All articles
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Tech & Builds
What 'Autonomous Drone' Actually Means: A Field Guide to the Spectrum
The word 'autonomous' covers everything from a DJI's return-to-home button to a 103-drone swarm with no designated leader. Five competing frameworks — NIST ALFUS, LORA, SAE-adapted, DoD's loop taxonomy, and Exyn's aerial scale — each illuminate something different about a genuinely hard engineering problem.
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Tech & Builds
The 30-Minute Wall: Why Drone Endurance Is a Battery Physics Problem
Most commercial multirotors top out at 20–40 minutes per charge — a ceiling set by electrochemistry, not engineering ambition. Here's what actually limits drone endurance and what hydrogen, semi-solid cells, and smarter charging infrastructure are doing about it.
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Tech & Builds
What a Drone Can Do Depends Entirely on What You Hang Under It
The airframe is a delivery vehicle. The payload is the mission. A field guide to EO/IR cameras, LiDAR, SAR, hyperspectral imagers, gas sensors, SIGINT receivers, and the physics of endurance tradeoffs that govern every payload decision.
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Tech & Builds
eVTOL, Drone, UAV, UAS, RPAS: A Precise Guide to Six Terms That Aren't Interchangeable
Six overlapping terms describe aircraft that fly without an on-board human — or sometimes with one. Which label applies determines which regulations govern you, how DoD classifies a platform, and whether a Joby air taxi is legally a drone at all.
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Tech & Builds
Glass Wire: How Fiber-Optic Links Are Defeating Electronic Warfare on Drone Battlefields
Spooled glass fiber thinner than a human hair has rendered million-dollar jamming systems irrelevant on the drone battlefield. Here is how fiber-optic FPV drones work, why their physics make them immune to radio-frequency attack, and what their real limits are.
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Tech & Builds
How Drones Navigate When GPS Is Gone: The Full Toolkit
Russian jamming dropped FPV hit rates from 40–60% to under 30%. Ukraine's response accelerated every GPS-denied navigation technique in the book — from inertial sensors and visual odometry to quantum magnetometers and $50 autonomy modules. Here's how each layer works.
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Tech & Builds
Beyond the 30-Minute Wall: How Hydrogen and Hybrid Power Are Reshaping Drone Endurance
Lithium batteries cap most drones at 30–45 minutes. Hydrogen fuel cells and gas-electric hybrids are dismantling that ceiling — with certified hardware entering commercial and military catalogs, though storage infrastructure remains the stubborn bottleneck.
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Commercial & Delivery
Tethered Drones: The Persistent Aerial Mast Redefining Overwatch
Unlike battery-powered UAS that fly to a destination, tethered drones hover over one — drawing continuous ground power through a Kevlar-reinforced tether to deliver days of unbroken ISR, secure fiber-optic data, and jamming-immune comms relay that free-flying platforms simply cannot match.
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Commercial & Delivery
How Drones Are Displacing Helicopters, Scaffold Crews, and Rope Teams in Infrastructure Inspection
UAVs now survey transmission lines, wind turbine blades, bridges, pipelines, and solar farms at a fraction of the cost of legacy methods. Here's the sensor stack, the economics, and the regulatory framework making autonomous inspection possible.
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Counter-UAS
Listening for Drones: How Acoustic Detection Works — and Where It Falls Short
Acoustic microphone arrays can detect drones by their blade-passing frequencies from hundreds of meters away using beamforming and AI classification. Ukraine's 24,000-sensor network shows what the technology can do at scale — and reveals the hard limits of listening alone.
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Tech & Builds
Anduril’s Lattice: The Software Stack Rewriting How the Pentagon Fights
Lattice is Anduril’s AI command-and-control platform fusing sensors, drones, and effectors into a unified operational picture. With over $25 billion in known contract ceilings and a $20B Army enterprise agreement, it’s becoming the connective tissue of U.S. autonomous warfare.
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Counter-UAS
Net Capture Systems: The Case for Catching Drones Instead of Destroying Them
Kinetic destruction and RF jamming both carry unacceptable collateral risks in civilian airspace. A new generation of net-capture systems — compressed-air launchers and autonomous interceptor hexacopters — offers a low-debris, forensics-preserving alternative built for populated environments.
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