Podcast: Drones to Explore Space and Save Lives on Earth

11 Jan, 2022

MIT aerospace engineers are testing a concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon’s natural charge. This illustration shows a concept image of rover.

In this episode, we talk about MIT’s new ion propelled hovering rover destined to change the way we explore our universe and an emergency drone coming from TUM hoping to reduce the fatalities caused by cardiac arrest episodes.

artificial intelligence

- aviation

- space

- spacecraft

- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

In this episode, we talk about MIT’s new ion propelled hovering rover destined to change the way we explore our universe and an emergency drone coming from TUM hoping to reduce the fatalities caused by cardiac arrest episodes. As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics.

EPISODE NOTES

(2:30) - Hovering Rover ☀️🚁

(17:10) - Life-saving Drone Deliveries 🚁🚑

About the podcast:

Every day, some of the most innovative universities, companies, and individual technology developers share their knowledge on Wevolver. To ensure we can also provide this knowledge for the growing group of podcast listeners, we started a collaboration with two young engineers, Daniel Scott Mitchell & Farbod Moghaddam who discuss the most interesting content in this podcast series.

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Hummingbird flight could provide insights for biomimicry in aerial vehicles

Hummingbirds have extreme aerial agility and flight forms, which is why many drones and other aerial vehicles are designed to mimic hummingbird movement. Using a novel modeling method, researchers gained new insights into how hummingbirds produce wing movement, which could lead to design improvements in flying robots.

Sarah Small

fromPenn State

10 Dec, 2022

aviation

- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

Hummingbirds occupy a unique place in nature: They fly like insects but have the musculoskeletal system of birds. According to Bo Cheng, the Kenneth K. and Olivia J. Kuo Early Career Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, hummingbirds have extreme aerial agility and flight forms, which is why many drones and other aerial vehicles are designed to mimic hummingbird movement. Using a novel modeling method, Cheng and his team of researchers gained new insights into how hummingbirds produce wing movement, which could lead to design improvements in flying robots.

Their results were published this week in the Proceedings of Royal Society B.

“We essentially reverse-engineered the inner working of the wing musculoskeletal system — how the muscles and skeleton work in hummingbirds to flap the wings,” said first author and Penn State mechanical engineering graduate student Suyash Agrawal. “The traditional methods have mostly focused on measuring activity of a bird or insect when they are in natural flight or in an artificial environment where flight-like conditions are simulated. But most insects and, among birds specifically, hummingbirds are very small. The data that we can get from those measurements are limited.”

The researchers used muscle anatomy literature, computational fluid dynamics simulation data and wing-skeletal movement information captured using micro-CT and X-ray methods to inform their model. They also used an optimization algorithm based on evolutionary strategies, known as the genetic algorithm, to calibrate the parameters of the model. According to the researchers, their approach is the first to integrate these disparate parts for biological fliers.

“We can simulate the whole reconstructed motion of the hummingbird wing and then simulate all the flows and forces generated by the flapping wing, including all the pressure acting on the wing,” Cheng said. “From that, we are able to b

Dolphin Tracking UAVs

University of Aberdeen has partnered with Duke University to develop a UAV system capable of studying bottlenose dolphins to determine how environmental changes impact the populations

Farbod Moghaddam

08 Mar, 2022

unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

This article was discussed in our Next Byte podcast.

The full article will continue below.

Dolphin Tracking

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen and Duke University have a very important mission: understanding how bottlenose dolphin populations are affected by pollution, natural toxins, change in the availability of prey, etc.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it sounds because most methods to study cetacean (marine mammals) populations are not efficient for the following reasons:

Catch and release is time consuming and results are not reliable for estimating behavior of large populations
Cetaceans spend a great deal of time underwater so they are mostly inaccessible
Conclusions made on key factors - such as pregnancy success rates - are made after the fact which can lead to inaccurate generalizations

Help From Above

Utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is the light bulb moment that began a research effort in 2017 to gauge the viability of this technology for studying cetacean populations.

UAVs with imaging and sensing technologies were deployed to monitor bottlenose dolphin populations in the Moray Firth Special Area of Conservation in Scotland with the goal of differentiating dolphins and determining their age, sex, and pregnancy status via analysis of gathered data.

Researchers looked for unique identifiers to differentiate individual dolphins from one another and measured the length of the dolphin body (from the nose to the tail) along with the width at every 10% interval of the length. The goal was to use this data and see if there was any correlation between length and width that could help accurately determine the sex, age, and pregnancy status.

Image 1. Matching and measuring bottlenose dolphins during 2017 field tests (Cheney, 2022)<

Podcast: Drones to Explore Space and Save Lives on Earth

In this episode, we talk about MIT’s new ion propelled hovering rover destined to change the way we explore our universe and an emergency drone coming from TUM hoping to reduce the fatalities caused by cardiac arrest episodes.

EPISODE NOTES

Dolphin Tracking

Help From Above

Advanced drone technology streamlining mine clearance

Special drone collects environmental DNA from trees

Saving Resources with Precision Agriculture

In this episode, we talk about MIT’s new ion propelled hovering rover destined to change the way we explore our universe and an emergency drone coming from TUM hoping to reduce the fatalities caused by cardiac arrest episodes.

EPISODE NOTES

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