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Drones are being utilized in everything from parcel delivery to search and rescue, but their limited flight times are restricting their ability to travel great distances or stay for extended periods of time in the field. Simply adding more batteries, however, affects flight characteristics and reduces the load the drone can carry. To help solve this problem, researchers at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech) have created a miniature fuel cell they claim not only provides enough energy to keep a drone in the sky for over an hour, but may…

What happens when you mix cloud computing with robotics? You get more powerful and smarter robots capable of communicating and collaborating with each other, and learning from each others’ mistakes so that they can accomplish a variety of tasks more effectively. The emerging area of cloud robotics links robots to the cloud, including the enormous storage capabilities these hosted IT services offer. This connection to the cloud and/or corporate data centers can give robots more powerful computational, data storage and communications abilities than they have when operating on a standalone…

A drone delivery startup that carried out the first government-approved test in the United States has recently shown how drones could deliver disaster relief supplies from ship to shore. The startup’s greater ambitions include nothing less than challenging Amazon and Google in the race to get drone delivery services off the ground. The delivery drones belonging to Flirtey, a startup based in Nevada, can carry up to five and a half pounds on round-trip journeys of up to 10 miles. Such figures are significant considering that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said 86 percent of Amazon…

At first glance, hydrogen fuel cells sound like a great power source for fixed-wing drones making long flights – they have much longer run times than batteries, and they emit no emissions other than water vapor. Unfortunately, the hydrogen typically has to be stored in large heavy pressurized tanks. Last month, however, a Raptor E1 electric drone made a successful test flight running on a unique new system that’s actually lighter than the lithium-ion battery it replaced. The flight was carried out on Jan. 19th at Scotland’s Oban Airport, by a team…