Rafael Suárez is a drone journalist and content creator with more than 20 years behind the lens. He began in film photography in 1998, moved to digital in 2005, and has been flying and filming with drones since 2016. As a commercial videographer he has produced work for premium brands including BMW, Porsche, and MINI, and his documentary work champions a #flysafe mentality across the industry. Based in Quito, Ecuador, he covers drone news, hardware, and the policy and business shaping the industry for DroneXL, and shares reviews and cinematic flight on his YouTube channel. A dad and a lifelong aviation nerd, he's happiest when something is in the air.
Kraken Robotics just pulled off something navies have been trying to make practical for years. The Canadian firm integrated its KATFISH towed sonar onto Sefine’s RD-22 unmanned surface vessel off the coast of Istanbul, then launched and recovered the system from the moving USV with no humans in the loop, as Unmanned Systems Technology reported.…
A Tokyo defense startup just put a $450 fixed-wing drone on the Japanese market, and the airframe is made of wood. JISDA, short for Japan Integrated Security Design Agency, announced the ACM-01 Shiraha on April 14 in Tokyo. It’s a 6.2-foot wingspan trainer built to be flown hard, crashed, and replaced without anyone wincing at…
Ukraine publicly introduced a new long-range strike drone called Sichen on April 14 at a Ministry of Foreign Affairs exhibition in Kyiv. The aircraft is built for deep strikes at ranges up to 870 miles and carries an 88-pound warhead, as reported by Militarnyi. The name translates to “January” in Ukrainian, a reference to the…
Barclays published research on Wednesday arguing that autonomous food delivery, driven by sidewalk robots and drones, could cut per-order costs to roughly $1 in the long term. The British bank sees about $16 billion in unlocked annual profit across the global food delivery industry if penetration reaches projected levels, as Yahoo! reported. For the drone…
China just put another piece of its low-altitude cargo strategy in the air. The HH-200, a twin-engine unmanned freighter built by AVIC Xi’an Aircraft Industry Group, completed its maiden flight on April 15 at Pucheng, in Shaanxi Province, as Defense Mirror reports. The program targets short-haul freight routes, cross-island logistics in Southeast Asia, and Belt…
A Santa Clara startup called Hyfix Spatial Intelligence just pulled in $15 million to build an American-designed system-on-a-chip that folds flight control, high-precision positioning, secure communications, and onboard compute into a single piece of U.S.-manufactured silicon. Craft Ventures led the round. The pitch is that this will be the American brain for drones and robots…
Skydio just landed the kind of contract that separates a public safety drone company from a defense contractor. U.S. Air Forces Central, the USAFCENT component of U.S. Central Command, awarded the San Mateo, California company an order exceeding $9 million for Skydio Dock and X10 systems to secure American airbases across the Middle East. Skydio…
The ink isn’t dry on the standard Osmo Pocket 4 announcement and DJI already has another one lined up. Photo Rumors is reporting that a Pocket 4P, the Professional variant, is queued up for a summer launch with a dual-lens setup and real optical zoom. And our trusted leaker Igor Bogdanov posted this: And this…
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