The full firehose — every story on DroneXL, newest first. Breaking news, deep dives, reviews, and the deals ticker archive.
The business card on the table at XPONENTIAL Europe 2026 in Düsseldorf read “General Cherry / Vlad Polikashkin / Marketing Director.” The booth behind it was the largest standalone Ukrainian stand on the floor — backlit walls, Ukrainian military unit insignia, a Ukrainian flag in the corner, and a steady line of visitors that did…
DJI officially launched the Avata 360 on March 26, 2026, the company’s first drone to combine a native 360° camera system with full FPV flight capability. The drone is available immediately for sale in China and on pre-sale in most other regions. American buyers are a separate story: DJI’s official website does not offer the…
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…
Lockheed Martin has selected Fortem Technologies to field an autonomous counter-drone system for critical infrastructure protection, pairing Fortem’s TrueView radar sensors and DroneHunter interceptors with Lockheed’s own Sanctum C-UAS Mission Management software, as reported by The Defense Post. The result is a layered, hardware-plus-software kill chain that is designed to detect, track, and neut
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…
For the first time on public record, American forces have disclosed live-fire drone interception training during a combined exercise with South Korea. U.S. Marine Corps forces deployed from Okinawa, Japan, conducted the training on March 18 at the Daecheon Shooting Range using Stinger portable surface-to-air missiles to shoot down MQM-171A BroadSword target drones configured to…
Kansas State University Salina is bringing together law enforcement, fire departments, and emergency management agencies for a full day of drone education and hands-on demonstrations on April 22, connecting public safety professionals with UAS experts, FAA representatives, and the vendors building the hardware they’re already flying in the field, as reported by The Salina Post.…
The Pardubice facility produces the AT-300 thermal imaging sight, the primary thermal optic for the Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile system
A Lakewood Police Department drone operation on Colfax Avenue resulted in five arrests last Saturday after agents used a Skydio X10 to watch three separate hand-to-hand drug transactions in real time before moving in on the suspects. The operation was straightforward in the best possible way. Agents patrolling the intersection of Colfax and Teller observed…
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…
The Air Force has had enough of watching small drones poke around its installations without a reliable way to stop them. This week, the service’s Point Defense Battle Lab put out two Requests for Information asking industry for exactly what’s been missing: systems that can spot the threat and systems that can kill it, as…
BRINC launches Guardian, the world’s first Starlink-connected 911 response drone, with 8-mile range, 62-minute flight time, and a new Seattle factory.
The Fulton County Sheriff's Office launched the system on March 19 in partnership with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based public safety
Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery subsidiary, announced on Monday that it will expand residential drone delivery service to the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming months. The company framed the move as a “homecoming,” since Wing was founded in the Bay Area in 2012 as a project inside Google’s X, the Moonshot Factory. It is…
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on March 23, 2026, banned the import of all new foreign-made consumer wireless routers, adding them to its Covered List after a White House-convened interagency panel determined they pose “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure,” according to the FCC’s official…
DJI filed a patent lawsuit against Insta360 in China three days before the Avata 360 launch. Insta360’s founder fires back with 28 counter-patents.
Warren County Community College has been quietly building one of the best drone training programs in America from a campus in Washington, New Jersey that most people in the industry couldn’t find on a map. Now it’s adding something no other higher education institution in the country currently offers at scale: a formal counter-drone security…
Zipline has closed an additional $200 million on top of its Series H round, pushing the total to $800 million, TechCrunch reported. The new capital includes participation from crypto investment firm Paradigm and arrives ahead of schedule. “Things have moved a little faster than we expected,” CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton said in a video posted…
The Dutch army is about to become the most drone-integrated ground force in NATO. Starting in April, the Netherlands will begin recruiting between 1,000 and 1,200 military personnel to staff newly created drone and counter-drone units that will be embedded across every combat formation in the Royal Netherlands Army — not as a centralized capability,…
Aurex, the Huntsville-based aerospace and defense company formerly known as Special Aerospace Services, has formally announced 65,000 square feet of secure manufacturing capacity across two facilities, one in Huntsville, Alabama and one in Denver, Colorado, built and ready now for classified programs, rapid prototyping, precision manufacturing, systems integration, and scaled production. Counter-U
Brazil just made drone delivery significantly less bureaucratic, which is not a sentence most people expected to write about any country’s aviation regulator, as AINONLINE reported. On March 16, ANAC, Brazil’s civil aviation authority, authorized Speedbird Aero to fly its DLV-2 A25 delivery drone over areas with population densities up to 12,950 people per square…
A DJI Matrice 400 drone paired with the Zenmuse L3 LiDAR payload is now scanning the Mirador Basin in northern Guatemala, where archaeologist Dr. Richard Hansen has spent 47 years documenting one of the densest concentrations of ancient Maya cities on Earth. DJI Enterprise published a video profile of the project this month. The video…
The Ukrainian military has tested an FPV (First-Person View) drone that carries both fiber optic and radio control channels at once, giving operators a live fallback the moment the fiber cable breaks or loops mid-flight. Tetyana Chornovol, a Ukrainian journalist, current Verkhovna Rada MP, and Armed Forces platoon commander, disclosed the development on March 22,…
Fifteen years after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, palm-sized drones have flown inside the Unit 3 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi and reached what engineers had been trying to see since the meltdown began: the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel, surrounded by what TEPCO believes is…
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.
