Sensors, batteries, LiDAR, obstacle avoidance, and the engineering that moves the industry forward.
China has shown a launch system that turns a line of flatbed trucks into an electromagnetic catapult for fixed-wing drones, with no runway required. Beijing Institute of Technology posted video on June 30 of three eight-wheeled trucks linked end to end into a single launch rail, accelerating a fixed-wing UAV off the back and into…
Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl announced a $100,000 prize, $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in Boom stock, for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1. Scholl posted the challenge on X this morning, July 2, quote-tweeting the dorm-built jet drone that DroneXL covered just hours earlier. “Boom will be offering a…
DJI will announce a new enterprise drone on July 8, 2026, at 8 AM EDT. The teaser, published by DJI Enterprise on July 2 under the tagline “For the Priceless Below,” shows a darkened silhouette of a quadcopter with extended landing gear, a gimbal payload slung under the body, and what appears to be a…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum on June 29 creating a single Pentagon office with authority over nearly every unmanned systems program in the U.S. military. The Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, reports straight to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg and absorbs the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group along with the…
The University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab flew DRAGON v1.5, a drone that changes its own shape in the air, in a live demonstration on the Komaba Campus in Tokyo. The robot bends and curls to pass through gaps that would stop a fixed-frame drone, and it does it autonomously, using only its onboard sensors. Now…
America now has roughly four registered drones for every registered crewed aircraft, and a public safety official is warning that the country has no agreed system for deciding which one moves out of the way. In a piece published June 24 in Homeland Security Today, Charles Werner, director of the DRONERESPONDERS Public Safety Alliance, laid…
Two rival drone delivery companies have spent a year running a working air traffic control system over North Texas suburbs with no humans brokering the traffic, and the headline number is genuinely impressive: zero airspace conflicts across roughly 8,000 overlapping flights. Flytrex and Wing coordinate their aircraft automatically in shared airspace above Little Elm and…
When Dominion Energy’s grid operators noticed an unexpected power drop at the Colonial Trail West solar farm in Surry County, Virginia this June, they didn’t send a lineman. They sent a drone. Pilot Aaron Colgrove pulled up the mission from Dominion’s D-ROC, the company’s drone remote operations center, told the unit to head to the…
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