AirBurr stumbles – but is unstoppable
Robots capable of flight in cramped and cluttered environments have many advantages over their ground-based counterparts, but most current systems suffer from the same fundamental problem: any contact with obstacles has catastrophic, mission-ending results. What if instead of avoiding collisions, a flying robot can become robust to them, and even take advantage of contact with […]
OpenRelief
OpenRelief is a project to design open, modular, information solutions for disaster relief. OpenRelief was inspired by difficulties encountered by the founders, when trying to map the Tohoku disaster area in Japan during March 2011. It was hard to see through the “fog” of disaster, so we decided to create tools to clear the fog. OpenRelief was […]
Flying WiFi robots for disaster relief
Researchers at Germany’s Ilmenau University of Technology are developing flying quadcopter robots that can be used to form a self-assembling ad-hoc wireless network in the event of disaster. Built with off-the-shelf parts (including VIA’s Pico-ITX hardware and a GPS unit) the robots are designed to provide both mobile phone and WiFi access — and they can […]
