Equipped with light sensors and LED strips, a team of ambitious geeks and gamers animated the space drones and arranged them in a game formation using a specially developed autonomous flight software.

On the ground the player sits on the laser gunner station which moves across rails and shoots laser beams. After 5 hits, the drones were taken down and out of the game.

The crew: Studio TinMan, Adam Bar-Niv, Elad Segal, Rotem Stahl, Ran Nachmany and Uri Harduf led by ForReal Team, Avi Ostfeld and VHive. “SpacedOut was finalised and first presented over the GeekCon 2016 hackathon which took place in Israel.”

“A team of 13 coders, designers, and makers were involved in the development of this ambitious project. It was an enormous effort to pull this off, and it took a diverse group of creative individuals who took part in this project”

The post Spaced Out: Real-Life Space Invaders Game Uses Drones first appeared on Gajitz.

As drones become more and more common among the military, regular folks, and bad guys alike, security fears about unmanned aircraft systems continue to mount. It’s just about impossible to tell whether an in-flight UAS is friendly – and when a drone is headed toward a restricted area like the White House or a prison yard, there’s no time to ask questions.

Battelle, a tech-development company that seems to have its hand in just about every industry imaginable, has developed the DroneDefender to easily secure sensitive areas from drones. It’s a shoulder-mounted anti-drone weapon that kills the flying machines with invisible bullets made of radio waves.

The ten-pound device can swat drones out of the sky from up to 400 meters away. Its shot jams up most GPS and ISM frequencies to disable the device and prevent it from spying, carrying weapons, detonating, or whatever else its goal (or rather, its operator’s goal) might have been. The DroneDefender doesn’t actually physically harm the drone – it just quickly and effectively neutralizes the potential threat.

The post Sound of the Fury? Radio Wave Gun Shoots Down Drones first appeared on Gajitz.

Drones are the future of so many important parts of our lives – from space exploration to reconnaissance to search and rescue missions. So far, most drones have been made in basically the same configuration: rotor(s) on top, body on bottom, the whole apparatus vulnerable to outside forces. Even the sturdy ones are prone to breaking when they crash, and when a drone costs hundreds or thousands of dollars it can be nerve wracking to fly one around.

The GimBall is a drone that won’t break when it crashes – in fact, it’s designed to bump into stuff and just keep on going like nothing happened. Swiss startup Flyability took their inspiration from nature’s own drones: flying insects. Their ability to collide with things and continue flying was translated into a drone that sports a handy rotating outer cage to protect its inner workings.

The interior mechanical parts always remain stable and upright no matter what position the drone is in. As the GimBall buzzes around and smacks into trees or walls, its working parts are protected. The drone stays aloft and on course, even if the course is full of obstacles. The innovative design will allow the GimBall to travel in cramped and dangerous places without the danger of running into something and going to pieces.

The lightweight carbon fiber body can even be somewhat guided on its mission by bumping into obstacles and taking its directional cues from those collisions. Because the inner workings don’t require complex navigational or obstacle avoidance systems, the drone is light and nimble (but adorably clumsy) like a bumblebee. The inventors hope that their concept can be used to send search and rescue drones to places where no other drone can safely travel.

The post Bee Line: Rescue Drone Keeps Flying Even After Collisions first appeared on Gajitz.

The U.S. military is pretty deeply involved in studying the ocean and gathering information on tides, currents, weather conditions, and potential dangers underwater. Until now, they’ve employed a variety of methods, including strapping cameras to trained dolphins. But a new unmanned underwater vehicle called GhostSwimmer could outshine all of the current techniques by looking and acting just like a fish.

The swimming drone weighs nearly 100 pounds and is about five feet long; it propels itself through the water by oscillating its tail just like a real fish. It’s the size of a tuna but takes on the appearance of a small shark with a dorsal fin that protrudes above the water when the drone is swimming near the surface. It can operate in depths from 10 inches up to 300 feet, making it ideal for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. The Navy points out that it can also help with inspecting the hulls of the U.S.’s own vessels.

Operators have the choice to send the drone out on its own, untethered, to explore and gather info. In that case, it has to surface periodically to transmit its information to the base station. It can also be operated on a 500-foot tether, which is an ideal setup for inspecting ships’ hulls because it can transfer data in real time.

GhostSwimmer was developed with Boston Engineering to be the next in a long line of emerging technology gadgets used by the U.S. military to get their jobs done more efficiently. Although the drone’s testing phase has been completed, there’s no word from the Navy on when or where it might be deployed – so it’s still a good idea to think twice before approaching a swimming shark to check for an antenna on its head.

The post Roboshark Ahoy! US Navy’s Shark-Shaped Swimming Drone first appeared on Gajitz.

If you ever get into trouble while swimming in a lake or ocean, help may just come in the form of a flotation device-toting flying drone. Students from the King Low Heywood Thomas School of Stamford, CT, in cooperation with Flying Robots LLC, designed a clip-on accessory called Project Ryptide that fits onto just about any consumer drone or RC helicopter. It clips on in under 30 seconds and weighs just 410 grams.

Any RC copter that can carry a GoPro camera can carry a Ryptide self-inflating flotation device, though the team developed it to work with the DJI Phantom. After the short 30 second preparation, the drone can carry the life-saving flotation device to the distressed swimmer and drop it. A radio-controlled trigger activates the floatie’s inflation.

There appears to be a lot of room for user error here since a human being directs the drone and decides where to drop and deploy the flotation device. Distances can be incredibly difficult to judge from shore to water, so some kind of proximity sensor would be useful. Still, even dropping the flotation device in the general area of the distressed swimmer would be more helpful than standing on the beach doing nothing.

The post Rescue From Above: Inflating Float Ring Clips Onto Drone first appeared on Gajitz.