The SkyRanger Flies in the Face of Inclement Weather

MONSTER MACHINES

ANDREW TARANTOLA  5/24/13

Quad-copters have become a popular choice for aerial surveillance tasks, in both the public and private sectors, thanks to their portability and ease of use. Problem is, their diminutive nature also limits where and when they can fly—high winds can knock them clear out of the air. The new SkyRanger sUAS, however, is powerful enough to lift off in conditions that would ground other drones.

SEXPAND

The SkyRanger is the latest sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) developed by Aeryon Corp. Weighing about five pounds and spanning 40 inches in diameter when deployed, the SkyRanger is a larger and sturdier iteration of the company's Scout drone released in 2009.

SEXPAND

Unlike plane-shaped UAVs, like the Scan Eagle or RQ-7 Shadow, the SkyRanger is capable of lifting off and landing vertically, eliminating the need for cumbersome slingshot launchers, sky hooks, or landing strips. What's more, the SkyRanger is built to withstand conditions that would sideline other drones. It's able to fly continuously for nearly an hour through 40 MPH sustained winds, shrug off gusts up to 55 MPH, and operate in temperatures ranging from -22 to 122 degrees F.

The SkyRanger carries both a 1080p/30 fps color camera that captures 15MP stills and a 640 x 480 infrared camera in its stabilized gimbal. These feeds are transmitted over a low-latency encrypted channel to the operator up to 5km away. This allows the SkyRanger to operate beyond the control station's line of sight making this sUAS an effective tool for military ISR missions, domestic security surveillance, and emergency response.

[Aeryon - SkyRanger - Images: Aeryon]

 

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Reality catches up with sci-fi in storm drones

In this April 2013 photo provided by Oklahoma State University, Team Black's airplane takes off during SpeedFest III, in Stillwater, Okla. / AP PHOTO/ OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY, GARY LAWSON

• TULSA, OKLA.At the time it premiered, "Twister" put forth a fantastical science fiction idea: Release probes into a storm in order to figure out which tornadoes could develop into killers.

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It's no longer fiction. Oklahoma State University researchers are designing and building sleek, Kevlar-reinforced unmanned aircraft — or drones — to fly directly into the nation's worst storms and send back real-time data to first responders and forecasters.

"We have all the elements in place that make this the right place for this study to occur," said Stephen McKeever, Oklahoma's secretary of science and technology. "We have the world's best natural laboratory."

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Oklahoma is the heart of Tornado Alley, and has emerged battered, yet standing, from seven tornadoes with winds exceeding 200 mph — tied with Alabama for the most EF5 storms recorded. The May 20 tornado in Moore that killed 24 people was one of them.

And on Friday came more storms, killing nine people, including a mother and baby who were sucked out of their car as a deadly twister tore its way along a packed Interstate 40 near the town of El Reno, about 30 miles from Oklahoma City. More than 100 people were injured, most of those from punctures and lacerations from swirling debris, emergency officials reported

The federal government's National Weather Center, with its laboratories and the Storm Prediction Center, are appropriately headquartered in Norman, but research is done statewide on Earth's most powerful storms.

If all goes as planned, OSU's research drones will detect the making of a tornado based on the humidity, pressure and temperature data collected while traveling through the guts of a storm — critical details that could increase lead time in severe weather forecasts.

The drones would also be equipped to finally answer meteorologists' most pressing questions.

"Why does one storm spawn a tornado and the other doesn't, and why does one tornado turn into an EF1 and another into an EF5?" asked Jamey Jacob, professor at OSU's School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, which is developing the technology.

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The drones could be operating in roughly five years, designers estimate. But there are limitations on immediately using the technology, including current Federal Aviation Administration rules that mandate where and how drones can be safely launched in U.S. air space. The agency's regulations also require operators of such machines to physically see the aircraft at all times, limiting the range to a mile or two.

Developers are seeking to get the same clearances as the military, where operators don't have to see the aircraft at all times and can view data beamed via a satellite link.

The machines — which weigh up to 50 pounds- are safely controlled by operators with a laptop or iPad, cost a fraction of manned research aircraft and are more reliable than sending up weather balloons to divine a storm's intentions. In its simplest form, a weather drone would go for about $10,000, researchers said, but models with more extensive storm-detecting equipment — like having the ability to drop sensors as it flies through a storm — could run $100,000.

