Drone-assisted archeology (euronews)

... Archaeologist Olivier Feihl is making a 3D map of the dig using a drone equipped with a camera.

“It takes a photo every 1.5 or 2 metres to make sure the whole surface is covered, so that the photos will overlap, enabling us to measure the archaeological dig in 3D,” he tells euronews.

It’s a true revolution for archaeologists and helps them save a lot of time.

“Before we had this kind of technology, everything was done by hand,” says Sebastien Freudiger, who is also working on the project. “Each wall was drawn by hand, each layer was drawn by hand. Now, this new technology enables us to do all of that on a computer.”

It takes the drone just ten minutes to take all the snaps needed. They are then processed ...

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A robot that flies like a bird

Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.