Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

A flow disturbance estimation and rejection strategy for multirotors with round-trip trajectories

This paper presents a round-trip strategy of multirotors subject to unknown flow disturbances. During the outbound flight, the vehicle immediately utilizes the wind disturbance estimations in feedback control, as an attempt to reduce the tracking error. During this phase, the disturbance estimations with respect to the position are also recorded for future use. For the return flight, the disturbances previously collected are then routed through a feedforward controller. The major assumption here is that the disturbances may vary over space, but not over time during the same mission. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this feedforward strategy via experiments with two different types of wind flows; a simple jet flow and a more complex flow. To use as a baseline case, a cascaded PD controller with an additional feedback loop for disturbance estimation was employed for outbound flights. To display our contributions regarding the additional feedforward approach, an additional feedforward correction term obtained via prerecorded data was integrated for the return flight. Compared to the baseline controller, the feedforward controller was observed to produce 43% less RMSE position error at a vehicle ground velocity of 1 m/s with 6 m/s of environmental wind velocity. This feedforward approach also produced 14% less RMSE position error for the complex flows as well

Drones for parcel and passenger transportation: A literature review

Delivery drones and ‘air taxis’ are currently among the most intensely discussed emerging technologies, likely to expand mobility into the ‘third dimension’ of low-level airspace. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 111 interdisciplinary publications (2013 - 03/2019). The review systematizes the current socio-technical debate on civil drones for transportation purposes allowing for a (critical) interim assessment. To guide the review process four dimensions of analysis were defined. A total of 2581 relevant quotations were subdivided into anticipated barriers (426), potential problems (1037), proposed solutions (737) and expected benefits (381). We found that the debate is characterized by predominantly technical and regulatory problems and barriers which are considered to prevent or impede the use of drones for parcel and passengers transportation. At the same time, definite economic expectations are juxtaposed with quite complex and differentiated concerns regarding societal and environmental impacts. Scrutinizing the most prevalent transportation-related promises of traffic reduction, travel time saving and environmental relief we found that there is a strong need to provide scientific evidence for the promises linked to the use of drones for transportation. We conclude that the debate on drones for transportation needs further qualification, emphasizing societal benefits and public involvement more strongly.TU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel - 201

The Cowl - v.80 - n.8 - Nov 5, 2015

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 80 - No. 8 - November 5, 2015. 24 pages

The Parthenon, December 4, 2013

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

DroneHack Journalism: Educating & Inspiring Journalists in the Capacities & Possibilities of Unmanned Aerial Systems

The use of drones for journalism or newsgathering has been growing steadily over the past few years. The recent rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (also known as drones) as consumer products, along with the increasing civilian applications being developed has sparked interest in people outside the aviation industry – including journalists. Drone journalism as a practice and discipline is still relatively new. However, they offer great journalistic potential. Current practice is based on visual media. Primarily this comprises photographs and video, but virtual reality and spherical (360) video is starting to be explored. However, other non-visual drone payloads offer great potential for sensor and data journalism. DroneHack has been developed as an event to bring those with technological skills and know-how together with those with real-world needs, in order to generate ideas and rapidly prototype the next generation of civilian drone applications. It also provides an opportunity to raise awareness of regulations around drones and their use. This paper describes the DroneHack Journalism event which took place in January 2017 in conjunction with journalism.co.uk and Trinity Mirror in Manchester, United Kingdom. The paper also explains what a DroneHack is, how it was developed as a format and the origins and influences as well as an overview of previous DroneHacks and concludes with some possible directions which future DroneHacks could take