The flying taxi company Kitty Hawk last night launched ‘Cora’, a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) personal airplane/helicopter drone hybrid that will carry a passenger. Kitty Hawk is funded by Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO-ed by Sebastian Thrun, the self-driving car pioneer who is the founding director of Google’s X lab. Expand
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Facebook’s (soon to be) solar-powered, wifi serving, laser mesh network drone, the Aquila, is retiring to the V&A – the world’s leading museum of art and design – in London.
The plane has completed two successful test flights, one each in 2016 and 2017. Facebook’s goal is to create a broad network of technology to deliver internet connectivity to the 1.6 billion on earth without access.
Researchers testing cutting-edge unmanned aerial vehicle technology went to the 24 hours a day sunlight of Greenland to power ‘perpetual’ solar drone flights.
The main goal of the project from the manufacturer’s perspective was to find a practical application of a solar-powered drone that could fly indefinitely, as there’d been few real-world uses. To partial success, the group tested the ‘First-ever solar-powered flight in the Arctic’ on June 20th.
Tesla has now over 14,000 employees, but back in 2005, the automaker was employing less than one hundred workers and Dan Adams was one of them. Adams joined Tesla as a Senior Mechanical Engineer in 2005 and had a 10-year career at the company, making him one of the most senior engineers at the 12 year old “startup”.
We now learn that Adams recently left Tesla to join Skydio, a drone startup in stealth mode, which announced the closing of a $25 million financing round this week. Expand
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Rinspeed announced that it will debut a plug-in hybrid sport car at CES next month. The company says the car, called “Ʃtos”, is based on the BMW i8 and comes with drone. Expand
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A new video posted to Youtube today gives us the closest and most recent look at Tesla’s Gigafactory. We get a good view of the exterior work Tesla has been doing on the battery factory, but we also recently wrote about Tesla acquiring several permits for multi-million dollar interior construction work, which gives us a good idea of the progress on this $5 billion project.
See the video below the break: Expand
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