A drone captures spectacular images as lava spews from Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano.

Some Samsung customers in Ireland will receive their orders through a courier that can take to the skies and reach them within a few minutes. The tech giant has teamed up with Manna Drone Delivery to make, well, drone delivery an option for Irish customers, so long as they're purchasing the latest Galaxy devices. Eligible models include the S21 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds Pro, the Galaxy Tab S7, the Galaxy Watch 3 and the Galaxy A Series. In addition, orders must be placed via Samsung's Irish website, and the option only available for customers based in a town called Oranmore at the moment. Manna uses customized aerospace grade drones that can fly at an altitude of 164 to 262 feet and at speeds exceeding 60 kph (37 mph).

Israeli startup Airwayz Drones Ltd., set up by veterans of the Israeli airforce, has developed software that knows how to safely steer hundreds of drones in the same airspace, orchestrating them in the sky autonomously, just as a traditional human-manned air traffic control station would. The technology of the Israeli company Airwayz managed some 20 drones from five companies simultaneously on Wednesday in the sky over an unpopulated area of the northern coastal city of Hadera. It was the first stage of a two-year initiative that is being touted by the Israel Innovation Authority and its partners in the event as one of the largest drone experiments ever conducted in the world. "This is one of the most progressive experiments in the world, in which drones from many companies are flying in a open and not controlled area," said Daniella Partem, head of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the Israel Innovation Authority, which is in charge of fostering the nation's tech ecosystem. Get The Start-Up Israel's Daily Start-Up by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up The purpose of the large-scale government-backed experiment is to understand what our skies will look like in the future, as hundreds and thousands of drones pepper our firmament to meet various needs -- online deliveries, photography, security, agriculture and more.

Simi Valley police arrested a man who they say was operating a drone with a bag of heroin onboard. John Piani, 51, was taken into custody Friday in the 900 block of Enchanted Way on suspicion of selling heroin and methamphetamine, the police department said in a news release. During his arrest, investigators recovered a drone he was operating and found attached to it a bag of what is believed to be heroin, police said. The investigation is continuing to determine whether Piani was using the drone to sell drugs, police said. Piani was being held at the Ventura County Jail in lieu of $125,000 bail on suspicion of two counts of possessing a controlled substance for sale and one count of controlled substance possession, jail records state.

This paper presents and discusses algorithms, hardware, and software architecture developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), competing in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, it presents the techniques utilized within the Tunnel (2019) and Urban (2020) competitions, where CoSTAR achieved 2nd and 1st place, respectively. We also discuss CoSTAR's demonstrations in Martian-analog surface and subsurface (lava tubes) exploration. The paper introduces our autonomy solution, referred to as NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy). NeBula is an uncertainty-aware framework that aims at enabling resilient and modular autonomy solutions by performing reasoning and decision making in the belief space (space of probability distributions over the robot and world states). We discuss various components of the NeBula framework, including: (i) geometric and semantic environment mapping; (ii) a multi-modal positioning system; (iii) traversability analysis and local planning; (iv) global motion planning and exploration behavior; (i) risk-aware mission planning; (vi) networking and decentralized reasoning; and (vii) learning-enabled adaptation. We discuss the performance of NeBula on several robot types (e.g. wheeled, legged, flying), in various environments. We discuss the specific results and lessons learned from fielding this solution in the challenging courses of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge competition.

Editor's note: This research was conducted by Sai Vemprala, Senior Researcher, and Ashish Kapoor, Partner Researcher, of Microsoft Research along with Sami Mian, who was a PhD Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and an intern at Microsoft at the time of the work. Autonomous systems are composed of complex perception-action loops, where observations of the world need to be processed in real time to result in safe and effective actions. A significant amount of research has focused on creating perception and navigation algorithms for such systems, often using visual data from cameras to reason about which action to take depending on the platform and task at hand. While there have been a lot of improvements in how this reasoning is performed, and how information can be extracted efficiently from camera imagery, there are a number of challenges when it comes to achieving autonomous systems that receive and process information both accurately and quickly enough for applications in real-world scenarios. These challenges include the speed limitations posed by commercial off-the-shelf cameras, data that is unseen during training of vision models, and the limitations of sensors in RGB camera sensors.

Collision-free path planning is an essential requirement for autonomous exploration in unknown environments, especially when operating in confined spaces or near obstacles. This study presents an autonomous exploration technique using a small drone. A local end-point selection method is designed using LiDAR range measurement and then generates the path from the current position to the selected end-point. The generated path shows the consistent collision-free path in real-time by adopting the Euclidean signed distance field-based grid-search method. The simulation results consistently showed the safety, and reliability of the proposed path-planning method. Real-world experiments are conducted in three different mines, demonstrating successful autonomous exploration flight in environments with various structural conditions. The results showed the high capability of the proposed flight autonomy framework for lightweight aerial-robot systems. Besides, our drone performs an autonomous mission during our entry at the Tunnel Circuit competition (Phase 1) of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

In many robotic tasks, such as drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the minimum-time trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming perfect knowledge of the waypoints to pass in advance. The resulting solutions are either highly specialized for a single-track layout, or suboptimal due to simplifying assumptions about the platform dynamics. In this work, a new approach to minimum-time trajectory generation for quadrotors is presented. Leveraging deep reinforcement learning and relative gate observations, this approach can adaptively compute near-time-optimal trajectories for random track layouts. Our method exhibits a significant computational advantage over approaches based on trajectory optimization for non-trivial track configurations. The proposed approach is evaluated on a set of race tracks in simulation and the real world, achieving speeds of up to 17 m/s with a physical quadrotor.

The FAA just set dates for when its tightened drone rules will take effect, and some measures will kick in sooner than others. The regulator has revealed that Remote ID and Operations Over People rules will start taking effect as of April 21st, 2021. From then on, you'll have to list the serial number of any Remote ID drone or add-on module in your registration. You can fly small (under 0.55lbs) drones over people if they have protected blades, but you can't conduct sustained flight over open-air assemblies unless you comply with Remote ID. Other, heavier drones have stricter operational and performance requirements, such as limits on the amount of force they'd deliver in a crash.

We've just seen the worst wildfire season on record in the United States, resulting in more than 8 million acres of land burned. On average, the world loses 18.8 million acres of forest to fires every year. Getting all that forest replanted and back to converting carbon dioxide is crucial to the environment, but in practice, it's a costly and slow process. Seattle-based DroneSeed uses swarms of large, proprietary drones to carry seeds to burned areas and plant them in spots where they're most likely to grow well. The seeds are delivered in "vessels" designed to keep the seed hydrated and protected from animals.