This week on WDD’s HotSpot, brought to you by SanDisk:
- Google’s Project Wing focuses on a drone delivery system that would bypass earthbound traffic so packages can be delivered to people more quickly. Google tested the self-flying vehicles in Queensland, Australia, where they successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers. Aside from perfecting their aerial technology, Google will still need to get government approval to fly commercial drones in many countries, including the U.S. Read: Google Building Fleet of Package-Delivering Drones
- Netherlands-based, Clear Flight Solutions create birds, and they believe that birds are beautiful creatures. However, if you work in aviation, waste management or agriculture, birds can be a very tough problem to deal with and can also be a serious threat to safety in aviation. To help decrease the dangers that birds can create, Clear Flight Solutions have designed Robirds, which are remotely controlled robotic birds of prey, with the realistic appearance and weight of their living counterparts. Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds. Based on nature itself, the Robird models offer new and exciting possibilities in bird control. By triggering the instinct of birds, through the combination of silhouette and wing movement, chasing birds becomes fully controllable.
Communication satellites are the central component of the space industry, and are responsible for $100 billion dollars yearly revenues. But – satellite operators are losing millions of dollars due to De Orbiting requirements, which compel the use of propellant resources. Israel-based Effective space solutions has developed high-end micro and small satellites allows that the communication satellite to exhaust its propellant resources until the last drops, and then push it to its graveyard orbit. So it’s similar to the concept of a tug boat. The benefits of this solution include an extended satellite life up to actual end of fuel; an extended operational life for additional period using Station Keeping and De-orbiting services; and rescue missions for misplaced satellites. - Swiss scientists are adapting technology from automatic watches to power pacemakers with nothing more than the motion of the beating heart. According to Adrian Zurbuchen, from the University of Bern, “An automatic watch ‘harvests’ its energy from the wrist by transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy. Thus, attaching a pacemaker to the epicardium would allow the same system to be directly exposed to the accelerations of myocardial muscle. The motion of the heart winds a spring which accumulates mechanical energy.”
- Technology developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory brings the potential for truly secure data encryption to the marketplace, allowing ordinary citizens and companies to use cryptographic systems that have only been the subject of experiments in the world’s most advanced physics and computing laboratories for real-world applications. If implemented on a wide scale, quantum key distribution technology could ensure truly secure commerce, banking, communications and data transfer. The technology at the heart of the agreement is a compact random-number-generation technology that creates cryptographic keys based on the truly random polarization state of light particles known as photons. Because the randomness of photon polarization is based on quantum mechanics, an adversary cannot predict the outcome of this random number generator. This represents a vast improvement over current “random-number” generators that are based on mathematical formulas that can be broken by a computer with sufficient speed and power.
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Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)