The e-commerce giant has had its sights set on drone delivery for years. Amazon is betting big on drone delivery -- again. The company's recently granted patent, titled "Unmanned aerial vehicle with ports configured to receive swappable components," shows how Amazon will customize UAVs before they take off on their routes. The patent highlights drones that can be outfitted with sensors, batteries, lights, speakers, and more, based on specific flight or delivery requirements. These items can be "swapped out" as needed for future missions.

An open-source disaster response tool that uses visual recognition and learns through artificial intelligence and cloud tools began as an idea that a self-taught developer had at IBM's Call for Code hackathon in Puerto Rico last year. IBM announced DroneAid on Oct. 2 as an open-source project through Code and Response, the company's $25 million program dedicated to the creation and deployment of open-source solutions tackling real-world problems. DroneAid uses visual recognition technology to detect and count SOS icons on the ground gleaned from drone video streams and automatically plots the emergency needs on a map for first responders. Developer Pedro Cruz had planned to use optical character recognition to detect messages, but reading different handwriting and languages complicated that approach. Instead, the tool relies on a subset of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' 500 humanitarian icons – symbols that DroneAid can learn and first responders can quickly understand.

Oculus co-founder has designed a drone that is capable of seeking out its targets and ramming them head on in order to destroy them. In a video demonstration, Interceptor seeks out its opponent and charges at it 100 miles per hour, ultimately hurdling both of them to the ground. The company claims it is capable of neutralizing threats in any environment, day or night, and according to its creator, the device'almost always survives and returns to base.' Interceptor is the brainchild of Anduril, which was founded by Palmer Luckey who also co-founded Oculus - the Facebook owned company that designs virtual reality technology. 'The best way to kill fast drones piloted by hostile humans is with even faster drones piloted by AI!' said Luckey on Twitter. 'The United States cannot allow the skies of the world to turn into the Wild West, our ability to take out aerial threats in a matter of seconds is part of the solution.'

AAR (NYSE: AIR), a leading aviation services provider to commercial airlines and governments worldwide, has announced the integration of Donecle drone technology into its award-winning maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations. AAR s Miami MRO facility is the first in its global network to use the fully automated drone technology to drive operational and cost efficiencies, where the pilot phase has yielded increases in speed and precision. With laser positioning, the drone can safely perform end-to-end visual inspections of B737 and A320 aircraft in under an hour. "In exploring opportunities to increase efficiencies and best utilize our skilled workforce, AAR continually assesses opportunities to digitally enable our businesses," said Rahul Ghai, AAR Chief Digital Officer. "In the case of our MRO sites, our investments in technologies like drones, machine learning and mobile devices will drive a more efficient operation, optimized technician schedules, as well as improved turnaround times achieved through faster and more accurate inspections and maintenance plan execution. This will lead to ultimately higher customer satisfaction, while helping us build out richer data to enhance our overall maintenance planning and execution capabilities."

White sharks are being spotted off the Pacific coast more than ever before. A 2014 study found that, at minimum, California's shark population now exceeds 2,000. And the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reports that since 1950, there's been at least 158 documented cases where a shark approached a person in the water, 44 of which occurred since 2010. Those numbers are at best rough estimates -- tracking shark encounters is an imperfect science largely reliant on first-hand reports. But members of Salesforce's Einstein AI team and oceanographers at the University of California's nonprofit Benioff Ocean Initiative say they've developed a better solution in a system that susses out great whites from drone footage.

"We're here to watch as robotics evolve beyond humanity." Since 2016, the human pilots of the Drone Racing League have competed to see who could whip a quadcopter around pylons and through hoops the fastest. On Tuesday, they'll get a new challenge: the fully autonomous RacerAI, a drone programmed to fly itself. Nine teams of programmers from around the world have have been coding for months to come up with the best software to control the Drone Racing League-designed RacerAI. Their work, along with the drone itself, will debut at the Addition Financial Arena in Orlando, Florida. The software needs to take advantage of the drone's four cameras, four propellers and Nvidia processor.

London design studio Sample & Hold has been asked to scan all kinds of things: a shoe, a carrot, the heads of every member of the Barcelona FC team. The firm has even worked with a company in Knightsbridge, London, that makes casts of babies' feet and heads. "Occasionally they have a client who wants a head scan of their kid," explains Sample & Hold director Sam Jackson. Those scans have been used for bronze casts of the child's head, and the 3D scan speeds up that process. Sample & Hold doesn't need lasers to do this 3D scanning.

Raw video: Cuyahoga County Jail security footage shows an inmate attempting to catch marijuana and a cell phone that was dropped from a drone. Earlier this year, we learned that Martin Shkreli, a conman and convicted felon, was secretly running an investment company from prison using a contraband cell phone. Shkreli, also known as the "Pharma Bro," achieved infamy in 2015 for jacking up the price of a medicine needed by a small group of very sick patients to enrich himself and his investors. He was convicted of fraud in 2017 and sent to prison. Prison is supposed to keep criminals out of our communities, but as Shkreli's example shows, contraband cell phones allow inmates to continue their crime sprees from behind bars.

In 2017 the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution teamed up with the Government of Rwanda to draft the world's first framework for governing drones at scale. Using a performance-based approach that set minimum safety requirements instead of equipment specifications, this innovative regulatory framework gave drone manufacturers the flexibility to design and test different types of drones. These drones have delivered life-saving vaccines, conducted agricultural land surveys, inspected infrastructure and had many other socially beneficial uses in Rwanda.

Meanwhile, other prominent companies on the Top 10 list include manufacturers like GoPro and 3DR who no longer produce hardware, and hobbyist manufacturers like Holy Stone whose platforms are not suitable replacements for these use cases. Moreover, as many have already noted, it will be difficult for the public sector with its budget limitations to replace DJI drones at the same or even competing price point. Currently it seems like European and American companies are poised to take up the helm, most specifically Parrot. Their Anafi drone appears to already be part of the DoI's'UAS Fleet' which means that they are a likely candidate for the replacements for the 600 DJI drones that would be removed from operations.