Tag Archive for: UAVs

Building the Android of UAVs with Open Source


Nowadays, the interaction between a user and a drone, and a drone and its hardware is mediated by software. For that reason, developing secure, dependable, well-implemented, and feature-rich software is critical to fly safely and collect the necessary data during a commercial operation. While, on the surface, proprietary software seems to tick all those boxes, the drone industry is currently shifting its focus to open-source technologies.

In 2009, we saw the birth of the Pixhawk* (which became PX4 in 2011) and the ArduPilot (APM) flight-control projects to enable everybody to freely create and use trusted, autonomous, unmanned vehicle systems. As open-source projects, it meant, and still means, the platform’s software source code was freely available on the Internet, providing everyone with easy access to code, software, designs, and features that could be shared, modified, redistributed, and implemented into developers’ applications and hardware, under certain licensing terms – such as GPLv3 for APM and BSD-3 for PX4. While these are two of the leading open-source projects, there are others such as the industry-standard communication protocol MAVLink, QGroundControl, and more.

In 2014, the Dronecode Foundation was founded to make sure all drone software created in an open-source environment stays that way and remains non-discriminative while building a sustainable ecosystem for critical drone components and fostering a collaborative community of top developers, end-users, and vendors. Today, as a non-profit organization that belongs to the Linux Foundation, Dronecode has set the standards over the last decade in the drone industry with PX4, MAVLink, and Pixhawk.

Still in 2014, a DroneAnalyst report from Colin Snow mentioned that thousands of hobbyists and researchers were taking advantage of open-source platforms, whereas most commercial drone operators were using proprietary drone software. For the latter, this was mostly due to the misconception that open-source software couldn’t get certified to be used commercially, and that it was harder to work with than proprietary software since it “lacked” in various fields, such as quality and tech support. This…

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Lima ’19 to focus on UAVs, Cyber warfare – Mohamad – New Straits Times

Lima ’19 to focus on UAVs, Cyber warfare – Mohamad  New Straits Times

ALOR STAR: The Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition 2019 (LIMA ’19) in March is expected to focus on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) …

“cyber warfare news” – read more

Lima ’19 to focus on UAVs, cyber warfare – Malaysiakini

Lima ’19 to focus on UAVs, cyber warfare  Malaysiakini

The Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition 2019 (Lima ’19) in March is expected to focus on unmanned aerial vehicles and cyberwar …

“cyber warfare news” – read more

German chancellor’s drone “attack” shows the threat of weaponized UAVs

Small unmanned air vehicles like this quadrocopter could be turned into swarms of exploding flying robots, and Dutch researchers say there’s not much that can be done right now to stop them.
Dkroetsch

At a campaign rally in Dresden on September 15, a small quadrocopter flew within feet of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere, hovering briefly in front of them before crashing into the stage practically at Merkel’s feet. Merkel appeared to be amused by the “drone attack,” but de Maiziere and others on the stage seemed a bit more unsettled by the robo-kamikaze.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel smiles as a Parrot AR drone comes in for a crash landing during a Christian Democratic Party campaign event September 15.
EPA

The quadrocopter, a Parrot AR drone, was operated by a member of the German Pirate Party as a protest against government surveillance and the ongoing scandal over the Euro Hawk drone program—which failed because it could not get certified to fly in European airspace. In a statement, the deputy head of the Pirate Party, Markus Barenhoff, said, “The goal of the effort was to make Chancellor Merkel and Defense Minister de Maiziere realize what it’s like to be subjugated to drone observation.” The drone was harmless, aside from potential political collateral damage to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, and the pilot of the drone was released after being briefly held by police.

While Merkel smirked off the drone in Dresden, even a small explosive charge or grenade aboard a similar drone would have been catastrophic—and defending against such attacks is difficult at best. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) researchers from TNO Defense Research, an organization in The Netherlands, recently showed the real risk of that sort of attack, demonstrating that terrorists and insurgents could effectively use current commercial and do-it-yourself drones as weapons in a number of scenarios, including one much like the Dresden event.

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