Drones

don’t-call-it-a-drone:-zipline’s-uncrewed-aircraft-wants-to-reinvent-retail

Don’t call it a drone: Zipline’s uncrewed aircraft wants to reinvent retail

delivery, Drones, Features, logistics, Tech, Zipline / /

Ars visits a zipline delivery service that’s deploying in more locations soon.

The inner portion of the Zipline P2 is lowered to the ground on a tether, facing into the wind, with a small propeller at the back. Doors on the bottom open when it touches the ground, depositing the cargo. Credit: Tim Stevens

The skies around Dallas are about to get a lot more interesting. No, DFW airport isn’t planning any more expansions, nor does American Airlines have any more retro liveries to debut. This will be something different, something liable to make all the excitement around the supposed New Jersey drones look a bit quaint.

Zipline is launching its airborne delivery service for real, rolling it out in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Mesquite ahead of a gradual spread that, if all goes according to plan, will also see its craft landing in Seattle before the end of the year. These automated drones can be loaded in seconds, carry small packages for miles, and deposit them with pinpoint accuracy at the end of a retractable tether.

It looks and sounds like the future, but this launch has been a decade in the making. Zipline has already flown more than 1.4 million deliveries and covered over 100 million miles, yet it feels like things are just getting started.

The ranch

When Zipline called me and invited me out for a tour of a drone delivery testing facility hidden in the hills north of San Francisco, I was naturally intrigued, but I had no idea what to expect. Shipping logistics facilities tend to be dark and dreary spaces, with automated machinery stacked high on angular shelves within massive buildings presenting all the visual charm of a concrete paver.

Zipline’s facility is a bit different. It’s utterly stunning, situated among the pastures of a ranch that sprawls over nearly 7,000 acres of the kind of verdant, rolling terrain that has drawn nature lovers to Northern California for centuries.

A modest-looking facility amidst beautiful hills

The Zipline drone testing facility. Credit: Tim Stevens

Zipline’s contribution to the landscape consists of a few shipping container-sized prefab office spaces, a series of tents, and some tall, metal structures that look like a stand of wireform trees. The fruit hanging from their aluminum branches are clusters of white drones, or at least what we’d call “drones.”

But the folks at Zipline don’t seem to like that term. Everyone I spoke with referred to the various craft hovering, buzzing, or gliding overhead as aircraft. That’s for good reason.

Not your average UAV

Go buy a drone at an electronics retailer, something from DJI perhaps, and you’ll have to abide by a series of regulations about how high and how far to fly it. Two of the most important rules: Never fly near an airport, and never let the thing out of your sight.

Zipline’s aircraft are much more comprehensive machines, able to fly for miles and miles. By necessity, they must fly well beyond the range of any human operator, or what’s called “beyond visual line of sight,” or BVLOS. In 2023, Zipline was the first commercial operator to get clearance for BVLOS flights.

Zipline’s aircraft operate under a series of FAA classifications—specifically, part 107, part 135, and the upcoming part 108, which will formalize BVLOS operation. The uncrewed aircraft, which are able to operate as such, navigate through controlled airspace, and even near airports, with the help of FAA-mandated transponder data as well as onboard sensors that can detect the presence of an approaching aircraft and automatically avoid it.

A tree-like tower houses a drone with rolling hills as the backdrop

A Zipline drone testing facility. Seen on the right is one of the “trees.” Credit: Tim Stevens

In fact, just about everything about Zipline’s aircraft is automatic. Onboard sensors sample the air through pitot tubes, detecting bad weather. The craft use this data to reroute themselves around the problem, then report back to save subsequent flights the hassle.

Wind speed and direction are also calculated, ensuring that deliveries are dropped with accuracy. Once the things are in the air, even the Zipline operators aren’t sure which way they’ll fly, only that they’ll figure out the right way to get the package there and return safely.

Zipline actually operates two separate aircraft that are suited for different mission types. The aircraft clinging to the aluminum trees, the type that will be exploring the skies over Dallas soon, are internally called Platform 2, or P2, and they’re actually two aircraft in one.

A P2 drone can hover in place using five propellers and take off vertically before seamlessly transitioning into efficient forward flight. When it reaches its destination, doors on the bottom open, and a second aircraft emerges. This baby craft, called a “Zip,” drops down on a tether.

