Weekend Roundup: November 13, 2020

November 13, 2020 | AUVSI News

This Week in the Unmanned Systems and Robotics World

Scientific Systems Company Inc. (SSCI) has demonstrated a team made up of a fully autonomous UAS and a search and rescue canine working together without intervention from a human handler to conduct a simulated search and rescue mission. During the demonstration, SSCI’s newly developed Teammate Aware Autonomy (TAA) system was used together with its Collaborative Mission Autonomy (CMA) and Finding Objects thru Closed Loop Understanding of the Scene (FOCUS) software. (PRNewswire)

Researchers at the Norwegian Computing Center recently used social robots to teach Norwegian to immigrant children residing in the Grorud district in Oslo. The idea behind the study was to support teachers delivering the language learning program using a social robot. Right now, the program is offered to children between the ages of three and six at local daycare centers in Oslo’s Grorud district, but it also has an additional component that can be provided to the children’s families to help them practice their language skills at home. (Tech Xplore)

Raj Bridgelall, assistant professor of transportation and logistics at North Dakota State University, has helped develop a simplified computer modeling technique to help forecast the effects of autonomous vehicles on land use. According to Bridgelall, the demand for autonomous vehicles for shopping, entertainment and dining in urban areas could “dramatically increase” as a result of changes in land use and travel habits, driven by the efficiency, safety and convenience of autonomous vehicles. (North Dakota State University)

After learning that biologists were looking for a better way to image a large penguin colony in Antarctica, Mac Schwager, assistant professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, saw an opportunity to work on the project, given his experience working with swarms of autonomous drones. This led to the first test flight of a new multi-drone imaging system that coordinates the flight of multiple autonomous drones, which took place at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. (National Science Foundation)

As the technology continues to develop into a way to attack, defend or even deliver logistics, military planners are looking to drone swarms as both a threat and opportunity. The flight time of short-range, small drone swarms is an issue, so Army researchers are looking into a variety of possible solutions, including a UGV that could weave across the land space, acting as a charging station for hordes of drones as they conduct their resupply missions. (Army Times)

Six months after receiving $100 million in funding, Inceptio Technologyhas announced that it raised $120 million in its latest funding. A Chinese startup developing self-driving trucks, Inceptio is currently focusing on level 3 autonomous technologies. (Reuters)