The full firehose — every story on DroneXL, newest first. Breaking news, deep dives, reviews, and the deals ticker archive.
Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. The FBI seizes over 600 drones at World Cup venues so far. DJI releases the Matrice 400 parachute, which is really interesting. And Boom Supersonic offers a $100,000 prize for anyone who’s going to build a Mach 1 RC airplane.…
AulGo, a pocket camera from Hong Kong startup TriLife, hit Kickstarter this week promising 4K video from a Sony sensor, six-axis electronic stabilization, and five recording modes for about $200. The campaign cleared its modest goal within hours and kept climbing. The pitch is easy to like: a 4K camera light enough to actually carry,…
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stood beside a recovered Iranian Shahed drone at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables on July 8 and warned that roughly 300 of them now sit in Cuba, within range of South Florida. U.S. Representative Carlos Gimenez, a Republican from Florida, stood with him. The drone behind them, a Shahed-136,…
A cargo drone lifted a stranded truck driver off the top of a fuel tanker and flew him over raging floodwater to dry ground in southern China. The rescue happened on July 6 in Yunbiao, a town in Guangxi that Typhoon Maysak had put underwater. A rescue worker strapped the man into a harness, and…
Montgomery County, Maryland, is pulling the human spotter off the rooftop. The county police department said on July 6 that it is rebuilding its Drone as First Responder program around docked Skydio X10 aircraft at six sites, and flying them beyond visual line of sight without the observer the old setup required. This was the…
Mikhail Svilanov shows how the iFootage Pico Slider helps create repeatable reveal shots, pans, and robotic camera moves with compact gear like the DJI Osmo Pocket 4.
A University of Houston engineer says she has built a real-time monitor that keeps a quadrotor from crashing when a gust shoves it off course. Marzia Cescon calls it a “safety supervisor,” a software module that rides onboard the drone and watches its tilt and position while it flies. When the math predicts the aircraft…
DJI revealed its first eVTOL delivery drone today, the DJI EV50, and it announced the aircraft’s existence by disclosing that it already flew to 29,072 feet (8,861 meters) on the north side of Mount Everest. The fixed-wing cargo aircraft carried ozone-measuring equipment for Peking University researchers over a 12-day campaign in the Qomolangma National Nature…
DJI’s 2026 drone pipeline keeps moving, and American buyers keep watching from the sidelines. The Air 4 turned up inside a Chinese flight-reporting app back in May. A model nobody can identify, the N610BS, just cleared Chinese radio certification. The Avata 360 already shipped worldwide in March. Every one of those launches hits the same…
Lucid Bots wants transitioning veterans flying its cleaning drones, and it’s working through a veteran nonprofit to get them there. On July 7, the Charlotte-based manufacturer announced an official sponsorship of Vets to Drones, a nonprofit that trains former service members to fly commercially. The pitch is a path from military service to small-business ownership…
Colorado Springs police put a drone over a knife fight before a single patrol car arrived, and this week they released the video to prove it. On June 21, a 911 call reported two men fighting at the A1 Mobile Home Park near Cimarron and I-25, with a possible gun in the mix. The department’s…
Filmmaker Reilín Joey has published a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the official DJI Osmo Pocket 4 launch commercial, a production he directed and edited across 12 locations on two continents. The video, released July 7, 2026, follows the shoot from safari scenes near Cape Town, South Africa, to a typhoon-compressed schedule in Hong Kong, and closes…
DJI released the DJI AP100 Parachute for the Matrice 400 on July 8, 2026, a rear-mounted recovery system that deploys in under 600 milliseconds and brings the aircraft down at less than 5 meters per second (16.4 feet per second). The launch landed in the 8 AM EDT slot DJI had teased, under the tagline…
Emesent has raised $17 million (A$25 million) in new funding to expand manufacturing at its Wacol, Queensland facility and build out two software platforms: Cortex AI, its onboard autonomy engine for GPS-denied flight, and Aura, its cloud platform for processing and visualizing 3D data. The round pairs a $7 million (A$10 million) venture debt facility…
Cellebrite has become the exclusive digital forensics partner to SkySafe, expanding a relationship the two companies first built out through Cellebrite’s March 2026 acquisition of SCG Canada. The deal, announced Tuesday, ties Cellebrite’s mobile-device extraction platform directly into SkySafe’s drone detection and airspace intelligence feeds, giving investigators a single workflow that spans what
A child was injured by a drone during the July 4 fireworks at Big Bang Boom in Norfolk, Nebraska, the show billed as the state’s largest, on the night of its 50th anniversary. Event organizers, Madison County deputies and Norfolk police identified the aircraft with specialized drone identification equipment before anyone approached the operator, Sheriff…
Minnesota just published something no other state hands its residents: an itemized receipt for every police drone program inside its borders. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s 2025 Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles report counts 9,080 warrantless flights across 135 agencies, up 38% in a year, and the Rochester Police Department leads them all. Rochester flew…
AVSS (Aerial Vehicle Safety Solutions) has manufactured more than 2,000 drone components and systems so far in its current fiscal year, the Fredericton, New Brunswick company announced today. That figure already exceeds the company’s full-year production total from the previous fiscal year, with several months still left on the calendar. AVSS builds parachute recovery systems,…
The most expensive cattle in American history are now being counted from the air. HeadCount Inventory, the drone division of Kansas crop consultancy Crop Quest, flies autonomous DJI aircraft over feedyards and delivers head counts the company says hit 99.997% accuracy. “Nothing is impossible, but getting a whole yard count is close to impossible as…
A senior figure in Japan’s drone industry is pushing for Japan and Taiwan to align their drone rules and deepen manufacturing cooperation, arguing that mismatched regulations and Japan’s limits on defense work are holding the sector back. Kakuya Iwata, executive director of the Japan UAS Industrial Development Association, made the case in an interview with…
The Kent County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan has wired its deputies’ body cameras into its drone fleet. When a deputy presses a button on the camera, the nearest rooftop-docked Skydio X10 launches and flies straight to that officer’s location. The agency stages three of the drones on rooftops across West Michigan, in Cutlerville, Comstock Park…
Manna has appointed former DAA chief executive Kenny Jacobs as executive chairman and president, four weeks after the Irish drone delivery company grounded its home-market fleet and pointed its growth plans at the United States and the United Kingdom. The company said Jacobs arrives as it shifts focus to markets where regulation and local planning…
Lorenz Meier picked a fight with half the defense industry on July 1. The Auterion founder, creator of the Pixhawk flight controller and the widely adopted open-source PX4 autopilot, published an essay arguing that the United States, Germany, and Ukraine now buy attack drones the way consumers buy cell phones: interchangeable hardware, replaced every two…
Thales agreed on Monday to buy the Gorgé family’s 35.51% stake in Exail Technologies for €134 per share ($153), the first step in a full takeover of the French maritime drone maker at an enterprise value of €3.9 billion ($4.45 billion). The agreement lands three days after rival Safran abandoned its own exclusive talks for…
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.
