To conserve and manage fresh water, particularly in arid regions such as Saudi Arabia, it is important to understand how the water is used each day. KAUST scientists are using data gathered by shoebox-sized satellites, or CubeSats, to learn more about daily agricultural water use. An estimated 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s freshwater supplies are…
Aerial Imaging of Plant Heights Could Help Farmers Manage Field Crops More Effectively
Monitoring the growth patterns of crop plants provides farmers with a strong indication of potential yield, allowing them to tweak crop management to boost production. Now, KAUST researchers have demonstrated that using fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collect data on vegetation height throughout the crop growth cycle provides a low-cost, simple way of monitoring…
Tiny, Fast, Accurate Technology on the Radar
A tiny, portable radar device could allow visually impaired people, or unmanned moving devices to detect objects in real time. Radar technology has been used for decades in aviation, defense and speed-camera technology. Now, a team at KAUST, in collaboration with scientists at the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, have created a compact, low-cost…
Robots Learn By Checking In On Team Members
The software and hardware needed to coordinate a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can communicate and work toward a common goal have recently been developed by KAUST researchers. “Giving UAVs more autonomy makes them an even more valuable resource,” says Mohamed Abdelkader, who worked on the project with his colleagues under the guidance…
White Lasers Demonstrates Data Speeds of Up to 2 Gbps
A nanocrystalline material that rapidly makes white light out of blue light has been developed by KAUST researchers. While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are now well established technologies, there are several advantages gained by shortening the wavelength of the electromagnetic waves used for transmitting information. So-called visible-light communication (VLC) makes use of parts of the electromagnetic…
Faster Prediction of Wireless Downtime
As the number of mobile devices grows along with demand for faster connections and larger data volumes, wireless networks can easily exceed capacity, resulting in severe network slowdowns and outages. While engineers have developed various sophisticated signal processing methods to accommodate sudden changes in network loads, it has been challenging to evaluate and compare the…