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Jacob started researching the need for such aircraft more than 20 years ago while an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, and arrived at OSU about seven years ago to continue his research. As a native Oklahoman with a long-held interest in the weather, developing the perfect storm-savvy technology has become a passion for him.

"Technology has really been catching up to what we wanted to do," he said in an interview. And in the future, the drones could be used to monitor wildfires and send back information to firefighters so they don't get outflanked by the blazes or they could fly over farmers' crops to relay enhanced pictures of how well they are growing.

One of the storm models was supposed to have its test flight on the day of the Moore tornado. It was delayed by two days — to great success. Immediately after, OSU researchers posted a video of its flight on YouTube.

To researchers' dismay, drones have developed a negative connotation lately, as some groups concerned about civil liberties strongly question the Obama administration's use of armed Predator drones overseas as well as privacy issues. So, the weather researchers prefer "unmanned aircraft" to describe what they are working on, even though the word drone is also accurate.

"It's so sad to me because I see the negatives people are always talking about, that it's going to be a Big Brother surveillance system and the government is actually going to worsen society rather than benefit society, and our goals are the exact opposite," said Jacob Stockton, a master's student at OSU who is working on the project.

"It's extremely rewarding to take the perspective that my work is being poured into helping others to avoid the tragedy that happened" at Moore, he said.

CBS / AP June 1, 2013

Hacking the Drone War’s Secret History

Airmen load an inert Hellfire missile on a Predator drone in New Mexico in April. Photo: Air Force

By David Axe 

In 2008 U.S. troops in Iraq discovered that Shi’ite insurgents had figured out how to tap and record video feeds from overhead American drones. Now you too can hack Washington’s globe-spanning fleet of silent, deadly armed robots — although legally, and only in an historical sense.

Josh Begley, a 28-year-old NYU grad student, has just created an application programming interface — basically, a collection of building blocks for software development — that allows anyone with basic coding skills to organize, analyze and visualize drone-strike data from Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia dating back to 2002.

Based on information collected by the U.K. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the API can be used to create interactive Websites (similar to this) that add depth, context and even a little humanity to the sterile news reports of the latest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle strike in some far-away conflict zone.

 Begley tells Danger Room he’s trying to bridge the “empathy gap” between Western audiences and drone-attack victims. “To Americans like me, what may have previously been blank spots on the map all of a sudden have complex stories, voices of their own. From 30,000 feet it might just be cars and buildings. But there are people in them. People who live under the drones we fly.”

Begley has already experimented with a few interfaces using his API. One, he says, “assembles every covert drone attack on a Website, hides them behind numbered blank tiles, and lets you filter through the various years and countries where these attacks happened.”

“Another interface is more practical,” he adds. “It’s just a simple search function — for researchers and legal scholars who want to look for a specific drone attack, or more easily go to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and read the corresponding articles they’ve assembled.”

The drone API, which is actually Begley’s master’s thesis, is not his first foray into capturing robot-attack data. His @dronestream Twitter feed documents all reported UAV attacks. Last year Begley created an iPhone app that tracks drone strikes, but Apple rejected it. Other developers have jumped on the bandwagon, too. London-based artist James Bridle runs a Tumblr blog that matches overhead satellite imagery to reports of drone attacks.

The public release of Begley’s API, which took five months to complete, is timed to coincide with the White House-promoted National Day of Civic Hacking on June 1. Hacking Day aims to “liberate government data for coders and entrepreneurs.” The ACLU, for one, is commemorating the event with an API linked to the group’s vast database of documents related to U.S.-sanctioned torture of terror suspects.

“I’m actually not sure what people will learn,” Begley says of his own drone-strike API. “I just feel like I’ve been iterating on this data set for a little while and there are probably a bunch of more talented developers and designers who could find stuff in the data that I’m not seeing.”

With Pres. Barack Obama’s recent promise to rein in robotic attacks, the time is ripe to begin making sense of 12 years of drone warfare that has claimed thousands of lives. Begley’s API makes that vital self-reflection a whole lot easier.

