The Dutch company PAL-V has had its flying car Liberty approved for use on roads in Holland (but is not permitted to fly). The Liberty is a gyrocopter with rotors on top to provide lift, and a separate propeller engine on the back to provide thrust. It needs a runway of at least 590’ for takeoff and 100’ for landings. In driving mode, the Liberty can travel up to 99 mph, and in flight mode, its max speed is 112 mph.

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Walmart has launched a pilot drone delivery program in Fayetteville, North Carolina in partnership with drone company Flytrex. The initial plan is to use drones to deliver grocery and household items. Flytrex has been around since 2013, and caters to people living in suburban areas. Its drones fly at 32 mph, have a cruising height of 230 feet, and can carry up to 6.6 pounds. The company has been working with Icelandic retailer AHA since 2018, delivering groceries to peoples’ backyards in Reykjavik.

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In 2021, Zipline will begin making on-demand drone deliveries for Walmart in Northwest Arkansas for select health and wellness products.

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Robots are taking up new roles in hospitals, replacing clinical and other hospital workers to help with medical care and the logistics of running hospitals. Drones are delivering medical supplies, collecting patient samples for testing, and dropping off medicine to people in remote communities. Drones have also been used to disinfect outdoor markets and other areas to slow the spread of disease.

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Drones and air taxis will soon create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery, and for construction. Drones and other aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

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Drone use currently underway includes: Public shaming by government; Ice cream delivery; Making a giant screen in the sky; Killing locusts in Kenya.

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For an eVTOL to qualify for Uber’s aerial ridesharing program, it must be able to carry one pilot and four passengers at a speed of over 150 mph for 3 continuous hours of operation. Uber now has five partners who have committed to delivering eVTOLs that meet these specs, with another five or ten still to come. Uber has also partnered with NASA and the FAA to develop the air traffic management system to coordinate their flying fleet, and has established the design of “mega-skyports.

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On November 1, UPS Flight Forward delivered prescription medication directly from a pharmacy in North Carolina to a customer’s home by drone. The Matternet M2 drone hovered 20 ft above the property before slowly lowering its package via a cable. The intent is to use drone deliveries for customers with limited mobility.

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a system for aerial cinematography that learns from human visual preferences in order to enable drones to make artsy filmmaking choices while autonomously filming scenes.

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UPS Flight Forward has been granted the highly-restricted Part 135 air carrier certification, allowing approved UPS drones to fly over people, at night and out of the operator’s line of sight. Alphabet’s Wing subsidiary received the same certification in April.

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Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a pilot version of an autonomous octocopter that attaches asphalt shingles to roofs with a nail gun. This requires positioning the nail gun on a nailing point, placing the nail, and moving to the next point.

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Later in 2019, Alphabet’s drone delivery arm Wing will begin delivering goods for FedEx Express, Walgreens and a small retailer in Christiansburg, Virginia. The pilot program is to test the delivery of health care products, and fill last-mile delivery needs.

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Bell Helicopter’s all-electric APT 70 can carry up to 70 pounds, cruise at 75 mph, and cover 35 miles with a fully charged battery.

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The history and future of flying cars! Smartphone components gave rise to autopilot control of drones, and the large drones that are flying cars or taxis. Four current challenges and time lines: Autopilot data (2022), Autonomous flight (2023), Batteries for flight time (2025), Government regulation (2029).

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The German company, Volocopter, revealed its first commercial autonomous flying taxi. The 18-rotor, electric vertical takeoff and landing VoloCity can travel 35 km at 110 km/hr, carrying two passengers and their hand luggage.

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Melbourne joins Dallas and Los Angeles as pilot cities trialling Uber’s flying taxi service, Uber Air. Test flights start in 2020, with commercial planned for 2023. Uber Air is an “urban aviation ride-sharing product”, which will ease traffic congestion on the ground.

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Amazon’s latest prototype of its Prime Air package delivery drone with improved energy efficiency and safety, will be delivering soon. The goal is to have fully-electric drones that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes.

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Drones have become a key tool in the insurance sector, where damage assessments are frequently performed by drones equipped with machine vision and AI.

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A custom-built drone with eight rotors to ensure stability and a special apparatus to control the environment, delivered a donor kidney to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center, ferrying it from a hospital about three miles away. The kidney was then successfully transplanted into a patient with renal failure. It’s the first time a drone has been used to drop off an organ for a transplant.