Fins ensure the tethered craft stays facing into the wind while a small propeller at the rear keeps it from blowing off-target. When it touches the ground, its doors pop open, gently depositing a package from a cargo cavity that’s big enough for about four loaves of bread. Maximum payload capacity is eight pounds, and payloads can be delivered up to about 10 miles away.

Where there’s a P2, there must be a P1, and while Zipline’s first aircraft serves much the same purpose, it does so in a very different way. The P1 is a fixed-wing aircraft, looking for all the world like a hobbyist’s radio-controlled model, just bigger and way more expensive.

The P1 launches into the sky like a glider, courtesy of a high-torque winch that slings it aloft before its electric prop takes over. It can fly for over 120 miles on a charge before dropping its cargo, a package that glides to the ground via parachute.

The P1 slows momentarily during the drop and then buzzes back up to full speed dramatically before turning for home. There’s no gentle, vertical landing here. It instead cruises precisely toward a wire suspended high in the air. An instant before impact, it noses up, exposing a metal hook to the wire, which stops the thing instantly.

In naval aviator parlance, it’s an OK three-wire every time, and thanks to hot-swappable batteries, a P1 can be back in the air in just minutes. This feature has helped the company perform millions of successful deliveries, many carrying lifesaving supplies.

From Muhanga to Mesquite

The first deployment from the company that would become Zipline was in 2016 in Muhanga, Rwanda, beginning with the goal of delivering vaccines and other medical supplies quickly and reliably across the untamed expanses of Africa. Eric Watson, now head of systems and safety engineering at Zipline, was part of that initial crew.

“Our mission is to enable access to instant logistics to everyone in the world,” he said. “We started with one of the most visceral pain points, of being able to go to a place, operating in remote parts where access to medicine was a problem.”

It proved to be an incredible proving ground for the technology, but this wasn’t just some beta test designed to deliver greater ROI. Zipline already has success in a more important area: delivering lifesaving medicine. The company’s drones deliver things like vaccines, anti-venoms, and plasma. A 2023 study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that Zipline’s blood delivery service reduced deaths from postpartum hemorrhage by 51 percent.

That sort of promise attracted Lauren Lacey to the company. She’s Zipline’s head of integration quality and manufacturing engineering. A former engineer at Sandia Labs, where she spent a decade hardening America’s military assets, Lacey has brought that expertise to whipping Zipline’s aircraft into shape.

A woman stands by a drone in a testing facility

Lauren Lacey, Zipline’s head of integration quality and manufacturing engineering. Credit: Tim Stevens

Lacey walked me through the 11,000-square-foot Bay Area facility she and her team have turned into a stress-testing house of horrors for uncrewed aircraft. I witnessed everything from latches being subjected to 120° F heat while bathed in ultra-fine dust to a giant magnetic resonance device capable of rattling a circuit board with 70 Gs of force.

It’s all in the pursuit of creating an aircraft that can survive 10,000 deliveries. The various test chambers can replicate upward of 2,500 tests per day, helping the Zipline team iterate quickly and not only add strength but peel away unneeded mass, too.

“Every single gram that we put on the aircraft is one less that we can deliver to the customer,” Lacey said.

Now zipping

Zipline already has a small test presence in Arkansas, a pilot program with Walmart, but its rollout today is a big step forward. Once added to the system, customers can make orders through a dedicated Zipline app. Walmart is the only partner for now, but the company plans to offer more products on the retail and healthcare front, including restaurant food deliveries.

The app will show Walmart products eligible for this sort of delivery, calculating weight and volume to ensure that your order isn’t too big. The P2’s eight-pound payload may seem restrictive, but Jeff Bezos, in touting Amazon’s own future drone delivery program, previously said that 86 percent of the company’s deliveries are five pounds or less.

Amazon suspended its prototype drone program last year for software updates but is flying again in pilot programs in Texas and Arizona. The company has not provided an update on the number of flights lately, but the most recent figures were fewer than 10,000 drone deliveries. For comparison, Zipline currently completes thousands per day. Another future competitor, Alphabet-backed Wing, has flown nearly a half-million deliveries in the US and abroad.

