GoKawiil
Tech News
A developer launched Dovepass, a web tool that lets users enter a drone's specifications and a planned flight path in San Francisco to check whether the route complies with FAA Part 107 rules and local restrictions. Users input details like airframe type, takeoff weight, battery capacity and speed limits, and the tool estimates flight time and legality for that specific route.
Ukraine's 92nd Separate Assault Brigade used a modified Heavy Shot bomber drone to evacuate a wounded infantryman, callsign 'Kostya', from an exposed position on the Kharkiv front. The soldier, who was stranded amid mined terrain and enemy kamikaze drones, strapped himself to the aircraft's underbelly and was flown 18km to safety while escorted by a protective fleet of smaller drones and net-armed quadcopters.
Ukraine's 92nd Separate Assault Brigade released video it says shows the first evacuation of a wounded infantryman by aerial drone, after landmines and enemy drone activity ruled out ground vehicles. The soldier was strapped into a heavy-lift hexacopter, originally built as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer, and flown to safety at low altitude. The brigade says the soldier is now undergoing treatment and rehabilitation.
Software engineer and hobbyist Joshua Bird built and flight-tested a drone with only one motor, documenting the project in a YouTube video. The design uses a hinged propeller, rapid motor speed changes reacting in under 0.2 milliseconds, and custom flight-controller firmware to replace the swashplate and secondary propeller found in typical rotary-wing aircraft.
DJI has released the Dock 4, its first automated battery-swapping drone dock, which can replace a drone's battery in about 25 seconds and return it to flight in under 45 seconds. The system charges two 925g battery packs simultaneously and works exclusively with DJI's Matrice 5TD drone and O4 Ground Station, though it is not FCC-authorized for U.S. sale.
Ukrainian military and government officials said this week that sudden restrictions on Starshield, SpaceX's military-grade satellite internet service, interrupted drone operations and communications. Commanders reported lost drones and disrupted missions tied to the outage, raising concerns about who controls access to the system.
Ukraine has carried out drone attacks over the past week targeting several of Yandex's major data centers, disrupting Russian consumer apps including shopping and taxi services in major cities. A Cloudflare report found that while the attacks caused real service outages, Russian bot-driven disinformation traffic was not eliminated but instead shifted to other hosting providers.
A suspected drone strike on October 13 sank the Guinea-Bissau-flagged cargo ship Dignity and forced evacuation of the Ukrainian-operated freighter Chelsea 3 near Bulgaria's coast, leaving 11 Dignity crew members missing. This marks the fifth vessel attacked within NATO members' exclusive economic zones in the Black Sea in little over a week, prompting calls for NATO to move counter-drone defenses into the area.
Ukrainian officials say SpaceX has imposed new restrictions on Starlink satellite internet access that have interfered with military drone missions. The officials say they were given no advance notice before the changes took effect, and that several operations were disrupted as a result.
Ukrainian drones struck three data centers operated by Russian tech giant Yandex over four days, knocking facilities offline and disrupting services relied on by banks, retailers and consumers. One targeted site, in Sasovo, held tens of thousands of servers along with two supercomputers used to train Yandex's AI models.
Ukrainian officials say Starlink has quietly imposed a new restriction preventing connections to devices moving faster than 100mph, disrupting several military missions including drone strikes and defense against Russian drones. The reported change, detailed by defense adviser Serhii Beskrestnov and covered by Reuters and the Financial Times, follows recent public friction between Elon Musk and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries.
Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed a lightweight tactile sensor modeled on animal whiskers, allowing small drones to detect obstacles by touch rather than vision. The design targets ultra-compact rescue drones, which often operate in smoke-filled or dark environments where cameras and lidar fail. Professor Salwa Hamaza said the sensor must be lightweight, low-latency and low-power to work on such drones.