Funding rounds, partnerships, layoffs, and the market math underneath the drone headlines.
FCC Public Notice DA 26-314 asks the drone industry to fix spectrum access, licensing delays, and Counter-UAS legal barriers before the 2027 exemption cliff.
China is imposing some of the harshest drone restrictions on the planet, even as its government pours billions into building a “low-altitude economy” around the same technology. The New York Times reports that new regulations taking effect in May will require real-name registration for all drones, advance permits for flights in restricted zones covering most…
Lucid Bots Drones just closed a $20 million Series B to keep up with demand it says it can’t fulfill fast enough. For a company that spent five years selling its first 100 robots, that’s a different kind of problem. The Charlotte, North Carolina company makes the Sherpa cleaning drone and the Lavo ground robot,…
Theme parks like Disney World across the U.S. spent years watching unauthorized drones buzz their crowds with essentially no legal way to stop them. That finally changed in December 2025, and the industry is still figuring out what it means, as reported by Facilities Dive. The Safer Skies Act, embedded in Sections 8601 through 8607…
Freefly Systems will hold its 5th annual Freefly Fest on August 19, 2026, just outside Seattle, Washington. Chief Revenue Officer Matt Isenbarger announced the date on LinkedIn, describing the event as a day of hands-on demos, BBQ, and tours of Freefly Systems HQ. No venue has been announced yet — Freefly’s own shipping page lists…
Three years ago, Ukraine had almost no commercial drone manufacturing industry at scale. Today, I was walking the floor at XPONENTIAL Europe 2026 in Düsseldorf — the leading European trade fair for autonomous technologies and robotics, running March 24–26 at Messe Düsseldorf — and Ukrainian companies occupied some of the busiest floor space in the…
Engineers at Rutgers University have designed a solid-state ornithopter, a bird-like flying robot with no motors, no gears, and no mechanical linkages of any kind, and proven in simulation that it can fly. The catch is honest and refreshingly so: the materials needed to build it in the physical world don’t exist yet. The research…
Lockheed Martin has built and demonstrated a drone detection prototype that uses no dedicated sensors, no specialized hardware, and no new infrastructure. It uses the 5G network that already exists, the same one your phone is connected to right now, as its detection layer. You wanted Black Mirror? There you go. The system is called…
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.