Others are vying for a piece of the airborne delivery pie, too, but nobody I spoke with at Zipline seems worried. From what I could see from my visit, they have reason for confidence. The winds on that ranch in California were so strong that towering dust devils were dancing between the disaffected cattle during my visit. Despite that, the drones flew fast and true, and my requested delivery of bandages and medicine was safely and quickly deposited on the ground just a few feet from my own feet.

It felt like magic, yes, but more importantly, it was one of the most disruptive demonstrations I’ve seen. While the tech isn’t ideally suited for every situation, it may help cut down on the delivery trucks that are increasingly clogging rural roads, all while getting more things to more people who need them, and doing it emissions-free.

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Drones are now launching drones to attack other drones in Ukraine

culture, Drones, Ukraine, war / /

Radio mast

The Ukrainian military is talking up a new ground drone called the Pliushch, which doesn’t carry a weapon but instead features a folded, 10-meter (32-foot) tall radio mast. The drone has a range of 40 km (25 miles), and once in position, it can raise the radio mast, which can be used either as a communications repeater or as a mobile electronic warfare station.

The future of drone combat

These examples are really just a partial list—it doesn’t even touch on the continually updated naval drones that Ukraine continues to deploy in the Black Sea—and for every new innovation, there will shortly be a counter-innovation. Case in point: electronic warfare has now saturated front-line combat areas in Ukraine and Russia and, in some places, is so bad that fiber optic drones are now used to avoid its effects. (These drones unspool miles of ultra-thin fiber-optic cable behind them as they fly, which provides a high-quality, unjammable video and control channel to the drone.)

Because fiber optic drones lack the electromagnetic transmissions that can make drones easy to pinpoint, new methods (including short-range radar systems) are now used to hunt them down, while quick-reaction units will use small attack drones to hit the fiber optic drone before it reaches its target.

Given the many kinds of drone hardware available, you might wonder why more assaults don’t rely on machines rather than humans. Now that ground drones are entering the fight in greater numbers, this does appear to be happening. For instance, local news reports from Ukraine in December described how the Khartia brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard attacked Russian positions using only a mix of machine gun ground drones, aerial attack drones, and mine-laying/clearing drones.

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us-temporarily-bans-drones-in-parts-of-nj,-may-use-“deadly-force”-against-aircraft

US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft

drone sightings, Drones, Policy / /

The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said “the United States government may use deadly force against” airborne aircraft “if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”

The FAA issued 22 orders imposing “temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons” until January 17, 2025. “At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure,” an FAA statement said.

Each NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) affects a specific area. “No UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] operations are authorized in the areas covered by this NOTAM” unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations “with a valid statement of work.”

“Pilots who do not adhere to the following proc[edure] may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel,” the FAA said. Violating the order could result in “civil penalties and the suspension or revocation of airmen certificates,” and criminal charges, the FAA said.

The New Jersey orders affect areas in Evesham, Hamilton, Bridgewater, Cedar Grove, Metuchen, North Brunswick Township, Camden, Gloucester City, Westampton, South Brunswick, Edison, Branchburg, Sewaren, Jersey City, Harrison, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Winslow, Burlington, Clifton, Hancocks Bridge, and Kearny.

5,000 tips to FBI, but nothing “anomalous”

The latest notices follow numerous sightings of objects that appeared to be drones, which worried New Jersey residents and prompted state and federal officials to investigate and issue several public statements. The FAA last month imposed temporary flight restrictions at the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research and manufacturing facility, and a Bedminster golf course owned by President-elect Donald Trump.

On December 16, a joint statement was issued by the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and Department of Defense. The “FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated,” but evidence so far suggests “the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” the statement said. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.”

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new-drone-has-legs-for-landing-gear,-enabling-efficient-launches

New drone has legs for landing gear, enabling efficient launches

Drones, robotics, Science / /

The RAVEN walks, it flies, it hops over obstacles, and it’s efficient.

The RAVEN in action. Credit: EPFL/Alain Herzog

Most drones on the market are rotary-wing quadcopters, which can conveniently land and take off almost anywhere. The problem is they are less energy-efficient than fixed-wing aircraft, which can fly greater distances and stay airborne for longer but need a runway, a dedicated launcher, or at least a good-fashioned throw to get to the skies.

To get past this limit, a team of Swiss researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne built a fixed-wing flying robot called RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) with a peculiar bio-inspired landing gear: a pair of robotic bird-like legs. “The RAVEN robot can walk, hop over obstacles, and do a jumping takeoff like real birds,” says Won Dong Shin, an engineer leading the project.

