It was only yesterday that T3 was reporting on a new and improved drone design from Chinese manufacturer Yuneec that had incorporated a supersmart 3D mapping system, making it the smartest one to date. Well, now someone has gone one better - drones with actual radar...
An Isreali firm by the name of Arbe Robotics has bagged the top prize on TechCrunch's inaugural Meet Up and Pitch Off event with their design to add a basic form of radar to its on-board systems. Apart from enabling the drone to detect obstacles with a significantly higher degree of accuracy, the tech also makes less of an impact on your drone's battery, effectively increasing flight times.
Arbe Robotics has even gone as far as claiming the system only uses around 5% of your drone's battery, certainly a bold claim if we've ever heard one. So how does the tech work? The system is in fact a mountable band that scans every object around the flight path of a drone - anything larger than a metre across is automatically flagged and the drone is guided away to avoid a collision.
Interestingly, this isn't the fist time we've seen radar used with drones - a number of experimental tech organisations including DARPA have tested the idea of using radar for military-grade unmanned vehicles - but this is certainly the first time we've seen such a concept considered for the commercial market. It's certainly no gauruntee such a device will hit shelves, but it does prove the potential to make drones even more effiicient in the air is possible.
Via: Arbe Robotics
Why not check out: The beginner's guide to buying a drone: everything you need to know