Navy’s High-Flying Spy Drone Completes Its First Flight

The MQ-4C Triton drones are getting flight-tested in Palmdale, Calif. Photo: U.S. Navy

By Spencer Ackerman

This is some month for the Navy’s next-generation drones. First it launched an autonomous robot off the deck of an aircraft carrier. Now its very high-flying new spy drone has completed its first test flight.

The MQ-4C Triton took off today for the first time from a Palmdale, California airfield, a major step in the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program. Northrop Grumman, which manufactured the 130.9-foot-wingspan drone, said the maiden voyage lasted an hour and a half. The Navy even announced it via Twitter.

“First flight represents a critical step in maturing Triton’s systems before operationally supporting the Navy’s maritime surveillance mission around the world,” Capt. James Hoke, Triton’s program manager, said in a statement.

If the Triton looks familiar, it should. It’s a souped-up version of the Air Force’s old reliable spy drone, Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk. The Navy’s made some modifications to the airframe and the sensors it carries to ensure it can spy on vast swaths of ocean, from great height. (It’s unarmed, if you were wondering.)

The idea is for the Triton to achieve altitudes of nearly 53,000 feet — that’s 10 miles up — where it will scan 2,000 nautical miles at a single robotic blink. (Notice that wingspan is bigger than a 737′s.) Its sensors, Northrop boasts, will “detect and automatically classify” ships, giving captains a much broader view of what’s on the water than radar, sonar and manned aircraft provide. Not only that, Triton is a flying communications relay station, bouncing “airborne communications and information sharing capabilities” between ships. And it can fly about 11,500 miles without refueling.

The Navy wants 68 of these aircraft. But the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program hasn’t all been shining successes. Almost a year ago, a Global Hawk that the Air Force loaned the Navy to experiment with at Pax River Air Station went down in Maryland. Northrop says it’ll put the Triton through additional flight tests before sending it to Pax River later this year.

While most of the military has said it’s got enough drones, thanks, the Navy is moving forward with at least two advanced drone programs. Aside from the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, there is a plan to launch and land autonomous armed drones from aircraft carriers. The demonstrator vehicle for that program, the X-47B, took its first flight from a carrier deck at sea last week, and is scheduled to make its first arrested carrier landing by the end of the summer. (It even did some touch-and-goes from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush, too.)

Like the X-47B, the Triton is different from the Air Force’s drones: it’s autonomous. Its flight operations are a matter of executing a flight pattern thanks to lines of software code and GPS, rather than a pilot in a remote air-conditioned box holding a throttle.

“Replacing our aging surveillance aircraft with a system like Triton,” Hoke noted, “will allow us to monitor ocean areas significantly larger with greater persistence.” And with humans relatively removed from its operations, even by drone standards.

Domestic-Drone Industry Prepares for Big Battle With Regulators

A team from Cornell University’s engineering department prepares their homegrown drone for a 2012 competition in Maryland. The domestic drone industry is leaning on the FAA to relax regulations on U.S. drone flights. Photo:Cornell.edu

 By Spencer Ackerman for Wired Magazine

For a day, a sandy-haired Virginian named Jeremy Novara was the hero of the nascent domestic drone industry.

Novara went to the microphone at a ballroom in a Ritz-Carlton outside Washington, D.C. on Wednesday and did something many in his business want to do: tenaciously challenge the drone regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration to loosen restrictions on unmanned planes over the United States. Judging from the reaction he received, and from the stated intentions of the drone advocates who convened the forum, the domestic-drone industry expects to do a lot more of that in the coming months.

There’s been a lot of hype around unmanned drones becoming a fixture over U.S. airspace, both forlaw enforcement use and for operations by businesses as varied as farmers and filmmakers. All have big implications for traditional conceptions of privacy, as unmanned planes can loiter over people’s backyards and snap pictures for far longer than piloted aircraft. The government is anticipating that drone makers could generate a windfall of cash as drones move from a military to a civilian role: Jim Williams of the Federal Aviation Administration told the Wednesday conclave of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) that the potential market for government and commercial drones could generate “nearly $90 billion in economic activity” over the next decade. $90 billion.

But there’s an obstacle: the Federal Aviation Administration.
 