Smart investments

The key challenge in attaching legs to drones was that they significantly increased mass and complexity. State-of-the-art robotic legs were designed for robots walking on the ground and were too bulky and heavy to even think about using on a flying machine. So, Shin’s team started their work by taking a closer look at what the leg mass budget looked like in various species of birds.

It turned out that the ratio of leg mass to the total body weight generally increased with size in birds. A carrion crow had legs weighing around 100 grams, which the team took as their point of reference.

The robotic legs built by Shin and his colleagues resembled a real bird’s legs quite closely. Simplifications introduced to save weight included skipping the knee joint and actuated toe joints, resulting in a two-segmented limb with 64 percent of the weight placed around the hip joint. The mechanism was powered by a standard drone propeller, with the ankle joint actuated through a system of pulleys and a timing belt. The robotic leg ended with a foot with three forward-facing toes and a single backward-facing hallux.

There were some more sophisticated bird-inspired design features, too. “I embedded a torsional spring in the ankle joint. When the robot’s leg is crouching, it stores the energy in that spring, and then when the leg stretches out, the spring works together with the motor to generate higher jumping speed,” says Shin. A real bird can store elastic energy in its muscle-tendon system during flexion and release it very rapidly during extension for a jumping takeoff. The spring’s job was to emulate this mechanism, and it worked pretty well—“It actually increased the jumping speed by 25 percent,” Shin says.

In the end, the robotic legs weighed around 230 grams, way more than the real ones in a carrion crow, but it turned out that was good enough for the RAVEN robot to walk, jump, take off, and fly.

Crow’s efficiency

The team calculated the necessary takeoff speed for two birds with body masses of 490 grams and a hair over 780 grams; these were 1.85 and 3.21 meters per second, respectively. Based on that, Shin figured the RAVEN robot would need to reach 2.5 meters per second to get airborne. Using the bird-like jumping takeoff strategy, it could reach that speed in just 0.17 seconds.

How did nature’s go-to takeoff procedure stack up against other ways to get to the skies? Other options included a falling takeoff, where you just push your aircraft off a cliff and let gravity do its thing, or standing takeoff, where you position the craft vertically and rely on the propeller to lift it upward. “When I was designing the experiments, I thought the jumping takeoff would be the least energy-efficient because it used extra juice from the battery to activate the legs,” Shin says. But he was in for a surprise.

“What we meant by energy efficiency was calculating the energy input and energy output. The energy output was the kinetic energy and the potential energy at the moment of takeoff, defined as the moment when the feet of the robot stop touching the ground,” Shin explains. The energy input was calculated by measuring the power used during takeoff.

The RAVEN takes flight.

“It turned out that the jumping takeoff was actually the most energy-efficient strategy. I didn’t expect that result. It was quite surprising”, Shin says.

The energy cost of the jumping takeoff was slightly higher than that of the other two strategies, but not by much. It required 7.9 percent more juice than the standing takeoff and 6.9 percent more than the falling takeoff. At the same time, it generated much higher acceleration, so you got way better bang for the buck (at least as far as energy was concerned). Overall, jumping with bird-like legs was 9.7 times more efficient than standing takeoff and 4.9 times more efficient than falling takeoff.

One caveat with the team’s calculations was that a fixed-wing drone with a more conventional design, one using wheels or a launcher, would be much more efficient in traditional takeoff strategies than a legged RAVEN robot. “But when you think about it, birds, too, would fly much better without legs. And yet they need them to move on the ground or hunt their prey. You trade some of the in-flight efficiency for more functions,” Shin claims. And the legs offered plenty of functions.

Obstacles ahead

To demonstrate the versatility of their legged flying robot, Shin’s team put it through a series of tasks that would be impossible to complete with a standard drone. Their benchmark mission scenario involved traversing a path with a low ceiling, jumping over a gap, and hopping onto an obstacle. “Assuming an erect position with the tail touching the ground, the robot could walk and remain stable even without advanced controllers,” Shin claims. Walking solved the problem of moving under low ceilings. Jumping over gaps and onto obstacles was done by using the mechanism used for takeoff: torsion springs and actuators. RAVEN could jump over an 11-centimeter-wide gap and onto an obstacle 26-centimeter-high.

