Google Confirms Titan Drones Will Fly This Year

We all wait patiently every year for fresh and exciting news to come from Mobile World Congress and this year is no exception. There have been lots of different things happening in the realms of mobile pay, hardware and surrounding technology at this year’s MWC. One thing that caught my attention was from the keynote address by Google’s Sundar Pichai. He said that drone company Google acquired in April of 2014, Titan, would be conducting their first test flight later on this year.

Google acquired the company after it was vastly reported Facebook had also made an offer for the aerospace firm. Both firms were interested in the drone’s ability to stay airborne for extended periods of time with very little energy and also the ability to carry a payload that is capable of providing internet connectivity to people back on the ground.

Sundar Pichai said that Titan is now, approximately where Google high altitude balloon Project Loon was a couple of years back. The team overseeing Titan are building a new type of ultra lightweight solar-powered aircraft, which would be capable of hovering in one region of the stratosphere. These manoeuvres may provide a way to send internet connectivity down to a specifically targeted area on the ground. It may even supplement existing services with extra bandwidth, or it may provide access in an area, which suddenly falls offline, as in the case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or tsunami.  

Pichai also said it is Google’s hope to start connecting some of the four billion people on earth who currently do not have any reliable internet access.

Both Project Loon and the Titan project could work in tandem and complement each other. The technology used could provide what Pichai described as a mesh of flying cell towers circling the planet. Whilst the balloons will not be easy to manoeuvre and cover a large area, the Titan aircraft would be capable of moving to a specific area in order to provide services that are based upon demand. In both of these instances, Google’s aim is to partner with carriers to provide overlapping service to people on the ground.

[image via gogirlmagz]

SOURCE: The Verge