Weekend Roundup

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This Week in the Unmanned Systems and Robotics World

According to Indigo Beam’s Flight Operations Director, Troy Turcott, the company is working with disaster response teams in Texas, as well as state and local law enforcement officials, to provide damage assessment and disaster recovery assistance using UAS, following Hurricane Harvey. Indigo Beam is working in subdivisions in Fort Bend County's Riverstone development (near the Brazos River) in Missouri City, Texas, where more than 1,000 homes on the "safe-side" of the levee within Levee Improvement District #19 were flooded due to lift station pumps not being able to handle the volume of water produced by the hurricane. To help address this issue, Indigo Beam is providing UAS videography and 3D mapping services for Littleton, Colorado’s Maverick Pump Services, on behalf of Levee Management Services of Sugarland, Texas. (News9.com)

Heath Consultants Incorporated (Heath) and Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) have been demonstrating the usefulness of UAS-mounted laser-based leak detection technology for emergency response, following Hurricane Harvey. Known as the Remote Methane Leak Detector Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RMLD-UAV), the system integrates Heath’s laser-based, Remote Methane Leak Detector (RMLD) with PSI’s quadrotor, which is capable of highly advanced autonomy and all-weather operation. In Texas, the RMLD-UAV was deployed to inspect underground gas lines around two cities, Beaumont and Port Aransas, for major leakage of areas that were inaccessible to vehicles and unsafe for walking due to various factors caused by the hurricane. (PRWeb)

Two Oregon legislators, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, have written a letter to federal officials in which they asked what's being done to deploy more UAS to battle wildfires in the state and throughout the west. In their letter to FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke, Wyden and DeFazio wrote, “these tragic yet foreseeable events make it necessary to explore all ways to better fight wildfires. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have the potential to help this effort significantly.” A copy of the letter can be found here. (wyden.senate.gov)

The Bend Municipal Airport in Oregon has been added to the Unmanned Aircraft operation locations of the Warm Springs FAA UAS Test Range. The Warm Springs UAS Test Range has also added operations to the Prineville and Madras airports in Oregon as well. (KTVZ.com)

A city report says that UAS have shown an effectiveness for locating mosquito development sites in the U.S, so with this in mind, the Insect Control Branch in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada is requesting $36,500 from the Innovation Capital Fund to purchase a UAS, which would be used to “help identify new standing water sites and improve mosquito larviciding operations by treating more standing water sites.” The Insect Control Branch says that using UAS would be beneficial for identifying new sites, being that identifying new standing water sites using ground crews is considered labor intensive, and more expensive. (CTV News Winnipeg)

Warner Bros. used a UAS light show to promote the Blu-ray release of the Wonder Woman movie. The light show, which took place at Dodger’s Stadium in Los Angeles, utilized Intel’s Shooting Star UAS, which were also used during the Super Bowl in February. Among many things, the UAS were used to illuminate words like “grace,” “wisdom,” and “power,” and they also created a silhouette of Wonder Woman taking a knee. (WeTalkUAV)

In River Vale, New Jersey, River Vale police will begin using UAS for a variety of missions, including assisting with emergency operations, crime scene investigations and public safety programs, according to Chief William C. Giordano. The UAS, known as “Angel 1,” is a professional-grade UAS that carries two cameras, “one a high-definition model and the other thermographic, which produces images without the need for light.” The UAS was paid for using money forfeited by defendants in criminal cases. (Northern Highlands Daily Voice)

Identified Technologies, which provides UAS mapping for construction and energy job sites, and Kokosing Construction Co. have announced a new partnership in which the companies worked together on a multimillion-dollar Kentucky highway project. For the project, Kokosing needed to survey two 500-acre sites to “track progress and profitability as the projects cut through five mountains and used the rock aggregate for fill.” Identified Technologies’ commercial UAS platform provided fully integrated mapping and tracking, which gave Kokosing total control of its job site data. Ultimately, the UAS mapped both sites in less than a half a day. (Unmanned Aerial)

As a part of a “wider plan to speed up its technical development and compete with U.S. rivals,” China’s Baidu Inc. has announced a $1.52 billion autonomous driving fund. Over the next three years, the fund, known as the “Apollo Fund,” will invest in 100 autonomous driving projects. The launch of the fund occurred around the same time of the release of Apollo 1.5, which is the second generation of Baidu’s open-source autonomous vehicle software. (Reuters)

Delphi has announced a partnership with BlackBerry QNX, which will result in Delphi using BlackBerry QNX as the operating system for Delphi’s automated driving platform. According to TechCrunch, Delphi will lean on BlackBerry QNX’s track record in safe and secure automotive software “as a way to help kickstart its autonomous platform development and get it ready for real-world deployment,” where intrusion and hacking attempts will be present. (TechCrunch)

The North Avenue Smart Corridor has launched in Atlanta. The 2.3-mile corridor, which among many things will serve to help pave the way for autonomous vehicles, equips 18 intersections with “advanced technology designed to improve vehicle, transit, bike and pedestrian flow and safety.” To improve traffic safety, the intersections have been equipped with a video surveillance and detection system, as well as a connected vehicle system that could allow traffic signs to communicate with autonomous vehicles and the smartphones of drivers. Via Equipment World, Mayor Kasim Reed says that the corridor is a demonstration project to make Atlanta “a national leader in the Smart Cities movement.” (Equipment World)