1. Drone technology helps researchers count turtles on the Great Barrier Reef
Biopixel, one of Australia’s premier filming companies specialising in natural history behavioural sequences, has been working with researchers at Raine Island to conduct accurate turtle population surveys via drones.
The drone vision captured in December 2019 as part of the Raine Island Recovery Project showed up to 64,000 green turtles around the island waiting to come ashore and lay clutches of eggs.
Find out more…
2. The Queensland Government announces contractor to build flight test range
According to the Queensland Government, it was the first state in Australia to launch a strategy for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – also known as drones.
One of the strategy’s priorities was to establish a $14.5 million, world-class commercial common-user drone testing facility at Cloncurry Airport. This week QinetiQ Australia was awarded the contract to design and construct the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) flight test range (FTR) on behalf of the Queensland Government.
https://www.qinetiq.com/au/news/2020/06/queensland-range
3. US Army release report on swarming drone uses
The US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory Guidance Technologies Branch has implemented a one-of-a-kind outdoor motion-capture system for multi-agent unmanned aerial system testing.
To find out more and download the report visit https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340399542_Implementation_and_Evaluation_of_the_World’s_Largest_Outdoor_Optical_Motion-Capture_System/citation/download
4. Drone Acrobatics without a human controller?
UZH Robotics and Perception Group have taken drone flying to a whole new level with this test using an autonomous quadrotor to fly extreme acrobatic manoeuvres with only onboard sensing and computation.
5. Wing will deliver library books to kids in isolation
The Washington Post reported this week that Wing, owned by Google parent company Alphabet has teamed up with a local librarian to deliver books to kids in isolation. Read the whole story by clicking the link below
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/10/wing-library-book-drone-delivery/
6. Africa’s Drone Medical Delivery Service Saves Lives
The Centre for Global Development last month hosted a virtual seminar to share insights from new work being carried out by Zipline to help Ghana and other countries in their COVID-19 response supply chain.
Watch the webinar via the link below or read the summary on the Insead Humanitarian Research Group
