Google Acquires Titan Aerospace Drone Company

Google has acquired Titan Aerospace, a startup that specializes in making high-altitude drones. The company announced the news on their site.

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We’re thrilled to announce that Titan Aerospace is joining Google.

At Titan Aerospace, we’re passionate believers in the potential for technology (and in particular, atmospheric satellites) to improve people’s lives. It’s still early days for the technology we’re developing, and there are a lot of ways that we think we could help people, whether it’s providing internet connections in remote areas or helping monitor environmental damage like oil spills and deforestation. That’s why we couldn’t be more excited to learn from and work with our new colleagues as we continue our research, testing and design work as part of the Google family.


To everyone here in New Mexico and around the world who has supported us so far — thank you. We couldn’t have made it this far without your support.
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The WSJ reports that Facebook was in talks to buy Titan; however, it later announced it was buying Ascenta, a U.K. aerospace company that has also been working on solar-powered drones.

Google says the Titan team will be working closely with Project Loon, the company's project to use a global network of high-altitude balloons to connect people in rural and remote areas who have no Internet access at all. Titan may also work with Makani, another project that is developing an airborne wind turbine that generates more energy at lower cost than conventional wind systems.

Titan's drones ccan also collect real-time, high-resolution images of the earth, capture data from atmospheric sensors, and support voice and data services. That might be useful for the Google Maps team.


"It's still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation," a Google spokesman said.

Read More [via WSJ]