But Shin says RAVEN will need way more work before it truly shines. “At this stage, the robot cannot clear all those obstacles in one go. We had to reprogram it for each of the obstacles separately,” Shin says. The problem is the control system in RAVEN is not adaptive; the actuators in the legs perform predefined sets of motions to send the robot on a trajectory the team figured out through computer simulations. If there was something blocking the way, RAVEN would have crashed into it.

Another, perhaps more striking limitation is that RAVEN can’t use its legs to land. But this is something Shin and his colleagues want to work on in the future.

“We want to implement some sensors, perhaps vision or haptic sensors. This way, we’re going to know where the landing site is, how many meters away from it we are, and so on,” Shin says. Another modification that’s on the way for RAVEN is foldable wings that the robot will use to squeeze through tight spaces. “Flapping wings would also be a very interesting topic. They are very important for landing, too, because birds decelerate first with their wings, not with their legs. With flapping wings, this is going to be a really bird-like robot,” Shin claims.

All this is intended to prepare RAVEN for search and rescue missions. The idea is legged flying robots would reach disaster-struck areas quickly, land, traverse difficult terrain on foot if necessary, and then take off like birds. “Another application is delivering parcels. Here in Switzerland, I often see helicopters delivering them to people living high up in the mountains, which I think is quite costly. A bird-like drone could do that more efficiently,” Shin suggested.

Nature, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08228-9

Photo of John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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teaching-a-drone-to-fly-without-a-vertical-rudder

Teaching a drone to fly without a vertical rudder

Biomechanics, birds, Drones, engineering, flight, mechanical engineering, Science / /

We can get a drone to fly like a pigeon, but we needed to use feathers to do it.

Pigeons manage to get vertical without using a vertical tail. Credit: HamidEbrahimi

Most airplanes in the world have vertical tails or rudders to prevent Dutch roll instabilities, a combination of yawing and sideways motions with rolling that looks a bit like the movements of a skater. Unfortunately, a vertical tail adds weight and generates drag, which reduces fuel efficiency in passenger airliners. It also increases the radar signature, which is something you want to keep as low as possible in a military aircraft.

In the B-2 stealth bomber, one of the very few rudderless airplanes, Dutch roll instabilities are dealt with using drag flaps positioned at the tips of its wings, which can split and open to make one wing generate more drag than the other and thus laterally stabilize the machine. “But it is not really an efficient way to solve this problem,” says David Lentink, an aerospace engineer and a biologist at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. “The efficient way is solving it by generating lift instead of drag. This is something birds do.”

Lentink led the study aimed at better understanding birds’ rudderless flight mechanics.

Automatic airplanes

Birds flight involves near-constant turbulence—“When they fly around buildings, near trees, near rocks, near cliffs,” Lentink says. The leading hypothesis on how they manage this in a seemingly graceful, effortless manner was suggested by a German scientist named Franz Groebbels. He argued that birds’ ability relied on their reflexes. When he held a bird in his hands, he noticed that its tail would flip down when the bird was pitched up and down, and when the bird was moved left and right, its wings also responded to movement by extending left and right asymmetrically. “Another reason to think reflexes matter is comparing this to our own human locomotion—when we stumble, it is a reflex that saves us from falling,” Lentink claims.

Groebbels’ intuition about birds’ reflexes being responsible for flight stabilization was later backed by neuroscience. The movements of birds’ wings and muscles were recorded and found to be proportional to the extent that the bird was pitched or rolled. The hypothesis, however, was extremely difficult to test with a flying bird—all the experiments aimed at confirming it have been done on birds that were held in place. Another challenge was determining if those wing and tail movements were reflexive or voluntary.

“I think one pretty cool thing is that Groebbels wrote his paper back in 1929, long before autopilot systems or autonomous flight were invented, and yet he said that birds flew like automatic airplanes,” Lentink says. To figure out if he was right, Lentink and his colleagues started with the Groebbels’s analogy but worked their way backward—they started building autonomous airplanes designed to look and fly like birds.

Reverse-engineering pigeons

The first flying robot Lentink’s team built was called the Tailbot. It had fixed wings and a very sophisticated tail that could move with five actuated degrees of freedom. “It could spread—furl and unfurl—move up and down, move sideways, even asymmetrically if necessary, and tilt. It could do everything a bird’s tail can,” Lentink explains. The team put this robot in a wind tunnel that simulated turbulent flight and fine-tuned a controller that adjusted the tail’s position in response to changes in the robot’s body position, mimicking reflexes observed in real pigeons.