The FAA has been reluctant to grant licenses to drone makers, out of the fear that the drones — which maneuver poorly, have alarming crash rates, are spoofable, and don’t have the sensing capacity to spot approaching aircraft — will complicate and endanger U.S. airspace. (Nor has it been transparent about the licenses it grants: The Electronic Frontier Foundation had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn who’s operating drones in America.) A push last year by Congress and the Obama administration directing the FAA to fully integrate unmanned aircraft into American skies hasn’t been nearly enough for the drone makers: The FAA is months late in designating six test sites for drones around the country.

“When will the test site selection begin? I’m sure that’s what all of you are asking now,” Williams, the head of the FAA’s drone integration department, told the AUVSI crowd. (It’ll start at the end of the month.)

Drone makers are also frustrated by the logic of existing FAA regulations. Currently, a drone weighing under 55 pounds, flying below 400 feet within an operator’s line of sight and away from an airport is considered a model airplane, and cleared to fly without a license. That is, if it’s not engaging in any for-profit activity — sort of. “A farmer can be a modeller if they operate their aircraft as a hobby or for recreational purposes,” Williams said.

Enter Novara, a 31-year old who owns a small drone business in Falls Church, Va. called Vanilla Aircraft. “If a farmer, who hopefully is profit-minded, can fly as a hobbyist an unmanned aircraft,” Novara challenged Williams, “why can’t I, as the owner of an unmanned aircraft company, fly as a hobbyist my own unmanned aircraft over property that I own? The guidelines before this [2012 legislation] were that any commercial intent is prohibited, but–”

“I didn’t change any guidelines,” Williams interrupted. “I didn’t say that any guidelines changed. I said that if a farmer as an individual wants to operate an unmanned aircraft according to the modeling rules, they can do that. The FAA rules are very clear about for-compensation and hire. If you’re going to operate an aircraft for compensation or hire, there’s a different set of rules that apply. So, you know, I’m not gonna split hairs over whether the farmer is making a profit or not, nor are we going to go look for him, but the bottom line is the rules are the rules and we have to enforce them until they’re changed.”

“So unmanned aircraft companies can operate R&D as long as they’re within the modeling guidelines?” Novara continued. Laughter and applause broke out among the hundreds of drone enthusiasts inside the Tyson’s Corner Ritz-Carlton.

“That’s why we have experimental certificates, to allow manufacturers–”

“The farmer doesn’t need an experimental certificate,” Novara pressed, “and everyone knows the experimental certificate process is available but not actually functional.”

Williams conceded that the current FAA rules “need to change,” since they were written for manned aircraft, “and that’s why we’re working hard to get the small unmanned aircraft rule out that will help resolve these issues. Until such time, we have to enforce the rules that are in place.”

“Is everyone else clear on this?” Novara asked, to bales of laughter. Some in the crowd shouted “No!” It felt like pent-up frustrations were being taken out on Williams, to the point where Novara added, apologetically, “I’m not trying to put this on you.”

But to the crowd at AUVSI, Novara was a hero. Outside the hall as he walked by, an older man slapped him on the shoulder and laughed, “Hey, troublemaker! I need to talk to you later!”

Expect a lot more troublemaking over the coming months. And if the domestic drone industry doesn’t succeed in getting the FAA to move fast enough for it, it’s prepared to pressure Congress to kick the FAA into gear. “Every company needs to call their Congressman,” said Peter Bale, the chairman of the board of AUVSI. April 9 is the organization’s “Day on The Hill,” when the drone industry intends to put the screws to legislators and their staff.

Novara says that he’s pessimistic that the lobbying will do any good for him: he expects it to benefit the aviation giants with established drone businesses with the government instead. (Especially as they’re the ones that make the campaign contributions.) He’s sympathetic to the FAA’s commitment to aviation safety: “I’m not advocating anarchy in the skies,” he says. But Novara sees a potential for the commercial domestic drone sector to get regulated out of business before a domestic drone boom actually starts.

“If we were all smart guys, we’d be in consumer products, right?” Novara tells Danger Room. “It’s what I like doing. There’s just no money in it.”

As the domestic-drone industry gets ready to press the FAA and Congress to loosen regulations on unmanned planes in U.S. airspace, there’s something to keep in mind. The FAA’s mandate is to protect the safety of air travel — not the privacy rights of Americans.