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Alphabet’s drone division, Wing, has launched its first public delivery service for about 100 homes in Canberra, Australia, processing orders for food and medication from 12 local businesses to be delivered by drone in minutes. Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted regulatory approval after an 18-month trial involving 3,000 deliveries.

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UPS has started delivering medical samples, using drones built by Matternet, at the WakeMed hospital and campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. The drones can carry up to 5lbs pounds over <12.5 miles. This is the first revenue-generating drone delivery scheme to be approved by the FAA.

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Pensa is a New York company that makes an autonomous mobile perception system to track inventory in stores. Pensa uses drones which are faster, quieter and less obtrusive than ground robots.

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The British Army is testing out over 70 new technologies, including unmanned vehicles and surveillance drones, in a four-week experiment on one of its biggest training grounds.

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A drone, created by Aerones, a San Francisco company, can wash skyscraper windows 20 times quicker than manual cleaners. It can also extinguish fires, and will be in operation in 2019. Weighing about 200 lb, it is tethered to the ground with a hose supplying water and electricity.

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Researchers from Boulder, Denver and Boston have partnered to design autonomous teams of drones that can explore underground environments like subway tunnels, mines and caves, for 2-3 hours. Completion date is late 2021. Flying and rolling drones willo work together to search through dark and dangerous environments to find human survivors of earthquakes, chemical spills and more.

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Inspired by spiders and wasps, these tiny drones pull 40x their own weight, using 3 components: anchors to attach to objects, winches to pull, and sticky feet to provide a sure grip.

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An Icelandic startup called Aha is using a Chinese-made drone and an Israeli logistics system to deliver hot food, groceries, and electronics to households in Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavik. Drones only use GPS with no safety features, and deliveries are lowered to the house with neighbours’ permission.

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Drones provide provide high-resolution images that fit between ground-level and satellite views. Multiple uses range from item delivery in remote areas to roof inspections (with time reduced from 6 to 1 hour.

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A new report from MarketsandMarket predicts the market share for utility drones to grow from US$110.2 million (2018) to $538.6 million in 2023, due to increased demand in hazardous work conditions.

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Drones monitor construction sites, farms, and critical infrastructure, sending back real-time data, which is subjected to AI analysis to spot problems. This increases efficiency, reduces costs, and may spot problems humans might miss.

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Love them or hate them, drones are here to stay. Here are 17 drone mishaps that show why some people are still wary.

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Start-up Volans-i’s drones can travel up to 500 miles carrying 20 pounds of cargo at a top speed of 200 mph. They use fixed wings, along with vertical-take-off-and-landing systems, for flight, and both batteries and fuel for propulsion. They can take off or land on any flat 15×15 ft platform.

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Researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Bologna have created the first nano-drone capable of flying itself without a human operator – a breakthrough in AI miniaturization. All computation and navigation controls are created fully onboard the device.

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Start-up Volans-i’s drones can travel up to 500 miles carrying 20 pounds of cargo at a top speed of 200 mph. They use fixed wings, along with vertical-take-off-and-landing systems, for flight, and both batteries and fuel for propulsion. They can take off or land on any flat 15×15 ft platform.

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Tactical Robotics’ Cormorant drone can be deployed for a wide range of military, industrial, and civilian rescue and evacuation applications. The unmanned Cormorant is a compact, single-engine VTOL aircraft. Internal lift rotors allow the drone to land and take off in a large SUV-sized horizontal surface.

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A survey from ISACA showed 75% listed security or privacy as their biggest concern regarding the use of drones in the enterprise. Drones are already being used on oil rigs, telecommunication towers, and construction sites. A Gartner report predicted that the global drone market will hit $11.2 billion by 2020, with nearly 3 million new drones produced in 2018.

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Limited package deliveries by commercial drones could be coming to the US shortly, overcoming regulatory roadblocks. Australia, Singapore, and Britain are the leaders in drone delivery technology. A food delivery service in Iceland is using autonomous drones to deliver orders, and UAVs are in use in the agricultural space.

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Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is developing a small, artificial bee, currently in the format of a drone. Some plants can pollinate, only if there’s enough wind. Some plants need a current location of the pollination onto the flower itself. We are currently creating enough wind.

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Skyguide, a Swiss air traffic control operator, is partnering with AirMap, maker of a leading global airspace management platforms for drones. This is part of U-Space, which plans to promote safe and secure access to European airspace for millions of drones and their operators.

