David Lentink Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, USA E-mail: [email protected] The invention and deployment of small flying robots (drones) is beginning to influence our everyday lives. Their applications are frightening to some and exciting to others. From military surveillance, to city courier services, to near-future flying camera phones, this technology is bound ...

Aerial drones are becoming an integral part of application domains such as package delivery, construction, monitoring and search/rescue operations. It is critical to ensure the cyber-security of networked aerial drone systems in these applications. Standard cryptographic services can be deployed to provide basic security services; however, they have been shown to be highly energy costly for sma...

The word “drone” is commonly associated with the military. However, the same term is also used for multicopters that can be and are used by civilians for a multitude of purposes. Nowadays, drones are tested for commercial delivery of goods or building inspections. A survey of 200 people, laypersons and active users, on their acceptance and perceived barriers for drone use was conducted. In the ...

Maritime tasks, such as surveillance and patrolling, aquaculture inspection, and wildlife monitoring, typically require large operational crews and expensive equipment. Only recently have unmanned vehicles started to be used for such missions. These vehicles, however, tend to be expensive and have limited coverage, which prevents large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose a scalable robo...

Modern wireless traffic demand pushes Internet Service Providers to develop effective strategies to improve user experience. Since deploying dense Base Stations (BSs) is not cost efficient, an alternative is to deploy autonomous drones to supplement existing BSs. A street graph is adopted to represent the area of interest. The outdoor User Equipments (UEs) to be served locate near streets and t...

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly called drones, are being increasingly used in ecological research, in particular to approach sensitive wildlife in inaccessible areas. Impact studies leading to recommendations for best practices are urgently needed. We tested the impact of drone colour, speed and flight angle on the behavioural responses of mallards Anas platyrhynchos in a semi-captive situat...

Diploid males have long been considered a curiosity contradictory to the haplo-diploid mode of sex determination in the Hymenoptera. In Apis mellifera, 'false' diploid male larvae are eliminated by worker cannibalism immediately after hatching. A 'cannibalism substance' produced by diploid drone larvae to induce worker-assisted suicide has been hypothesized, but it has never been detected. Dipl...

The availability of relatively capable and inexpensive hardware components has made it feasible to consider large-scale systems of autonomous aquatic drones for maritime tasks. In this paper, we present the HANCAD and CORATAM projects, which focus on the fundamental challenges related to communication and control in swarms of aquatic drones. We argue for (i) the adoption of a heterogeneous appr...

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosu...

Since the beginning of aviation, unmanned aerial systems have been a challenge for scientists and engineers. The first automatic airplane developed by the Wright brothers in 1916 and the drone used by the British Royal Navy for gunnery practice in 1933 serve as examples. The possibility of controlling an aircraft without a pilot has been a challenge, both from the civil and military point of vi...