drones

Mark Rober visits Zipline and looks at its autonomous delivery drones, including medical and blood deliveries in Rwanda. He demonstrates how the drones' propeller design and cable-lowered delivery pod make them quiet and precise.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.

A Rheinmetall promo clip of its truck-mounted Skynex air defence system engaging a swarm of eight small drones with a 35mm revolver gun.

Armor expert The Chieftain explains why tanks still have a place on the modern battlefield despite drones and guided weapons. He responds to the 'tank is dead' debate, noting that tanks have been declared dead repeatedly since 1919.

Lex Fridman interviews Navy pilot David Fravor, a primary witness of the 2004 Tic Tac UFO encounter, about the sighting, military aviation and aerospace engineering. The conversation runs close to four hours.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Mentour Pilot's 56-minute account of the MH370 disappearance and what is now known, including the WSPR radio tracking technique and other sensing methods. It was made ahead of renewed search efforts.

A short video on the US Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which accelerated to around Mach 10 in seconds under extreme g-forces and heat. It includes striking launch footage and a brief development history.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains why general aviation has failed to replace leaded avgas, blaming industry inertia, bureaucratic delay and an exemption that removes the incentive. This is part one of two.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains in part two of a series why general aviation has not replaced leaded avgas. He covers industry inertia, bureaucratic delays and the exemption that lets the industry keep using lead.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

A special lecture from MIT's Private Pilot Ground School in which Lt. Col. Randy Gordon, a fighter and test pilot, describes F-22 flight controls. Topics include thrust vectoring, the pilot command system and how software handles failures.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

Tesla's full AI Day 2022 presentation, covering the Tesla Bot hardware and software, Full Self-Driving planning and perception, the occupancy network, data labeling, simulation and Dojo training infrastructure.

Veritasium explains how jet engines run hotter than their components' melting points, using cooling air and single-crystal superalloy turbine blades. It covers how the blades are grown as aligned crystals.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Boeing, tracing how it went from a quality engineering company to one tied to crashes and 'quality escapes'. It covers the 737 MAX failures and employee concerns about safety.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

Lilium's CTO gives a short update on the electric jet's design, certification and development. It shows the canard and rear wing layout and the wheel design.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

A short Tesla clip showing the Optimus humanoid robot sorting objects autonomously and doing yoga-style stretches. Tesla says its neural network is trained end to end, from video in to controls out.

A Bloomberg documentary on how Boeing's failures around the 737 Max crashes followed a shift in company culture and cost-cutting. It covers the grounding, the stock drop and questions about the company's future.

Joe Barnard of BPS.space shows his model rocket Scout F landing vertically like a SpaceX booster after seven years of attempts. The video documents the successful landing and the build-up to it.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment covers the working conditions of US air traffic controllers and the understaffing, outdated equipment (including floppy disks) and funding structure of the FAA. It mixes comedy with policy criticism.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

A No Priors podcast conversation with Andrej Karpathy covering self-driving (Tesla versus Waymo), the Optimus robot, bottlenecks in AI development, and his education project Eureka Labs.

Boston Dynamics introduces Stretch, a prototype robot that moves boxes in warehouses and distribution centers. Its mobile base lets it unload trucks, build pallets and assemble orders.

Boston Dynamics shows its humanoid robot Atlas picking up and manipulating objects, and altering the obstacle course to reach its goal. The clip demonstrates locomotion, sensing and athletic manipulation.

A GoPro-recorded flight of an RC glider setting a 548 mph dynamic soaring speed record at Parker Mountain, California, using only wind gradients.

Short Airbus footage of its ATTOL project, in which a test aircraft performed a fully automatic, vision-based take-off at Toulouse-Blagnac. The crew ran eight take-offs over several hours.

Mark Rober and Joe Barnard drop an egg from a high-altitude balloon, using a camera-guided glider to steer it to a safe landing.

Boston Dynamics shows the electric Atlas autonomously moving engine covers between containers and a sequencing dolly. It uses an ML vision model and grasping policy with no teleoperation or prescribed motions.

A short Unitree promo for its G1 humanoid robot, priced from $16K, showing agile motion, dexterous hands and imitation and reinforcement learning.