“We found that this reflexes controller that managed the tail’s movement worked and stabilized the robot in the wind tunnel. But when we took it outdoors, results were disappointing. It actually ended up crashing,” Lentink says. Given that relying on a morphing tail alone was not enough, the team built another robot called PigeonBot II, which added pigeon-like morphing wings.

Each wing could be independently tucked or extended. Combined with the morphing tail and nine servomotors—two per wing and five in the tail—the robot weighed around 300 grams, which is around the weight of a real pigeon. Reflexes were managed by the same controller that was modified to manage wing motions as well.

To enable autonomous flight, the team fitted the robot with two propellers and an off-the-shelf drone autopilot called Pixracer. The problem with the autopilot, though, was that it was designed for conventional controls you use in quadcopter drones. “We put an Arduino between the autopilot and the robot that translated autopilot commands to the morphing tail and wings’ motions of the robot,” Lentink says.

The Pigeon II passed the outdoor flying test. It could take off, land, and fly entirely on its own or with an operator issuing high-level commands like go up, go down, turn left, or turn right. Flight stabilization relied entirely on bird-like reflexes and worked well. But there was one thing electronics could not re-create: their robots used real pigeon feathers. “We used them because with current technology it is impossible to create structures that are as lightweight, as stiff, and as complex at the same time,” Lentink says.

Feathery marvels

Birds’ feathers appear simple, but they really are extremely advanced pieces of aerospace hardware. Their complexity starts with nanoscale features. “Feathers have 10-micron 3D hooks on their surface that prevent them from going too far apart. It is the only one-sided Velcro system in the world. This is something that has never been engineered, and there is nothing like this elsewhere in nature,” Lentink says. Those nanoscale hooks, when locked in, can bear loads reaching up to 20 grams.

Then there are macroscale properties. Feathers are not like aluminum structures that have one bending stiffness, one torque stiffness, and that’s it. “They are very stiff in one direction and very soft in another direction, but not soft in a weak way—they can bear significant loads,” Lentink says.

His team attempted to make artificial feathers with carbon fiber, but they couldn’t create anything as lightweight as a real feather.  “I don’t know of any 3D printer that could start with 10-micron nanoscale features and work all the way up to macro-scale structures that can be 20 centimeters long,” Lentink says. His team also discovered that pigeon’s feathers could filter out a lot of turbulence perturbations on their own. “It wasn’t just the form of the wing,” Lentink claims.

Lentink estimates that a research program aimed at developing aerospace materials even remotely comparable to feathers could take up to 20 years. But does this mean his whole concept of using reflex-based controllers to solve rudderless flight hangs solely on successfully reverse-engineering a pigeon’s feather? Not really.

Pigeon bombers?

The team thinks it could be possible to build airplanes that emulate the way birds stabilize rudderless flight using readily available materials. “Based on our experiments, we know what wing and tail shapes are needed and how to control them. And we can see if we can create the same effect in a more conventional way with the same types of forces and moments,” Lentink says. He suspects that developing entirely new materials with feather-like properties would only become necessary if the conventional approach bumps into some insurmountable roadblocks and fails.

“In aerospace engineering, you’ve got to try things out. But now we know it is worth doing,” Lentink claims. And he says military aviation ought to be the first to attempt it because the risk is more tolerable there. “New technologies are often first tried in the military, and we want to be transparent about it,” he says. Implementing bird-like rudderless flight stabilization in passenger airliners, which are usually designed in a very conservative fashion, would take a lot more research, “It may take easily take 15 years or more before this technology is ready to such level that we’d have passengers fly with it,” Lentink claims.

Still, he says there is still much we can learn from studying birds. “We know less about bird’s flight than most people think we know. There is a gap between what airplanes can do and what birds can do. I am trying to bridge this gap by better understanding how birds fly,” Lentink adds.

Science Robotics, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.ado4535

Photo of Jacek Krywko

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Ukrainian drones now spray 2,500° C thermite streams right into Russian trenches

culture, Drones, russia, thermite, Ukraine, war / /

dragon’s fire —

Mechanical dragons now deliver fire on command.

