Haye Kesteloo is the Editor in Chief and Founder of DroneXL.co, where he covers all drone-related news, DJI rumors and writes drone reviews, and of EVXL.co, for all electric vehicle news. Haye can be reached at haye @ dronexl.co or @hayekesteloo. Also on LinkedIn, Muck Rack, Instagram and YouTube.
You cannot hit a moving passenger train with a GPS coordinate. A pre-programmed Shahed-136 flies to a fixed point on a map and detonates. If the target moves, the drone misses. Three Shaheds hit the Barvinkove-Lviv-Chop train in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on Tuesday anyway, striking not the locomotive but a passenger car in the center…
German defense startups Helsing and Stark Defence are set to receive €300 million each in military orders for loitering munitions, while defense giant Rheinmetall AG gets passed over after failing to deliver a working prototype, Bloomberg reports. Helsing’s HX-2 And Stark’s Virtus Outperformed In Testing Germany’s Bundeswehr tested both loitering munitions at a military combat…
Anduril is launching the AI Grand Prix, an autonomous drone racing competition where humans don’t fly the drones—they write the software that does. The $500,000 prize pool comes with something potentially more valuable: a job offer that bypasses Anduril’s standard recruiting process, TechCrunch reports. Palmer Luckey’s Pitch: Autonomy Has Arrived The AI Grand Prix is…
Antigravity is adding a Flight Simulator to its A1 and running a global 15% discount from January 27 to February 9. The A1 isn’t just another FPV drone. It’s the first to capture 8K 360-degree video directly, with a built-in 360 camera that eliminates the need for external mounts or attachments. The Update: Antigravity’s new…
The FAA is reopening the comment period for its Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) rulemaking, but operators have just two weeks to respond. Comments open January 28 and close February 11, 2026. The reopened comment period focuses specifically on electronic conspicuity — the technology that allows aircraft to see and be seen in shared…
EnBW, one of Germany’s largest energy companies, will reveal how it’s using autonomous dock-based drones for solar PV inspections in a free webinar this Thursday. The session, hosted jointly with drone autonomy platform FlytBase, runs January 29 at 3:00 PM CET (8:00 AM CT). EnBW tackles the solar inspection scaling problem Solar PV inspections look…
Bessemer Venture Partners just released its 2026 defense tech roadmap, and the message for the drone industry is clear: autonomous systems aren’t experimental anymore. They’re defining battlefield outcomes. The venture capital firm, which has backed companies across the defense sector, argues that defense technology has advanced more in the past 24 months than in the…
SkyeBrowse, the drone-based 3D modeling platform used by law enforcement and first responders, just shipped a major update that addresses the biggest complaint I hear from public safety drone pilots: inconsistent model quality. The new “SkyeBrowse Thinking” feature uses AI to automatically detect when a 3D model doesn’t meet quality standards and re-processes it without…
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