All major UK airports now have or will soon have military grade anti-drone equipment, the government says. It comes after the military were called in to help when drone sightings caused delays for around an hour at Heathrow on Tuesday. And drone sightings at Gatwick caused major disruption affecting 140,000 passengers before Christmas. Earlier, the defence secretary said it would "not be right" to ask the RAF to respond to similar incidents in future. Gavin Williamson said all commercial airports needed to invest in anti-drone technology.

Departing flights have been grounded there Tuesday after a report of a drone sighting. Flights scheduled to depart from the busiest airport in Britain were suspended Tuesday amid a reported drone sighting near the runways -- less than three weeks after a similar incident in the area caused chaos during the Christmas travel period. The suspensions at London Heathrow Airport on Tuesday come as police have still not yet found the person or persons responsible for flying drones around Gatwick Airport in late December. "We are responding to a drone sighting at Heathrow and are working closely with the Met Police to prevent any threat to operational safety," the airport said in a statement. "As a precautionary measure, we have stopped departures while we investigate. We apologize to passengers for any inconvenience this may cause."

Police will be handed extra powers to combat drones after the mass disruption at Gatwick airport in the run-up to Christmas. Gatwick was repeatedly forced to close between 19 and 21 December due to reported drone sightings, affecting about 1,000 flights. In response the government has announced a package of measures which include plans to give police the power to land, seize and search drones. The Home Office will also begin to test and evaluate the use of counter-drone technology at airports and prisons. The exclusion zone around airports will be extended to approximately a 5km-radius (3.1 miles), with additional extensions from runway ends.

Current UAV-recorded datasets are mostly limited to action recognition and object tracking, whereas the gesture signals datasets were mostly recorded in indoor spaces. Currently, there is no outdoor recorded public video dataset for UAV commanding signals. Gesture signals can be effectively used with UAVs by leveraging the UAVs visual sensors and operational simplicity. To fill this gap and enable research in wider application areas, we present a UAV gesture signals dataset recorded in an outdoor setting. We selected 13 gestures suitable for basic UAV navigation and command from general aircraft handling and helicopter handling signals. We provide 119 high-definition video clips consisting of 37151 frames. The overall baseline gesture recognition performance computed using Pose-based Convolutional Neural Network (P-CNN) is 91.9 %. All the frames are annotated with body joints and gesture classes in order to extend the dataset's applicability to a wider research area including gesture recognition, action recognition, human pose recognition and situation awareness.

Police will be given new powers to tackle the illegal use of drones, the government has announced. The area around airports where drones are banned from flying will also be extended, and from 30 November operators of drones between 250g and 20kg will need to be registered. Labour said action on drones should have been taken years ago. Last month flights from Gatwick were suspended for more than 36 hours after drones were reported over the airfield. The plans follow a consultation into the use of drones which began in July.

The NIMBUS Lab at the University of Nebraska has been developing drones that have the unique ability to dig holes in the ground and then fill those holes with sensors. If this sounds like a complicated task, that's because it is: The drone needs to be able to carry a portable digging system a useful distance, locate a diggable spot, land, verify that the spot it thought was diggable is in fact diggable, dig a hole and install the sensor, and then fly off again. At IROS late last year, folks from the NIMBUS Lab presented a paper detailing a rather burly quadcopter that could carry an auger with an embedded sensor and use it to place the sensor in the ground (you can see a video of this in action here). And at ISER a few weeks later, they presented another paper on how the drone can autonomously figure out whether it's digging in a good spot or not. One of the biggest challenges to a system like this is that by the time you pack in the drilling rig and all the sensors and computers that the drone needs to operate autonomously, you'll be lucky if the thing will manage to keep itself aloft for more than just a few minutes.

China has unveiled its first stealth spy drone that is invisible to radar and can fly 40 hours without refuelling. The'Sky Hawk' warplane is capable of taking a clear picture of a car's number plate while flying at the altitude of 3,000 metres (9,800 feet), according to its developer. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been kept as a top secret by Beijing, and this is the first time any footage of it has been released. Footage of China's first stealth spy drone'Sky Hawk' has been released by its manufacturer The video, uploaded on New Year's Day, shows the plane taking off at an unspecified location The'Sky Hawk', or Tianying in Chinese, is the brainchild of Sea Hawke General Aviation Equipment Company Ltd, which was set up in 2012 by state-run China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation to develop and manufacture military drones. The plane is capable of avoiding radar detection and penetrating key enemy targets in a'highly threatening battling environment', says Sea Hawke in a post on Chinese social media on New Year's Day.

Many new technologies launched in 2018. In 2019, look for the refinement of those technologies as well as new technology to launch. Here are eight emerging technology trends that we can expect to see more of in 2019. Expect citizen development, where business users development their own applications so that they don't have to wait for IT, to grow in 2019. "In 2018, we saw enterprises talking about citizen development more, and we see the adoption rate increasing, with most organizations in an exploration stage," said Cory Phillips, executive VP at Crowd Machine, which provides low and no code software for citizen developers.

London's airports don't want a repeat of the drone panic that left Gatwick travelers grounded for days, and they're willing to spend loads of cash to keep their skies safe. Heathrow and Gatwick have spent millions of pounds on "military-grade" anti-drone systems in the wake of the scare. It's not clear what they've purchased, but it might be a Rafael Drone Dome system that can jam drone communications. The company told the Times that it had seen interest from UK customers, but it's not clear if that included the two airports. It's still unclear how much of a threat drones posed during the Gatwick incident, or if the owners even intended anything malicious.

China has for the first time released video showing its latest stealth drone in flight, state media said Sunday. China Central Television (CCTV) on Saturday ran video featuring the "saucer-like" Sky Hawk drone, and state-run Global Times claimed that the new drone's cutting-edge technology will allow it to fly faster, farther and escape detection. The Global Times, quoting the CCTV report, said the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp.-developed drone, known as the Sky Hawk, had conducted the flight test at an undisclosed location in the country. Video showed the drone taking off and landing, marking the first time that the aircraft has been publicly seen in flight, according to the reports. The drone reportedly made its maiden flight last February, but no video had been published before Saturday's broadcast.