UPS has announced that starting in May, its subsidiary UPS Flight Forward and CVS will use drones to deliver prescription medicines from a CVS pharmacy to The Villages, Florida, which is the largest U.S. retirement community, home to more than 135,000 residents.

by AUVSI NEWS | APR 27, 2020

“The pace of UAS [unmanned aircraft system] integration will be determined by the combined ability of industry, the operator community, and the FAA to adopt a proactive, collaborative approach,” FAA spokesperson Eva Lee Ngai says in an email to Input. “We’re working to assure that drones are safely integrated into that system so our society can reap the benefits of drone technology while still allowing other airspace users to continue their traditional operations.”

INPUT | Hart Fowler | 3-23-2020

A blind man who spent 33 hours lost in the woods in Connecticut in freezing conditions was finally rescued thanks to a police drone, according to authorities.

By: Lee Brown | New York Post

Black Swift Technologies (BST) has introduced its American-made, advanced UAS called the Black Swift E2, which is designed for automated industrial and structural inspections.

Equipped with advanced navigation, the Black Swift E2 UAS can conduct highly accurate, up-close inspections of infrastructures even in extreme environmental conditions. Considered an intelligent drone because of its leveraging of advances in computer vision and machine learning, the UAS can complete autonomous flights when combined with an inspection payload.

The UAS can safely and reliably navigate around complex structures thanks to this optional laser navigation technology, all while providing real-time actionable data to its operator.

By: AUVSI NEWS | FEB 14, 2020

Wing has announced that it will now begin using its UAS to deliver clothing items from LSKD, a street/sportswear fashion label in Queensland, Australia. 

The service is available through Wing’s app, as customers can select what they want from the LSKD summer collection, which includes shirts, shorts, gym wear, caps and dresses, and have them delivered to them by Wing’s UAS.

BY AUVSI NEWS | JAN 24, 2020

Learn more about AirSense from DJI for real time manned aircraft detection while flying your drone.

When Amazon made public its plans to deliver packages by drone six years ago, many skeptics scoffed—including some at this magazine. It just didn’t seem safe or practical to have tiny buzzing robotic aircraft crisscrossing the sky with Amazon orders. Today, views on the prospect of getting stuff swiftly whisked to you this way have shifted, in part because some packages are already being delivered by drone, including examples in Europe, Australia, and Africa, sometimes with life-saving consequences. In 2020, we should see such operations multiply, even in the strictly regulated skies over the United States.

By David Schneider, IEEE Spectrum, 01 Jan 2020

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced the fourth iteration of the federal automated vehicle policy during a keynote speech at CES 2020.

-Auvsi News Article, 14 Jan 2020

Check out this breaking news from DJI on the return of the Phantom 4 Pro V2.0. Its been a long time coming to have the Phantom back in the DJI inventory. Its the most capable quad copter i’ve ever piloted.

The Federal Aviation Administration's proposed rule for the remote identification of drones has now been printed in the Federal Register, giving interested parties 60 days to respond. 
 
AUVSI is reviewing the rules and will be responding, but in the meantime President and CEO Brian Wynne said he welcomes the move.
 
“The importance of remote ID regulations cannot be overstated, as they are necessary to enable advanced and expanded operations such as flights over people and beyond line of sight," Wynne said.
 
"They also serve as the linchpin needed for future rulemakings that will pave the way for transformative uses of UAS with significant benefits for our economy and society, including widespread UAS delivery. Finally, remote ID will also help law enforcement identify and distinguish authorized UAS from those that may pose a security threat."
 
The issue of identifying who's flying a drone has come to the fore from time to time, including after drone incursions near Heathrow Airport in London and more recently by sightings of night-flying swarms of drones in Colorado and Nebraska.
 
"The ability to identify and locate UAS operating in the airspace of the United States provides additional situational awareness to manned and unmanned aircraft," the executive summary of the rule says. "This will become even more important as the number of UAS operations in all classes of airspace increase."
 
The FAA says full implementation of the rule relies on three parts, which are being developed at the same time.
 
The first is the rule itself, which sets requirements for UAS operators and design and production standards for drone producers. The second is a network of remote ID UAS service suppliers, which would collect the drone identifications and locations in real time and perform that service under contract from the FAA.
 
The third is the collection of technical requirements that standards-setting organizations will develop to meet the design and production requirements of the rule.
 
Almost all drones will have to abide by the new rules, with the exception of some home-built systems, drones operated by the U.S. government and unmanned aircraft that weigh less than .55 pounds, such as the new DJI Mavic Air, which just squeaks under that weight limit.
 
The rule sets up two categories of remote ID: standard and limited. Standard means that a drone would need to broadcast its identification and location and simultaneously send that information to a UAS service suppliers.
 
The limited designation would mean the drone could send the info via the internet only, with no broadcast requirements, but they would need to operate no more than 400 feet from their control station.
 
Drones that can't meet either standard — some homebuilt drones, or older ones manufactured before the rule — could only fly at specific geographic areas specially designated for them.

By: AUVSI NEWS | JAN 2, 2020

Researchers at Dublin City University (DCU) are participating in a first-of-its-kind European project to discover the possible benefits of using drones and robots for the maintenance of wind and solar farms.

The Durable project is seeking to find out whether using such technologies to automate inspection of faults can reduce costs and boost take-up of renewable energies along the Atlantic.

The DCU researcher leading the project locally is Prof Patrick McNally, co-director of the Nanomaterials Processing Laboratory in DCU and the deputy director of its Advanced Processing Technology Research Centre.

He said countries along the western Atlantic seaboard are laggards in terms of reaching renewable energy targets, with plans to reach a target 20 per cent renewable energy use by the end of 2020 highly unlikely, particularly in the Republic where use is currently running at just under 11 per cent.

“One of the biggest impediments to driving things forward in encouraging greater adoption of wind and solar farms is the cost of maintenance, which represent upwards of 25 per cent of the total cost of producing energy,” said Prof McNally.

“The idea of the project is that unmanned vehicle technology, modern robotics technology and augmented reality can all be used to inspect turbines and solar panels to discover faults early on,” he added.

Project leader

The project is led by the École Supérieure des Technologies Industrielles Avancées (Estia) in France, with partners along the western Atlantic seaboard in Portugal, Spain, Britain and Ireland. Durable has a budget of €3.9 million and is co-financed by the Interreg Atlantic Area Programme through the European Regional Development Fund.

“We envisage that through using a drone you might be able to spot a fault in a turbine using thermal imaging or through ultrasonics. We will be interrogating the electromagnetic fields around turbines, which essentially means we will be listening to the radio waves they produce,” said Prof McNally.

WASHINGTON – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today announced Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) airspace restrictions over additional national security sensitive locations, effective November 7.

In cooperation with its federal partners, the FAA will restrict UAS operations in the airspace over 60 additional Department of Defense and Department of Justice facilities to address concerns about malicious drone activity. An FAA Notice to Airmen (NOTAM), FDC 9/7752, defines these special security instructions. The FAA has published a new NOTAM, FDC 9/1278, which alerts UAS operators and others in the aviation community to this change and points to FDC 9/7752.

By: FAA | 29 October 2019