–

Ukrainian drones now spray 2,500° C thermite streams right into Russian trenches

Wars of necessity spawn weapons innovation as each side tries to counter the other’s tactics and punch through defenses. For instance—as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made drone warfare real, both sides have developed ways to bring down drones more easily. One recent Ukrainian innovation has been building counter-drone ramming drones that literally knock Russian drones from the sky.

In the case of the trench warfare that currently dominates the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians have another new tactic: dragon’s fire. Delivered by drone.

Videos have begun to circulate on Telegram and X this week from Ukrainian units showing their new weapon. (You can see three of them below.) The videos each show a drone moving deliberately along a trench line as it releases a continuous stream of incendiary material, which often starts fires on the ground below (and ignites nearby ammunition).

The most terrifying development in drone warfare I’ve seen thus far. Makes FPVs with unitary warheads look like a walk in the park.

The POV videos of incendiary rockets cascading burning magnesium and thermite were horrifying, but this is next level. pic.twitter.com/muF2kbHPqJ

— Artoir (@ItsArtoir) September 2, 2024


Ukrainian thermite dropping drones continue to rapidly proliferate through various drone units.

Seen here, a Ukrainian drone from the 60th Mechanized Brigade drops a stream of molten thermite on a Russian-held treeline. pic.twitter.com/o20diLuN1L

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 4, 2024


This drone type is allegedly called “Dragon” and is said to feature thermite, a mixture of metal powder (usually aluminum) and metal oxide (in this case, said to be iron). When a thermite mixture is ignited, it undergoes a redox reaction that releases an enormous amount of heat energy and can burn anywhere. It can get really, really hot.

Wikipedia offers a nice description of the advantages of thermite:

The products emerge as liquids due to the high temperatures reached (up to 2,500° C [4,532° F] with iron(III) oxide)—although the actual temperature reached depends on how quickly heat can escape to the surrounding environment. Thermite contains its own supply of oxygen and does not require any external source of air. Consequently, it cannot be smothered, and may ignite in any environment given sufficient initial heat. It burns well while wet, and cannot be easily extinguished with water—though enough water to remove sufficient heat may stop the reaction.

Whether such weapons make any difference on the battlefield remains unclear, but the devices are a reminder of how much industrial and chemical engineering talent in Ukraine is currently being directed into new methods of destruction.

Ukrainian drones now spray 2,500° C thermite streams right into Russian trenches Read More »

trying-to-outrun-ukrainian-drones?-kursk-traffic-cams-still-issue-speeding-tickets.

Trying to outrun Ukrainian drones? Kursk traffic cams still issue speeding tickets.

culture, Drones, Kursk, russia, traffic cameras, Ukraine, war / /

SLOW DOWN —

Drones are everywhere. Traffic cameras don’t care.

–

Photo from a Ukrainian drone.

Enlarge / Ukrainian FPV drone hunting Russian army assets along a road.

Imagine receiving a traffic ticket in the mail because you were speeding down a Russian road in Kursk with a Ukrainian attack drone on your tail. That’s the reality facing some Russians living near the front lines after Ukraine’s surprise seizure of Russian territory in Kursk Oblast. And they’re complaining about it on Telegram.

Rob Lee, a well-known analyst of the Ukraine/Russia war, comments on X that “traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and people are receiving speeding fines when trying to outrun FPVs [first-person-view attack drones]. Some have resorted to covering their license plates but the traffic police force them to remove them.”

The Russian outlet Mash offers more details from a local perspective:

Volunteers and military volunteers who arrived in the Kursk region are asking the traffic police not to fine them for speeding when they are escaping from the drones of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Several people who are near the combat zone told Mash about this. Cameras are still recording violations in the border area, and when people try to escape from the drones, they receive letters of happiness [tickets]. One of the well-known military activists was charged 9k [rubles, apparently—about US$100] in just one day. He accelerated on a highway that is attacked almost every hour by enemy FPV drones. Some cover their license plates, but the traffic police stop them and demand that they remove the stickers.

Mash claims that the traffic police are sympathetic and that given the drone situation, “speeding can be considered as committed in a state of extreme necessity.” But those who receive a speeding ticket will have to challenge it in court on these grounds.

An image from a Russian traffic camera.

