Click Bond Eliminate the Hidden Costs of Drilled Holes Crack formation Extra weight Galvanic corrosion FOD (foreign object debris) Eliminate installation holes, and you eliminate the problems and costs that go with them. Adhesive-Bonded Assembly Technology WWW.CLICKBOND.COM #NoMoreHoles Allen Control Systems (ACS) has developed an AI system to detect and shoot down UAVs, writes Nick Flaherty. The Bullfrog is an autonomous, AI-enabled, counter-UAV system that integrates with a standard M240 machine gun. It has a detection error of under 2%. The system is trained on images of UAVs and can provide an indication of whether a shot will be on target before it is fired, or whether it is not feasible to track the UAV in the air. Demonstrations in the US show the system can execute the full detect, track, identify and defeat chain autonomously. This is increasingly important as UAVs are becoming immune to jamming, shielded from directed energy defences and deployed in swarms. The combination of advanced software and machine vision paired with commodity hardware brings the cost of disabling a UAV down to around $10, compared with the economically unsustainable solution of using million-dollar missiles to defend against $1000 drones. “Our counter-UAV robotic gun system achieves what has been a near-impossibility until now – the ability to autonomously shoot UAVs out of the sky with a solution that doesn’t cost millions of dollars to procure or arm. There is now a solution to address the urgent threat of low-flying, cheap drones that have changed the battlefield,” said Steven Simoni, co-founder and CEO of ACS. North Carolina State University, US, has developed a technique for creating sensors that function in air and water, writes Nick Flaherty. Researchers used a sensitive strain sensor, sandwiched between two thin films of a highly elastic, waterproof polymer. The polymer encapsulates the sensor to keep water out, but it does not restrict the movement of the material. This gives the sensor the desired sensitivity and stretchability, and it can be connected to a small chip that transmits data wirelessly. The conductive layer, made of silver nanowires embedded below the surface of polydimethylsiloxane, was sandwiched by two layers of thermoplastic polyurethane. Periodic sharp cuts were introduced to change the direction of flow from across the sensor to along the conductive path defined by the opening cracks. The crack advancing and opening is controlled by a combination of weak/strong interfaces within the sandwich structure. The strain sensor showed a high gauge factor up to 289, a linear sensing response, a fast response time of 53 ms, and stability after 16,000 loading cycles and 20 days in an aqueous saline solution. Counter-UAV Sensors Shooting UAVs Sensing it all
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