glimmer of eye-shine.”
Australian Aviation: Google Drone Service Wing To Expand In Australia. “Google’s drone delivery service, Wing, is set to expand to new locations in Australia in the coming months after successful trials in Canberra and Logan, Queensland. The business’ head of policy and government affairs, Margaret Nagle, revealed orders have soared 500 per cent because of COVID-19 as customers seek to obtain goods in a contactless way.”
The Drive: MQ-9 Reaper Flies With AI Pod That Sifts Through Huge Sums Of Data To Pick Out Targets. “General Atomics says that it has successfully integrated and flight-tested Agile Condor, a podded, artificial intelligence-driven targeting computer, on its MQ-9 Reaper drone as part of a technology demonstration effort for the U.S. Air Force. The system is designed to automatically detect, categorize, and track potential items of interest.”
North Carolina Department of Transportation: NCDOT Helping in Effort to Use Drones in COVID-19 Relief Efforts. “State transportation officials announced today a public-private partnership that will use drones to deliver critical medical supplies and food during the COVID-19 response.”
