Drone Beat: Delivering Drinks for $20K, Hunting Hurricanes and More

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A drone flies at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 8, 2014, in Las Vegas.

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-06-02 01:00:27 UTC

The U.S. government uses them to bomb alleged terrorists in far-away places. Tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook are all toying with the idea of using them, and now they're a photographer's secret weapon. Drones are a big part of our lives, whether we see them or not. Drone Beat collects the best and most important stories every week.

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Drones deliver drinks in Vegas

The Marquee Dayclub in Las Vegas, Nevada, has started delivering bottle service with drones — yep, you can now get your drinks served by a flying robot in Sin City. But it will cost you: the drone-delivered bottle service is available only if you've spent a minimum of $20,000.

In the past, concert organizers tried a similar scheme in South Africa, only with beer. And in the U.S., Lakemaid Beer announced it wanted to deliver 12-packs with drones, but the FAA quickly reached out to the company to tell it that the plan was illegal, and forced it to ground the drones. All before officially launching the drone-delivery initiative.

Whether the FAA has any plans to rain on Marquee Dayclub's parade, however, is yet to be seen.

Scientist hunts ocean hurricanes with drones

Joe Cione, a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida, is planning to use drones to study hurricanes in the middle of the ocean during this year's peak hurricane season.

Cione wants to use drones to better understand how to forecasts correctly a hurricane's intensity, studying the stroms as they form in the ocean.

"We really need to get a better idea of what's going on down there before we even look to improve our intensity forecast," he told the Associated Press.

DARPA launches "hack-proof" drone

DARPA, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, says it has developed a drone that can't be hacked thanks to software called High Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

"The software is designed to make sure a hacker cannot take over control of a UAS [Unmanned Aerial System]. The software is mathematically proven to be invulnerable to large classes of attack," Kathleen Fisher, HACMS program manager for DARPA, told Defense Tech.

If true, this would be a major development for drone safety. In the summer of 2012, researchers at the University of Texas showed that it was possible to hijack a civilian drone with a custom-built device that cost $1,000 dollars. The researchers tricked the Drone's GPS receiver and fed it with bogus coordinates. The trick caught both the FAA as well as drone makers off-guard.

This new system could potentially improve the situation as it becomes standard for civilian drones going forward, but if there's anything hackers and security researchers have taught us, it's that everything can eventually be hacked.

Israel trades helicopter for more drones

Israel is abandoning a U.S.-made helicopter in favor of more drones, a trend among militaries around the world.

Compared to helicopters, drones have several advantages: they're cheaper, lighter, and are less dangerous to use for the pilots. That's why Israel is phasing out its fleet of Cobra helicopters and investing more into locally made UAVs.

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Topics: dronebeat, Drones, U.S., US & World, World