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Drones are being used across the world, with the help of DroneDeploy software, to enable field surveillance, and detect issues (relating for example to weed detection and planting needs), and provide farm equipment with the data to fix the issues. Drones only cost about $1,000, and the software another $1,000.

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A major Chinese drone maker is testing it’s Ehang 184 flying taxi, providing personal, robotic transportation by drone. After >1,000 tests in a broad range of conditions, more test will start in Dubai and Las Vegas. It can fly for 10 miles at speeds of up to 80 mph, but for only 23 minutes. Competitors include Airbus.

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Drones will be used for aerial searches, recon intense situations, and other tasks where officers would otherwise be at risk. Flights are restricted to SWAT team members in dangerous situations.

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In open air, drones navigate autonomously using GPS, which doesn’t penetrate deep underground. So robot spelunkers require human pilots. A Swedish company, Inkonova, is developing an alternative positioning method. Using laser scanners and SLAM, a technology that calculates the distance between the drone and nearby objects, it quickly builds a map of its environment. The firm’s new autonomous drone combines the map with sensor input to position and move itself. When it encounters unusually shaped space, it uses wheels to move along the ground and tilt to fly or roll at an angle.

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A team at Johns Hopkins University created a drone, UAAV – an unmanned aerial-aquatic vehicle, that can travel underwater. The Flying Fish is propelled in the air and under the water by a single motor and propeller. The Flying Fish could fly autonomously at 48 km/h to land in the water, dive in to collect environmental data, then fly back to its base.

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UK/US technology research company, Cambridge Consultants, has unveiled a drone delivery concept that delivers a package directly into someone’s hands, using coded patterns sent via a phone’s LED flash to identify the recipient. DelivAir is ideal for items that are needed instantly or critically. The 3-stage package delivery involves using GPS to locate a person via their smartphone; then switching to optical tracking and a 3D-imaging and ranging system to locate and authenticate the recipient; finally, lowering the package using a stabilizing winch.

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Harper Adams University (UK) researchers have managed to plant, tend, and harvest 1.5 acres of barley using only autonomous vehicles and drones. No human set foot on the field, although remote management was required. Person-free precision farming seems like an increasingly viable way to help keep the world fed.\

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École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) researchers have developed a giant carbon-fiber cage that sits around a drone to protect it—and its cargo —by providing “an all-round protective structure that physically separates the propellers from the environment.”

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Switzerland will be the first country in the developed world to have permanent drone networks, with drones flying through urban airspace near busy international airports. Permanent drone delivery networks are already in use in Africa, where drones send units of blood for transfusions to remote clinics in Rwanda, and will soon deliver other medical supplies such as antimalarial drugs and emergency vaccines in Tanzania. Matternet, a Silicon Valley-based tech company, designed the drones, along with a cloud system for sending and receiving platforms–and a newly launched system that can autonomously load, launch, and land the drones.

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The Marine Corps uses a battle-proven hand-tossed flying robot for local surveillance. Raven can fly at speeds of <50 mph with a range of <6 miles, feeding video back to the operator. It is bulky and costs $30,000. Its potential replacement is a 3D-printed drone, Scout, that uses an open-source flight controller, and open-source software for waypoint navigation. Its only payload right now is a camera. Its current range is <2 miles, with speeds of <50 mph for <20 minutes. Its assembly time is 3 minutes, and it only costs $615.

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Dubai is considering two autonomous air taxi versions. One, the 18-rotor Volocopter, has a maximum flying time of 30 minutes at 50 kph, with a maximum airspeed of 100 kph. Batteries charged in climate-controlled areas near the pads would be swapped in as needed. Dubai will take the next five years to come up with laws and develop safety procedures.

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A Swiss company, PassengerDrone, introduced a two-seater, 8-rotor, 3-landing-wheel prototype commuter drone, which can fly at a speed of up to 80 km/h and is operated via a touchscreen. Testing started in May 2017, with launch planned in 2018, at a cost of $15-200,000. Competition is expected from Kitty Hawk and Daimler, and various world universities, including MIT.

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For the past 5 years, villagers in the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar have manually planted 2.7 million mangrove trees trying to restore an ecosystem that has been disappearing for decades. Drones, from startup BioCarbon Engineering, can plant up to 100,000 trees in a day, leaving the villagers to focus on care for the young trees. The drone technology involves a first pass to map the topography and soil quality, leading to a second pass to plant the best species in the best locations by firing seed pods to penetrate the soil.

