25 articles found
The FCC has extended the deadline for software and firmware updates on banned foreign-made drones and routers until January 1, 2029, allowing devices to receive security patches that mitigate harm to US consumers. The extension pushes back the original cutoff by approximately two years and follows lobbying from the Consumer Technology Association for continued support of previously authorized devices.
Robot Talk Episode 155 features an interview with Melissa Greeff from Queen's University about autonomous navigation and learning systems for aerial robots. Greeff, an Assistant Professor leading the Robora Lab, discusses her research in vision-based navigation, safe learning-based control, and autonomous aerial systems developed through field trials across Canada.
WaiV Robotics emerged from stealth with a $7.5 million seed-funded autonomous landing platform designed to enable drones to safely take off and land from moving ships at sea. The system uses a patent-pending catch-lock-release mechanism combined with AI-driven predictive algorithms to handle the challenges of maritime drone operations, working with any drone without requiring hardware or software modifications.
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute developed an ultrasound-based perception system for tiny drones inspired by bat echolocation, enabling navigation in low-visibility environments where cameras and lidar fail. The system combines an acoustic shield that reduces propeller noise with a neural network called Saranga that recovers weak echo signals, allowing small aerial robots to navigate safely in smoke, dust, darkness, and other challenging conditions for search-and-rescue operations.
The Drones & Robotics AI Summit 2026 highlighted major advances in autonomous systems, with Ghost Robotics demonstrating its Vision 60 robotic dog and over $30 billion in venture investment flowing into the sector. Heven AeroTech founder Bentzion Levinson discussed his company's evolution from autonomous fire detection to hydrogen-powered UAVs for defense applications, including partnerships with quantum computing firm IonQ to advance sensing capabilities.
Lucid Bots, a Charlotte-based robotics company specializing in window-cleaning drones and robots, raised $20 million in Series B funding co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners, bringing total funding to $34 million. The startup, which has accelerated from selling 100 units over five years to approaching 1,000 units, plans to use the capital to scale manufacturing and hiring to meet growing demand from cleaning companies and other infrastructure maintenance customers.
Zoox and Wing are aggressively expanding their autonomous service footprints across multiple cities despite operating in a regulatory gray area with unclear unit economics. This expansion-first strategy reveals a concerning bet that market dominance will precede—and perhaps substitute for—actual business viability.
The article discusses how the US military may use generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Grok to rank targets and recommend strike priorities, with human oversight required for final decisions. It also covers tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic's Claude over policy concerns, as well as Ukraine's efforts to provide battlefield data for AI training of drones and other autonomous systems.
The article examines Skyward Wildfire, a Canadian startup using AI-enabled technology and metallic chaff to prevent lightning-sparked wildfires before they ignite. While the company claims it can reduce ignition risk on high-risk days, experts debate whether preventing all lightning strikes is ecologically sound, since fire plays a natural role in many ecosystems and prescribed burns are often more effective at reducing catastrophic wildfire risk.
Carnegie Mellon University officially opened its new Robotics Innovation Center, a facility designed to serve as a hub for collaborative robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence research and development. The center features advanced quadruped robots and drone technology, positioning CMU to advance breakthroughs in these fields.
UK defence research organisation Dstl has developed the Single Information Environment (SInfoE) architecture to solve military interoperability challenges, enabling rapid data sharing across radar, satellites, drones, and AI systems. The architecture was successfully demonstrated in July 2024 during the ARCHERON trial, where Royal Navy, Army, and RAF systems were integrated with industry drones, reducing integration time from months to hours while maintaining NATO compatibility standards.
Walmart and Wing announced a major expansion of their drone delivery partnership, launching operations from five Walmart locations in the Houston area as part of a plan to add 150 store locations across the southern U.S. The autonomous delivery drones use AI-powered route planning and obstacle avoidance technology, with the partnership already completing hundreds of thousands of missions and approximately 1,000 daily deliveries in existing Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta markets.
The Department of Homeland Security posted a promotional video for its new drone program highlighting American air superiority, but the footage inadvertently revealed DHS agents using DJI remote controllers—Chinese-made drones that the Trump administration has officially banned. The embarrassing oversight exposes a contradiction between the government's stated anti-China drone policy and its actual operational practices for homeland security operations.
Unifly, a Terra Drones subsidiary, has completed FAA-led validation of Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) safety standards for commercial drone operations through the ASSURE A68 project. The project demonstrated how Unifly's UAS Traffic Management (UTM) platform can support collision avoidance capabilities and establish safety thresholds for Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations, providing validated technical specifications to inform future regulatory frameworks for autonomous aircraft.
Meteomatics has partnered with NOAA's National Mesonet Program to integrate autonomous weather drone data into U.S. National Weather Service forecasts for the first time, collecting atmospheric measurements between 50 and 20,000 feet to fill critical data gaps in the lower atmosphere. A pilot program running from February through April 2026 will deploy Meteodrones from Oklahoma to provide high-resolution temperature, humidity, and wind data to improve forecast accuracy for severe weather, fog, and precipitation events.
Researchers at Skoltech have developed SwarmDiffusion, a lightweight generative AI model that enables robots to navigate unknown environments using only a single image, eliminating the need for traditional mapping and heavy path planning algorithms. The diffusion-based approach can generalize across different robot platforms (drones, quadrupeds, wheeled robots) with minimal platform-specific training data, representing a significant advancement in autonomous navigation using modern AI techniques.
The FAA has announced two new UAS Test Sites in Oklahoma and Indiana, marking the first federal drone test ranges added in nearly a decade. These sites will advance research on Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations, autonomous systems, and advanced air mobility technologies, with testing focused on cargo delivery, infrastructure inspection, and emergency response applications.
By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill (Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories on efforts to establish new counter-UAS protocols in the U.S. to protect high-profile sporting events and critical infrastructure from the potential threats posed by drones flown by careless or hostile actors. The first installment examined a government push […] The post Kansas, Missouri Funding Counter-UAS at World Cup Events appeared first on DRONELIFE.
University of Maryland's Crossfire team is competing in an XPrize competition to develop autonomous drones that can rapidly detect and suppress wildfires, with the final round scheduled for June 2026 offering a $3.5 million prize. The competition challenges teams to locate and extinguish fires within 1,000 square kilometers of challenging terrain in under 10 minutes, representing a significant advancement in wildfire response technology. The initiative emerged from the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in California and aims to provide firefighting agencies with powerful new autonomous tools.
Point One Navigation, a San Francisco-based startup, raised $35 million in Series C funding led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its valuation to $230 million. The company has developed precise location technology using augmented GNSS, computer vision, and sensor fusion that achieves centimeter-level accuracy for autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones, and agricultural equipment, with over 150,000 vehicles already deployed and tenfold growth in manufacturer adoption over the past year.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few month...
Drones and Droids is a co-operative strategy game developed here at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS). In it, you and four other sentient beings set out on the deck of the research ve...
Claire chatted to Jane Pauline Ramos Ramirez from Delft University of Technology about drones that can move on land and in the air. Jane Pauline Ramos Ramirez is a licensed engineer with a multidiscip...
The brown haze that settled over Pittsburgh and other U.S. cities last summer was merely an irritant to most residents, but for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI), it...
When it comes to search-and-rescue missions, dogs are second to none, but an Amazon Research Award recipient says they might have competition from drones.
