"Drone delivery is a sexy thing to talk about, but it's not realistic to think we're going to see drones flying all over the sky dropping pizzas into everyone's backyards anytime soon," said Ido Levanon, the managing director of Dragontail Systems Ltd., the technology firm coordinating Pizza Hut's drone trial. Pizza chains and tech startups have spent years sketching visions of food descending from the sky instead of being yanked from the back of a moped or car. Drones would zip above road traffic, widen restaurants' delivery areas and cost less than human drivers. In 2016, a Domino's Pizza Inc. franchisee flew a drone over Whangaparaoa, New Zealand, and deposited two pizzas--peri-peri chicken and chicken and cranberry--into the backyard of Emma and Johnny Norman. Get weekly insights into the ways companies optimize data, technology and design to drive success with their customers and employees.

Farms and other agricultural operations in certain rural areas in the US can now use robotic drones to take images of or gather data on their crops. The FAA has approved Massachusetts-based American Robotics' request to be able to deploy automated drones without human pilots and spotters on site. As The Wall Street Journal notes, commercial drone flights typically require the physical presence of licensed pilots making them a costly undertaking. AR's machine eliminates the need for on-site personnel, though each automated flight will still need to be overseen by a remote human pilot. According to the relevant documents (via The Verge) the FAA has uploaded on its website, the pilot "who is not co-located with the aircraft" will have to conduct pre-flight safety checks to ensure the drone is in working condition.

DJI's Mini 2, as the name suggests, is the second generation of the company's least-expensive, and in many ways most-compelling, drone. What's notable is the new camera, which can now shoot 4K video at up to 30 frames per second and capture RAW still images. Its new motors are more powerful, which gives the Mini 2 more speed and, more important, better performance in the wind. Despite all the new features though, the best thing about the Mini 2 is the same thing I said about its predecessor--it's just plain fun to fly. The Mini 2 looks identical to Mavic Mini it replaces.

U.S. aviation regulators have approved the first fully automated commercial drone flights, granting a small Massachusetts-based company permission to operate drones without hands-on piloting or direct observation by human controllers or observers. The decision by the Federal Aviation Administration limits operation of automated drones to rural areas and altitudes below 400 feet, but is a potentially significant step in expanding commercial applications of drones for farmers, utilities, mining companies and other customers. It also represents another step in the FAA's broader effort to authorize widespread flights by shifting away from case-by-case exemptions for specific vehicles performing specific tasks. In approval documents posted on a government website Thursday, the FAA said that once such automated drone operations are conducted on a wider scale, they could mean "efficiencies to many of the industries that fuel our economy such as agriculture, mining, transportation" and certain manufacturing segments. The FAA previously allowed drones to inspect railroad tracks, pipelines and some industrial sites beyond the sight of pilots or spotters on the ground as long as such individuals were located relatively close by.

Entangled photons have been sent between two drones hovering a kilometre apart, demonstrating technology that could form the building blocks of a quantum internet. When a pair of photons are quantum entangled, you can instantly deduce the state of one by measuring the other, regardless of the distance separating them. This phenomenon, which Albert Einstein dismissively called "spooky action at a distance", is the basis of quantum encryption – using entangled particles to ensure communications are secret. Quantum networks are far more secure than the existing internet because any attempt to eavesdrop changes the state of the photons, alerting the recipient to foul play. Entangled photons have been transported more than 1000 kilometres in tests between a satellite and ground stations before, but now Zhenda Xie at Nanjing University in China and his colleagues have shown that links can be made over shorter distances with relatively inexpensive hardware.

A Los Angeles man admitted in federal court Thursday that he flew a drone that struck a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter that was responding to a crime scene in Hollywood. Andrew Rene Hernandez, 22, made the admission in pleading guilty to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft, a misdemeanor. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said Hernandez is believed to be the first person in the country to be convicted of that offense, which carries a punishment of up to one year in prison. In his plea agreement, Hernandez admitted that he "recklessly interfered with and disrupted" the operation of the LAPD helicopter, which was responding to a burglary of a pharmacy, and that his actions "posed an imminent safety hazard" to the chopper's occupants. Reached by phone Thursday, Hernandez declined to comment.

The need to accurately estimate the speed of road vehicles is becoming increasingly important for at least two main reasons. First, the number of speed cameras installed worldwide has been growing in recent years, as the introduction and enforcement of appropriate speed limits is considered one of the most effective means to increase the road safety. Second, traffic monitoring and forecasting in road networks plays a fundamental role to enhance traffic, emissions and energy consumption in smart cities, being the speed of the vehicles one of the most relevant parameters of the traffic state. Among the technologies available for the accurate detection of vehicle speed, the use of vision-based systems brings great challenges to be solved, but also great potential advantages, such as the drastic reduction of costs due to the absence of expensive range sensors, and the possibility of identifying vehicles accurately. This paper provides a review of vision-based vehicle speed estimation. We describe the terminology, the application domains, and propose a complete taxonomy of a large selection of works that categorizes all stages involved. An overview of performance evaluation metrics and available datasets is provided. Finally, we discuss current limitations and future directions.

Edge computing-enhanced Internet of Vehicles (EC-IoV) enables ubiquitous data processing and content sharing among vehicles and terrestrial edge computing (TEC) infrastructures (e.g., 5G base stations and roadside units) with little or no human intervention, plays a key role in the intelligent transportation systems. However, EC-IoV is heavily dependent on the connections and interactions between vehicles and TEC infrastructures, thus will break down in some remote areas where TEC infrastructures are unavailable (e.g., desert, isolated islands and disaster-stricken areas). Driven by the ubiquitous connections and global-area coverage, space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) efficiently support seamless coverage and efficient resource management, represent the next frontier for edge computing. In light of this, we first review the state-of-the-art edge computing research for SAGINs in this article. After discussing several existing orbital and aerial edge computing architectures, we propose a framework of edge computing-enabled space-air-ground integrated networks (EC-SAGINs) to support various IoV services for the vehicles in remote areas. The main objective of the framework is to minimize the task completion time and satellite resource usage. To this end, a pre-classification scheme is presented to reduce the size of action space, and a deep imitation learning (DIL) driven offloading and caching algorithm is proposed to achieve real-time decision making. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. At last, we also discuss some technology challenges and future directions.

Robotics researchers at the University of Zurich show how onboard cameras can be used to keep damaged quadcopters in the air and flying stably – even without GPS. As anxious passengers are often reassured, commercial aircrafts can easily continue to fly even if one of the engines stops working. But for drones with four propellers – also known as quadcopters – the failure of one motor is a bigger problem. With only three rotors working, the drone loses stability and inevitably crashes unless an emergency control strategy sets in. Researchers at the University of Zurich and the Delft University of Technology have now found a solution to this problem: They show that information from onboard cameras can be used to stabilize the drone and keep it flying autonomously after one rotor suddenly gives out.

From smartphones to TVs, Sony is known for its impressive range of electronic products. Now, the tech giant is turning its attention to drones, launching a new spin-off brand called Airpeak. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone that can be equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system. Sony hopes its new drones will support the creativity of video creators, and is even seeking collaborators to participate in the Airpeak project. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system The Airpeak model shown off at CES features a quadcopter design, with two landing gear extensions that retract upwards during flight.