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MIT engineer and Assistant Professor Fadel Adib leads a research team that has developed an aerial drone system capable of reading RFID tags from tens of metres away and identifying the location of the package within 19 centimetres, by relaying the signals emitted by the reader over larger distances. Rfly could save retailers billions in inventory shrinkage while reducing inventory logging from a multi-day activity for a team of workers to less than one day’s activity.

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Debuting in September after a year of R&D, quad-copters will fly above the greenish-blue water of the Gold Coast, relaying video to image-recognition technology that determines if the footage is of sharks. The drone sounds an alarm and can drop a four-person life raft and communication device to enable swimmers to call for help. Shark-spotting is only about 18% accurate from a helicopter, and 12% from an airplane, while the drones achieve 90% accuracy.

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The world’s first fully autonomous drone delivery service launched in Reykjavik, Iceland this week, with online marketplace AHA partnering with drone company Flytrex to deliver food and products on demand across the capital city. Delivery could take up to 25 minutes, while the drones can reduce this to 4 minutes, with a 60% reduction in delivery cost.

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MIT initiated development of commercialized hybrid gas-to-electric drones, providing an order-of-magnitude increase in range, payload size, and power over battery-powered counterparts. Available in fall 2017, Top Flight Technologies’ drones can fly for more than 2.5 hours ­— enabling ranges of up to 100 miles — while carrying up to 20 pounds. They’re developing a 100-kilowatt hybrid drone that can lift 100 kilograms for up to three hours.

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Japan’s space agency has released photos and videos taken on the International Space Station by its resident 3D-printed drone, which can be remote-controlled from Earth. It looks like a floating ball with luminous blue eyes.

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A team from the University of Sherbrooke has designed a drone that can take off from water and land, either normally, or by stalling or precision roll. The drone can right-side itself, and its takeoff design is based on that of mallard ducks.

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Wirth Research unveiled a vertical take-off and landing drone with a tilt-rotor, that uses a lightweight hydrogen fuel cells as its primary energy source and delivers six hours of flight time with a payload.

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Amazon has filed a patent application detailing a multi-level building in a city centre with drones being loaded manually and flying to their destinations from high floors. Nois may be reduced by new drone blade design, and drones may have redundant engines.

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A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a fleet of autonomous drones that have rotors and wheels, giving them the capability to avoid obstacles on the ground and to go underneath overhead obstructions. The design may also be used for flying cars.

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One demo in the Robust Adaptive Systems Lab on the Carnegie Mellon campus involves 15 pocket-sized drones lined up, three by five. They lift off in unison; then split into smaller groups, and explore the boundaries of the cage, before converging again and moving around as one. The batting cage is a motion capture arena, designed to track the quadcopters’ choreographed movement with pinpoint accuracy. Another demo in the arena uses 8 high-powered floor fans to mimic natural wind. The drone slowly adapts to its surroundings.

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Researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich developed a drone that is able to fly in any orientation, with rotors positioned at different angles. A prototype is shown catching a small ball in a net. The control algorithm is able to generate around 500,000 trajectories/sec, select the smoothest one within 20 milliseconds, and guide the drone from its initial position to catch the ball.

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The Local Government Association of Queensland has announced a live trial of drone technology to be used for disaster management, with drones flying beyond visual line of sight. The drones would survey terrain and bridges in disaster zones in real time, and would drop medical supplies. They are also testing drones in police chases, as drones can be launched from police vehicles within seconds, and at a far lower cost than helicopters.

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Boeing has developed a universal lift vehicle that can be quickly reconfigured based on the size and the weight of the payload. If the weight of a payload is less, then a single drone is used to transfer the payload. If a payload is heavier, then multiple drones are connected together to build a lift vehicle that can carry the heavy payload. A patent application has been filed.

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Japan plans to allow package delivery by drone sometime from 2020 and the commercialization of self-driving trucks by 2022. This move is urgent because its workforce has shrunk dramatically enough to force companies to start scaling back operations. More use of Big Data and AI will be encouraged to help diagnose medical conditions. Regulations will be temporarily eased for some firms, using what is known as a regulatory sandbox, to allow companies to test new technologies right away, free of the burden normally imposed by regulation.

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Disney plans to use drones extensively in Disneyland. Disney has developed crazy drone technology that includes creating flying displays using drone pixels, flying projections screens and projectors using drones, even using drones as puppeteers for flying puppet shows. They also have a unique airbag for drones to keep the audience safe from crashing drones.

