Skip to main content

Lockheed Martin’s ‘spider’ robot searches airships for tiny holes, then patches them

The airship industry is not a huge one, but it could be far more lucrative for those involved if there was a cheap and easy way to patch holes in them. Fortunately Lockheed Martin is right on top of that, as it’s developed a new “spider” robot to clamber all over the airship’s envelope and discover tiny holes in it, before automatically patching them up itself.

Repairs are a major problem for airship running. With even the tiniest of holes, much of the craft’s efficiency is lost, so keeping the envelope (the big air sack on top of the ship) air-tight is incredibly important.  Before this bot, finding and fixing those holes involved manually searching over the surface to find them, before repairing them by hand.

That seems awfully 20th century, so the researchers at Lockheed Martin have developed the SPIDER: a “self propelled instrument for airship damage evaluation and repair”. It even fitted a series of wires over the top of it so it actually looks like a spider.

In actuality though, it works in a manner similar to those magnets that you use to clean your fish tank. The Spider is attached in two halves, one to the exterior of the envelope and another to the interior. Together they move across the entire surface of the air sack and, using a light on one half and a sensor on the other, detect holes in the material. Better yet, they then fix up the hole to make sure that it will no longer be a problem.

Why is Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s most advanced aerospace and military contractors, developing airships? Because it believes that a new “hybrid” airship design, could be perfect for specific tasks in the future, like low-cost cargo transport, disaster relief and even military uses.

They combine airship technology for high-efficiency flight, with fixed wing aerodynamics and air cushioned, hover-craft like feet, which let it navigate safely on the ground too.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more