Insect-like drones have taken one large step closer to becoming a practical reality. Researchers at Harvard, MIT and the City University of Hong Kong have developed tiny insect-inspired drones that can not only maneuver in extremely tight spaces, but withstand bumps if things go wrong. The key is a switch to an actuation system that can flap the drones' wings while surviving its share of abuse. To date, drone makers wanting to go this small have had to ditch motors (which lose effectiveness at small sizes) in favor of piezoelectric ceramic-based rigid actuators. The new drones rely on soft actuators made from rubber cylinders coated with carbon nanotubes.

Drones have become a hit with consumers during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, market leader DJI has a new remote-controlled recreational drone that is easier to take on a first-person spin. To fly the DJI FPV (first-person view) drone, available today for $1,299, just don goggles and take in the scenic view as your high-speed drone zips along as fast as 87 mph. You can also control the drone with your hand motions by using a motion controller, sold separately for $199. Until now, most first-person view drones were hand-built or had goggles sold separately.

Drone maker DJI's new first-person view drone lets you pilot the speedy drone while wearing goggles.

As leaks suggested, DJI is releasing a cinematic first-person view drone that works with its FPV Goggles. The FPV comes with the latest version of the goggles and there's an optional one-handed motion controller. The company is calling it a hybrid drone that blends elements of cinematic FPV devices and racing drones, but it leans more toward the former category. The company is hoping to make first-person drone flying more accessible by bringing its features to a cinewhoop-style drone. The DJI Virtual Flight app should help beginners practice before they actually start flying.

Inside a building GPS does not work. We use a combination of global mapping and local mapping… it is very very complex. This recording was made possible by (Hessen Trade and Invest). Doks.innovation is not a hardware startup, they only provide Benjamin has spent some time after university in marketing and consulting for some smaller and also well-known companies like Leica. Learn about our interviews hours before they are released, help in the selection of the startups we interview or even suggest startups to be interviewed, by becoming a Patron: https://buff.ly/32bZ4zW

Drones are being used to carry Covid-19 test samples and other medical materials up to 40 miles (64km) across four locations in western Scotland. London drone firm Skyports has become the first operator to receive permission from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to carry diagnostic specimens by drone. Cargo – including test samples, medicine, personal protective equipment (PPE) and Covid-19 testing kits – is being transported by the drones in the Argyll & Bute region. A whole fleet of the drones are carrying up to 3kg of the supplies each, improving services for patients and healthcare staff in one of the UK's most remote areas. Drones can complete a journey that takes a whopping 36 hours by road and ferry to just 15 minutes, while increasing the frequency of pick-ups.

The US Army is developing its most powerful laser yet that is a million times more powerful than current systems. Most laser weapons fire a continuous beam until a target melts or catches fire, but the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser (UPSL) for Army Platforms will emit short, pulse-like bursts. Its being designed to reach a terawatt for a brief 200 femtoseconds, which is one quadrillionth of a second, compared to the 150-kilowatt maximum of current systems. It's also thought such a burst would disrupt nearby electronics systems, making it a functional electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The US military group is aiming to have a working prototype by August 2022.

Congress should pass reform legislation that would establish a Technology Innovation Fund for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to enable robotic last-mile postal delivery, a new report states. "Of particular promise are sorting and delivery robots, which could sort mail, including into local delivery orders, deliver mail to homes, or both," according to "A New Vision for Postal Reform in the E-commerce Age," a Feb. 11 report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). "One could imagine a postal worker driving to particular routes with a fleet of 10 or so robots, letting each one off to'walk' a particular mail route, and then picking them back up at the end of the route." This funding would help support innovation at USPS, the report states, likening the approach to those at the Defense Department and NASA, which get federal funding for automation and robotics research. Although robotics is not sophisticated or inexpensive enough yet to sort and deliver mail, progress is happening.

This week's biggest story continues to be the Perseverance rover. NASA's latest space robot has brought another Linux device to Mars, and is already sending back some impressive pictures. We'll have to wait a little longer for HD video and the first drone flight -- beware of fake videos circulating on social media -- but next week should be even better. Until then you can always catch up on WandaVision's bite-size episodes, and make sure you stick around after the credits start to roll. Blizzard's online-only convention is going on this weekend, and the opening keynotes provided plenty of info about upcoming games.

We consider the problem of routing a large fleet of drones to deliver packages simultaneously across broad urban areas. Besides flying directly, drones can use public transit vehicles such as buses and trams as temporary modes of transportation to conserve energy. Adding this capability to our formulation augments effective drone travel range and the space of possible deliveries but also increases problem input size due to the large transit networks. We present a comprehensive algorithmic framework that strives to minimize the maximum time to complete any delivery and addresses the multifaceted computational challenges of our problem through a two-layer approach. First, the upper layer assigns drones to package delivery sequences with an approximately optimal polynomial time allocation algorithm. Then, the lower layer executes the allocation by periodically routing the fleet over the transit network, using efficient, bounded suboptimal multi-agent pathfinding techniques tailored to our setting. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on simulations with up to 200 drones, 5000 packages, and transit networks with up to 8000 stops in San Francisco and the Washington DC Metropolitan Area. Our framework computes solutions for most settings within a few seconds on commodity hardware and enables drones to extend their effective range by a factor of nearly four using transit.