The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is still working to figure out the best way of making sure that people fly their drones safely and legally. It's very much a work in progress, and has been for years. At this point, anyone who wants to fly a drone weighing more than 250 grams (even just for fun in the backyard) must register that drone and follow some generally common sense rules and regulations. The FAA, to their credit, has been keeping track of how this has all been going, and late last week they announced a few important updates. The new change that will affect everyone is that all drones are now required to display registration information externally.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German Defense Ministry on Wednesday said it is evaluating separate bids from NATO and Canada to buy a high-altitude surveillance drone that has been parked at a German air base for years after the cancellation of the Euro Hawk program in 2013.

NASA is ready to put its drone traffic management system to the ultimate test and has chosen Nevada and Texas as its final testing sites. The agency, together with the FAA, has been developing an Unmanned aircraft Traffic Management (UTM) system over the past four years in an effort to figure out how to safely fly drones in an urban environment. Now that the project is in its last phase, it has teamed up with the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems in Las Vegas and the Lone Star UAS Center for Excellence & Innovation in Corpus Christi, Texas to conduct a final series of technical demonstrations. NASA and the FAA are planning to demo a big list of technologies, including their interface with vehicle-integrated detect-and-avoid capabilities, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and collision avoidance, as well as automated safe landing technologies. All those will help NASA understand the challenges of flying in an urban environment and conjure up ideas for future rules and policies.

The no-fly zone for drones around airports is to be extended following the disruption at Gatwick in December, the government says. From 13 March it will be illegal to fly a drone within three miles of an airport, rather than the current 0.6-mile (1km) exclusion zone. The government also said it wants police to have new stop and search powers to tackle drone misuse. Gatwick was shut for more than a day after drone sightings near the runway. It caused chaos for travellers, affecting more than 1,000 flights and about 140,000 passengers.

The students have developed drones that fly together like a flock or swarm of birds without any manual control. Each drone measures 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) wide and has a thermal camera and sensors that detect nitrogen levels in fertilizer. Farmers would use the drones as a unit to more evenly disperse nutrients on fields, KOTA-TV reported.

Flight departures from Dubai International, which handled around 90 million passengers last year, were suspended between 10:13 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. The incident, a Dubai official said, was caused by "a guy in the desert" operating a drone. It wasn't immediately clear if the person was apprehended. Although operating a drone without a license is illegal, individuals often fly their drones in the open space of the desert, in part to take pictures in the often scenic setting. The suspension came only weeks after U.S. regulators halted flights at Newark Liberty International Airport after a drone was spotted near another New Jersey airport.

Dubai International Airport is the latest to halt flights over a drone scare following similar incidents at London's Gatwick and Heathrow. The world's third-busiest airport temporarily stopped operations for just under 30 minutes due to "unauthorized drone activity," according to a tweet from the Dubai Media Office. Incoming flights were permitted to land during the disruption, reports The New York Times, which occurred between 10.15AM and 10.45AM local time. Operations are now reportedly back to normal. "Dubai Airports has worked closely with the appropriate authorities to ensure that the safety of airport operations is maintained at all times and to minimize any inconvenience to our customers," the airport said.

Drone manufacturer DJI announced today that it is updating the geofencing system it uses in Europe to prevent drone pilots from flying the unmanned aircraft in places where they don't belong. The updated Geospatial Environment Online (GEO) 2.0 system will be introduced in 19 European countries and is expected to roll out over the course of this month. According to DJI, the GEO 2.0 system creates stronger boundaries around airports to keep drones from interrupting flight plans. It will place 3/4th of a mile boundaries around runways and will fence off flight paths at the end of the runway where planes take off and land. The geofenced boundaries are based on recommendations from the Civil International Organization's standards for airspace safety.

If your vision of the flying future involves whooshing about in an air taxi while chuckling at the car-bound suckers below, Elroy Air is not here to help. But if you dream of a world of smooth logistics, where emergency supplies, firefighting chemicals, and all the crap you order online moves through the world faster and cheaper than ever, then 2019 might be your year. "We're developing a big cargo drone," says Elroy CEO Dave Merrill. One that will carry 500 pounds and fly 300 miles at a time. One he intends to start testing this year, and to put into service come 2020.

Researchers at the University of Colorado recently demonstrated a system that helps robots figure out the direction of hiking trails from camera footage, and scientists at ETH Zurich described in a January paper a machine learning framework that aids four-legged robots in getting up from the ground when they trip and fall. But might such AI perform just as proficiently when applied to a drone rather than machines planted firmly on the ground? A team at the University of California at Berkeley set out to find out. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv ("Generalization through Simulation: Integrating Simulated and Real Data into Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Autonomous Flight"), the team proposes a "hybrid" deep reinforcement learning algorithm that combines data from both a digital simulation and the real world to guide a quadcopter through carpeted corridors. "In this work, we … aim to devise a transfer learning algorithm where the physical behavior of the vehicle is learned," the paper's authors wrote. "In essence, real-world experience is used to learn how to fly, while simulated experience is used to learn how to generalize."