A scale model of a flying drone-car mashup has been unveiled which could provide a preview of future taxis. The'Pop.Up Next' prototype drone was driven and hovered across an Amsterdam exhibition hall. It is made in partnership with aviation giant Airbus, automaker Audi and Italdesign design house. The revolutionary design is is made up of three separate modules - a chassis with wheels, a two-seat capsule for passengers and a four-rotor drone. A scale model of a flying drone-car mashup has been unveiled which could provide a preview of future taxis.

Replanting trees after a wildfire or logging operation is an extremely labor intensive and expensive task. Carrying a bag of seedlings and using a dibble bar or shovel across steep debris-covered terrain can wear out a human. A new company, DroneSeed, has a solution. They are designing a system around a swarm of drones that can plant tree seeds in places where they have a decent chance of survival. First they survey the area with a drone using lidar and a multispectral camera to map the terrain and the vegetation.

As drone use grows, rules and regulations remain in flux and vary among jurisdictions. Last month, for instance, the Federal Aviation Administration granted operators of certain drones approval to fly them in controlled airspace in the US, but the UK has an outright ban on using them within a kilometer of airports. To help establish best practices, the International Organization for Standardization has released the first draft set of global standards for drone use. The draft does suggest no-fly zones around airports and other restricted areas, along with geofencing measures to keep drones away from sensitive locations. The standards also call for drone operators to respect others' privacy and a human intervention fail-safe for all flights.

The group has taken advantage of a nearly four year-old war between the Iranian-aligned Houthi movement and President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's Saudi-backed government to try to strengthen its position in the impoverished country.

SINGAPORE – High-tech Singapore is planning to roll out a swarm of drones for tasks that include delivering parcels, inspecting buildings and providing security, but safety and privacy concerns mean the initiative may hit turbulence. Companies have already started testing the devices for commercial use, mainly in an area of over 200 hectares (500 acres) dotted with high-rise buildings and shopping malls, specially designated by the government for the trials. It is part of the affluent city's drive to embrace technological innovation, as well as an effort to tackle a manpower shortage in a country of just 5.6 million, which relies on foreign migrant workers in many low-paying sectors. Commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles is already taking off around the world, in areas as diverse as crop-spraying and surveying for insurance claims, but Singapore's push represents a particularly ambitious bet on the technology. Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority has got behind the project, saying it recognizes the potential for drones "to transform mobility and logistics," and is working with industry players as it seeks to shape regulations for the sector.

From birds taking flight to sweeping waterfalls - these amazing drone images showcase spectacular scenery from perspectives that have never been seen before. The beguiling images appeared on photo-sharing site Dronestagram which is dedicated to drone photography.

But despite extensive company-government cooperation--spurred by White House pledges to fast-track decisions--trade-association leaders now see final FAA regulatory action stretching past the end of the decade. Some experts say 2022 is more likely. That would be up to three years later than some of the agency's initial projections, and many months longer than a revised timetable the FAA and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation, shared informally just months ago. "I'm not happy about it," said Brian Wynne, president and chief executive of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry's leading trade group. The process needs to move forward, he said in an interview, because so many commercial applications are in a holding pattern until new rules are approved.

Though it's often talked about as if it's a single continuous structure, China's legendary Great Wall is actually a series of stone fortifications that crawl across the country's changing landscape from the Korean border to the Gobi desert. Thousands of miles long and more than 2,000 years old in some places, as much as 30 percent of the wall "lies crumbling into ruins" as it is slowly reclaimed by the natural world, according to National Geographic. To reach some of the most vulnerable sections of the ancient wall –– deteriorating portions that people have been completely cut off from or that remain too dangerous to traverse --Chinese authorities have deployed a new tool: drones. The drones have allowed Chinese authorities to map and measure sections of the wall, offering precise data that is already being used to rehabilitate a structure that is widely recognized as one of mankind's greatest feats of engineering, the BBC reported in a video published this week. Data collected by the drones has helped workers build support structures for vulnerable sections of the wall, the BBC reported.

When a patient who needs an organ transplantation is finally matched with a donor, every second matters. A longer wait between when an organ is removed from a donor and when it is placed into a recipient is associated with poorer organ function following transplantation. To maximize the chances of success, organs must be shipped from A to B as quickly and as safely as possible--and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task. One transplant surgeon's personal experience at the operating table, waiting for organs to arrive, prompted him to think of new forms of delivery. "I frequently encounter situations where there's simply no way to get an organ to me fast enough to do a transplant, and then those life-saving organs do not get transplanted into my patient," says Dr. Joseph Scalea of the University of Maryland Medical Center.

A GPS-denied UAV (Agent B) is localised through INS alignment with the aid of a nearby GPS-equipped UAV (Agent A), which broadcasts its position at several time instants. Agent B measures the signals' direction of arrival with respect to Agent B's inertial navigation frame. Semidefinite programming and the Orthogonal Procrustes algorithm are employed, and accuracy is improved through maximum likelihood estimation. The method is validated using flight data and simulations. A three-agent extension is explored.