Friday Fun Flights #9! Our Weekly Summary of the Weird, the Whacky, and the Wonderful Things with The Drones Up There!

And all of a sudden, it’s Friday!

And you know that that means – it’s time for our weekly roundup of all-things-in-the-land of drones – from the aspirational to the inspirational, the crazy and the funny. Or whatever, depending on what we’ve found.

Let’s start out with the aspirational and this remarkable video from the startup MatterNet, on the potential role of an automated drone system for medical testing.

The company has big plans: here’s a quote from an article in Forbes, A Delivery Drone’s Home: Here’s Matternet’s Idea For The Kind Of Docking Station That Could End Up On Your Block

If drone delivery companies get to shape city streets to their liking, in the future, the curbside array of lamp posts, garbage cans and free magazine distribution boxes will be joined by docking stations for their aircraft. Matternet on Tuesday unveiled a 10-foot tall kiosk three years in the making that’s designed to safely integrate its medical delivery drones into urban environments — and to drastically reduce the number of employees the startup needs and achieve a breakthrough on costs.

There is no doubt that we will see many rapid advances with interesting use of drone technology such as this – and perhaps the need for accelerated COVID-19 testing might drive this further faster.

Reality? Definitely! Just this week, the well known drone delivery company Zipline began doing this in Ghana! Here’s an article via DroneLife.

The practice is evolving quickly – the World Economic Forum also reported on a program to do this in Chile, with delivery of medicine to the elderly:

One of the biggest challenges with drone technology, has been the issue of longevity: batteries are heavy, and reduce the flight time! As a result, there has been a significant amount of research through the years on how to improve battery technology to deal with that problem.

That’s why our attention to this article which appeared this week with an absolutely fascinating number – almost 6 hours in the air!

it’s not just battery technology that might help to deal with the issue of in-the-air time – so too might advances in the design of drone technology. That’s why this article over at the BBC on drones based on insect-flight concepts also drew our notice:

That article simply made us BUZZZ with excitement. (LOL!)

But it is a serious and real opportunity – long known as bio-mimicry in the world of science. Here’s another example of a drone that looks and flies like a pigeon, based on some research at M.I.T.

Onwards – that’s a lot of serious stuff for the week!

With that in mind, yes — there are now too many news articles to report on the plans by police and authorities to enforce COVID-19 lockdowns, then the inevitable articles about the howls and outrage around the privacy issues, and the eventual climbdown.

We promise not to report on that anymore – except – this image is simply spectacular in this particular report from the New York Post:

That’s all for now – let’s just close with another great drone fail compilation – this time, reaching all the way back to 2016!