This statement was the title of a TIME article, which was included in the magazine’s special report on “The Drone Age”. We asked Christian Bettstetter to tell us what today’s drones can do and what drone (swarms) are not yet capable of. One thing is certain: Our airspace is going to be much busier in the future.
Wherever several clocks tick simultaneously, it is tricky to get them all to display precisely the same time. This can be a challenge for drone swarms that are airborne together. To tackle this problem, young scientist Agata Gniewek is developing new technologies.
What has travelled by road to reach us until now could be delivered by drones in the future. This has many advantages: Poor rural transport infrastructure or persistent congestion in large cities can be bypassed. In 2013, Amazon was among the first to announce the intention to deliver goods using small autonomous drones. But when might this technology truly become part of our daily lives? Drone researcher Pasquale Grippa provides some answers.
Austria establishes a test field for 5G mobile systems. It can be used by companies and research institutes to advance their prototypes and products. The concept was presented in a press conference at the ministry for transport, innovation, and technology this week.
A multidisciplinary team at the University of Klagenfurt is due to deliver initial insights on the efficient operation of a drone-based delivery network. Doctoral student Pasquale Grippa will present the results at the Robotics: Science and Systems event taking place at MIT this week.
An interdisciplinary workshop on self-organization and swarm intelligence in cyber physical systems was held at Lakeside Labs this week. Experts presented their work and discussed open issues in this exciting field.
An analysis of robotics conferences of the past four years shows that Austria has relatively low visibility. It also shows that expertise is distributed among a handful of universities.
Samira Hayat and I attended re:publica 2017 in Berlin. It was an exciting event not least because Samira gave a very personal talk about drones and their application in disaster response.
I visited the Center for Aerial Robotics Research and Education in Toronto. It has an exciting research portfolio in small drone systems. My invited talk discussed wireless communications for drones and novel results for job selection.
Did you observe that lately more and more tech products and business processes have features of self-organization? Almost every major car maker has been testing self-driving vehicles and is now introducing them to the market. The industry is crazy about “industry 4.0”—which promises self-organizing production with humans, machines, and products collaborating to make decentralized decisions. These are just two examples for the ongoing trend toward more self-* properties in tech systems, e.g., self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-healing. Such paradigm shift from centralized, managed systems to decentralized, autonomous systems has been the core of Lakeside Labs — the small nonprofit research company that I have been co-leading as scientific director — since its foundation in 2008. Lakeside Labs is a hub for science and innovation in self-organizing networked systems. A space for inspiration, creativity, and multidisciplinarity. At the time of our foundation several people believed that research on self-organization is a pure academic “exercise” by professors without any practical application of benefit to industry. This attitude has changed in the course of 2015/16 when many companies have increasingly become interested in …