SAN FRANCISCO – The next step in regulating, and potentially expanding, drone use in the U.S. hit a deadline Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration was slated to receive recommendations on very small drones. As consumers and the industry surge forward with ideas for what they want to do with drones, the FAA is still working on the details on how these new devices, dubbed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) or UAS (unmanned aerial systems), will be treated. The report due to the FAA comes from the Micro UAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee, or the ARC. Its charter was to come up with recommendations for the FAA covering "micro UAS," or drones weighing less than 4.4 pounds. That size of drone includes everything from small, inexpensive toy drones to 3,000, film set quality flying cameras.

A U.S. drone strike in Somalia "most likely" killed Hassan Ali Dhoore, a senior leader of the terror group al-Shabab who had planned attacks that killed three Americans overseas, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News Friday. Dhoore was riding in a vehicle with two other al-Shabab members Thursday evening when the strike took place about 20 miles south of Jilib in southern Somalia, according to a senior U.S. defense official. The Pentagon had been watching him off and on for a long time, the senior official adds, saying the Somali government was involved in sharing information that led to this strike. U.S. officials say Dhoore helped facilitate a deadly Christmas Day 2014 attack at a Somali airport and a March 2015 attack at the Maka Al-Mukarramah Hotel, both in Mogadishu. U.S. citizens were among those killed in the two attacks, the officials said.

President Barack Obama is acknowledging that "civilians have been killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but says the administration is now "very cautious" about taking strikes where women or children are present. Asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in several drone strikes against extremist targets in Libya, Syria and Somalia, Obama said the "legal architecture" around the use of drone strikes in the past hasn't been precise. But in the last several years, he says, the administration has worked hard to prevent civilian deaths. He says the U.S. has to take responsibility when it is not acting appropriately. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

One of the top leaders of an al Qaeda-affiliated terror organization in Somalia was killed Thursday when the U.S. military launched an airstrike from a drone, the Pentagon says. The al-Shabab official, Hassan Ali Dhoore, was specifically targeted by U.S. forces for his alleged role in two separate attacks in the capital city of Mogadishu, according to a U.S. Defense Department statement Friday. The airstrike was sanctioned by and conducted in concert with the Somali government, and although additional details of the bombing were not immediately available, the Pentagon asserted that Dhoore's confirmed death deals "a significant blow to al-Shabab's operational planning and ability to conduct attacks against the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia, its citizens, U.S. partners in the region, and against Americans abroad." The news of Dhoore's demise comes about three weeks after another airstrike against the militant group, when up to 150 al-Shabab members were killed at a training camp in Somalia. Al-Shabab denied the U.S. account, but the Somali prime minister's office confirmed the airstrike.

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.

A U.S. drone strike in Somalia has killed a key leader of the al-Shabab militant group who was involved in two attacks in Mogadishu more than a year ago, killing Americans, several U.S. officials said Friday. Hassan Ali Dhoore and two others were killed in the strike Thursday about 20 miles south of Jilib in southern Somalia not far from the Kenya border, the officials said. They said Dhoore helped facilitate a deadly Christmas Day 2014 attack at the airport and a March 2015 attack at the Maka al-Mukarramah Hotel, both in Mogadishu. U.S. citizens were among those killed in the two attacks, the officials said. One senior official also said that Dhoore was believed to be involved in plotting more attacks that would have targeted U.S. citizens.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

Today's robots are far smarter and more capable than the clumsy and awkward robots of the 1980s and 1990s. And although we have a long way to go before autonomous robots reach the sophistication of TV science fiction, we do seem to be getting closer. Engineers, entrepreneurs and academics from the US and UK met this week to think out loud about the past, present and future of robotics during a conference hosted by the British Consulate General, a short walk from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The robotics and artificial intelligence sectors will be a 2.6 trillion industry by 2020, according to the consulate, with robots playing an ever-larger role in healthcare, military and autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and surface/underwater drones. I went to the conference to investigate a simple question: are the robots we're researching, designing and building today secure against hackers?

The Pentagon, the world's largest user of drones, has posted a new policy on signs outside the mammoth five-sided building: No Drone Zone. The signs, complete with a red slash through an image of a quadcopter drone, reflect America's growing concern about the proliferation of the small, inexpensive remote-controlled devices and the risk they pose to safety, security and privacy. Federal law prohibits flying a drone anywhere in and around Washington, an area known as the National Capital Region. Other communities and institutions across the country are wrestling with the potential threat from more than 400,000 private and commercial drones now registered to operate in the skies. The pilot of a commercial jetliner said his plane nearly collided with a drone while approaching Los Angeles International Airport on Friday afternoon, sparking a search by L.A. police and sheriff's officials for the owner of the unmanned aircraft.

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.