Enlarge / An image from a Russian traffic camera.

Mash

The attack drones at issue here are widely used even some distance beyond the current front lines. Russian milbloggers, for instance, have claimed for more than a week that Ukrainian drones are attacking supply vehicles on the important E38 highway through Kursk, and they have published photos of burning vehicles along the route. (The E38 is significantly to the north of known Ukrainian positions.)

So Russians are understandably in something of a hurry when on roads like this. But the traffic cameras don’t care—and neither, apparently, do the traffic police, who keep the cameras running.

Estonian X account “WarTranslated” provides English translations of Russian Telegram posts related to the Ukraine war, and the traffic cam issue has come up multiple times. According to one local Russian commentator, “In frontline areas, they continue to collect fines for violating traffic rules… For example, drivers exceed the speed limit in order to get away from the drone, or drive quickly through a dangerous place; the state regularly collects fines for this.”

Another Russian complains, “The fact is that in the Kursk region, surveillance cameras that monitor speeding continue to operate. There are frequent cases when fighters are fined when they run away from enemy FPV drones. Papering over license plates on cars does not help, either. For example, a guy from the People’s Militia of the city of Kurchatov was sent to 15 days of arrest because of a taped-over license plate.”

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to end the drone danger in Kursk.

Trying to outrun Ukrainian drones? Kursk traffic cams still issue speeding tickets. Read More »

drone-startup-launches-grocery-delivery-in-germany

Drone startup launches grocery delivery in Germany

Drones, Ecosystems, Electric vehicle, Startups and technology, Sustainability / /

This Thursday, German startup Wingcopter launched a drone and electric cargo-bike delivery project to bring everyday consumer goods to remote rural areas in Central Germany. 

Just as with ordinary grocery delivery, customers in Michelstadt, Hesse, will be able to place their orders via a website and decide on a convenient delivery time slot. Autonomous Wingcopter drones will then deliver non-perishable products from a local supermarket to a drop-off point outside of villages. The final stretch to the customer’s door will be covered by cargo-bikes (with human) from e-bike producer Riese & Müller. 

Initially, the pilot project, named “LieferMichel,” will offer non-perishables from the local REWE supermarket (one of Wingcopter’s backers), with the intention of adding more retailers if the project proves successful. 

“We are really proud to pilot LieferMichel, the first drone delivery service for groceries and everyday goods in Germany,” said Tom Plümmer, CEO of Wingcopter. “Our biggest goal is to gain experience and evaluate, together with the residents, an environmentally friendly and efficient service that creates real added value for the population in rural areas.” 

A group of people standing behind a Wingcopter drone with cargo bike to the side
The drone will fly to a drop-off point where are cargo-bike (plus human) will take over the final bit of logistics. Credit: Wingcopter

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Wingcopter is conducting the Drone-Cargo Bike Express Delivery (DroLEx – Drohnen-Lastenrad-Express-Belieferung) project in collaboration with the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (Frankfurt UAS). The pilot is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), as part of a broader “Innovative Air Mobility” funding directive of €430,000. The LieferMichel pilotwill initially run until the end of 2023. 

Grocery delivery just one of many air mobility use cases

Founded in 2017 by Plümmer and co-founders Jonathan Hesselbarth (CTO) and Ansgar Kadura (CSO), Wingcopter makes uncrewed all-electric delivery drones and also provides drone delivery services. Backed by the European Investment Bank, REWE Group, and Salvia, among others, the Darmstadt-based company currently employs 150 people. 

Its latest drone is the Wingcopter 198, built on patented tilt-rotor technology that makes it withstand strong winds and rain as it goes about its mission. It has a payload capacity of up to 5kg, range up to 110km, wind resistance of 15m/s average, and 20m/s gusts, and a default cruise speed of 100km/h.



It is also equipped with a redundant system architecture of dual airspeed sensors, dual heading and positioning systems, and dual flight controllers.

Zero-emission grocery delivery options may indeed prove to be vital for the survival of remote rural areas in the future. However, Wingcopter’s product has several other use cases. The company has already deployed its drones for on-demand medical delivery to remote islands in Vanuatu and Ireland, volcano inspection in Italy, and infrastructure inspection in Norway, among other projects. 

To see one of Wingcopter’s drones in action (and catch a glimpse of German rural landscapes) watch the video below.