"The effort contrasted and compared eight heat sources technologies, three power conversion, two dual cycle propulsion system configurations, and a single electrical power generation scheme."
Yes, it's about RTGs, at least partially.
If you've ever flown an R/C plane, you know how nerve wracking it can be. Navigating in three dimensions opens up the possibility to run into so many things, and a single crash could be your last. Now, a team from EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems has been working on a UAV called the AirBurr.
Demand for drones is exploding!
Dupin wants to aggregate aerial imagery from around the globle at Dronestagr.am.
In the near future we could experience something close to google maps, made with aerial pictures.
Remember that drones have top-view camera and front-view camera which gives more possibilities in terms of what you can do with collected data. With such a huge database and a little bit of 3D geometry we could get e.g. a 3D map of the world... I guess google can derive something like that already from their streetview images however obviously street view covers some relatively small part of the globe and also can not access places that UAV can.
“StarTiger is a fresh approach to space engineering,” explains Peter de Maagt, overseeing the project. “Take a highly qualified, well-motivated team, gather them at a single well-equipped site, then give them a fixed time to solve a challenging technical problem.”
StarTiger stands for ‘Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers’ working within the Agency’s TRP Basic Technology Research Programme.
It brings team members together on a single site to work on a set challenge, aiming to produce a working prototype by the end of the project’s time limit.
Nice initiative and also a good approach, problem-oriented within a fixed time frame. Could definitely be a highly motivating approach, similar to GTOC... I think the ACT should do this more often, targeted at future technologies and/or missions. The team could be structured around 'problems' instead of 'research areas', this will promote multidisciplinary work as well, plus it will also focus activities more. The problems, or more broadly concepts, are identified by the team and a few get chosen as main activities. Subsequent RF and YGT hiring is then done to strenghten the research team. These projects have a maximum lifetime maybe of 1 year?
Thoughts?
I'm impressed already by what an innovative group of experts and researchers was able to achieve when resourcefully targeted at coming up with the project's name...
"A new lightweight, energy-efficient tool for analyzing a material's chemical makeup could improve the detection abilities of various technologies, ranging from bomb-detecting drones to space rovers searching for signs of life".
Raman Spectroscopy is about measuring vibrational modes in molecules. This vibrational modes are in the meV typically, turning Raman Spectroscopy into a high precision technique. This impressive work shows a new technique based on the use of optical fibers coupled to photomultipliers allowing its use, author's word, in extreme conditions such as unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) and Mars/Moon rovers.
Sanswire-TAO’s ultimate goal is to loft an airship that can ascend to the lower stratosphere, about 18 kilometers up, and fly for weeks or even months at a time, says Dan Erdberg, vice president of operations for Sanswire.
An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech
XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...
Prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity (reward for unfamiliar states). Learns some games without any extrinsic reward!
Not read this article but on a related note: Curiosity and various metrics for it have been explored for some time in robotics (outside of RL) as a framework for exploring (partially) unfamiliar environments. I came across some papers on this topic applied to UAVs when prep'ing for a PhD app. This one (http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~yogesh/publications/crv2014.pdf) comes to mind - which used a topic modelling approach.