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NTT Docomo, the Japanese telecommunications giant, has revealed what may be the future of advertising – spherical video-touting drones which ensure you can see ads from every angle. Drones include an external frame and a LED spherical display created through eight strips which curve from top to bottom. The unmanned aerial vehicle is held within the sphere and legs protrude underneath for take-off and landing. The drone is roughly 88cm in diameter and together with the 144 x 136-pixel screen, the UAV only weighs 3.4kg and will be available by 2019.

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The next Mars rover in 2020 could be equipped with a UAV to get a bird’s eye view of the planet. Engineers at NASA’s Langley research center are developing a concept for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, a.k.a. drones) for Mars. The project, called Mars Electric Reusable Flyer, takes advantage of the technology that underpins the newest autonomous robots and self-driving vehicles. With 100 times less atmosphere, liftoff will be especially difficult.

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Uber announced partnerships with Dubai and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis in Texas to manufacture “vertical takeoff and landing” vehicles, and put networks (dubbed Uber Elevate) in place by 2020 with full-scale operations in Texas by 2023. Manufacturing will involve US-based Bell Helicopter, Brazil’s Embraer, and Slovenia’s Pipistrel.

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E-volo, a German aviation startup, has been using ultralight, electrically powered “multicopter” technology for several years. Its Volocopter VC200, an 18-rotor drone-helicopter hybrid, announced its first production model, which seats 2. Its maximum range is 17 miles at 43 mph, and its maximum flight time is 27 mins at an optimal cruising speed of 31 mph. Flying taxi pilot projects will commence in 2018.

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Two hospitals in Lugano have been testing the use of drones to transport laboratory samples. Since mid-March, logistics company Swiss Post has operated more than 70 tests flights and plans a regular service by 2018. It’s the 1st time drones will be used commercially for this purpose in an urban area. The drones are made by American company Matternet, have a load capacity of up to two kilograms, a range of 20 kilometers, and a top speed of 36 kilometers per hour.

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UK biomimetic engineering startup Animal Dynamics is building a microdrone with wings inspired by the flapping flight of a dragonfly. The project started in June 2015 and is being funded with £1.5 million from the UK Ministry of Defence. The company is confident they’ll have a flying prototype of their Skeeter drone by this summer — with the tech potentially deployed in the field by the end of 2018.

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Walmart was granted a patent for a system in which drones would shuttle products between different departments inside its stores. The drones would use nets or hooks to grab and carry items or would be loaded manually. They would mostly avoid buzzing above customers’ heads by being routed over shelves. Sensors on the drones would help them avoid obstacles. Several drone landing zones would be created in stores.

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A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for use in site surveying, security and other industrial applications in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace.

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Singapore and Dubai plan to use driverless drone taxis by the 2030s. Singapore is also planning an on-demand bus system to supplement its rail transit. Car ownership is deemed superfluous. 3 prototypes being considered are the Russian Hoversurf Scorpion, the German Volocopter VC200, and, the favorite, Chinese Ehang184.

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Land Rover has created an unusual version of its Discovery, featuring a quadcopter drone that launches from the top of the SUV. The drone can take off and lands while the vehicle is moving. It is designed primarily for search and rescue missions. The Austrian Red Cross is actively deploying the new Land Rover “Project Hero” vehicles, and trialing the drone.

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UPS announced today that it has successfully delivered a package in Florida using an autonomous drone that launched from the roof of one of its delivery trucks. The process is: The driver scans a package, puts it in a retractable cage that sits below the drone, and then plugs in a destination on a tablet near the driver’s seat. The roof of the truck then retracts, and the drone flies off to its destination. Once there, it lands, opens its cage, drops off the package, and sets back out to meet the driver as they continue along their route.

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Domino’s claimed the world’s first unmanned drone pizza delivery on Nov 16th in New Zealand, delivering two pizzas to a customer at Whangaparaoa, just north of Auckland. Domino’s said that drones were set to become an essential part of pizza deliveries, and is considering trials in Australia, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Japan, and Germany.

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Google’s Project Wing team has a drone delivery system that will test run multiple flights in Virginia delivering lunches prepared in an on-site food truck by Mexican food chain Chipotle.

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Drone startup Flirtey partnered with convenience store chain 7-Eleven to make the first commercial delivery to a private residence in Reno, Nevada on July 11. Flirtey flew an autonomous drone a mile from a 7-Eleven location. The order was packaged into two containers, each flown separately, and lowered to the ground to be retrieved by the homeowners.

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