'Dragon eggs' lowered into the heart of volcanoes using drones could help monitor for clues of future eruptions with more precision, scientists have revealed. Such extreme, hazardous and unpredictable environments present a very difficult challenge to reliably record volcanic behaviour. For some volcanoes, it is simply too dangerous for humans to get close enough to take readings manually. However, scientists have got around this problem by creating highly sensitive pods that can be positioned in dangerous locations to provide real-time data on eruptions. Dubbed'dragon eggs', scientists say these devices could also monitor other natural phenomenon such as glaciers, geological faults and man-made hazards such as nuclear waste storage sites.

A tiny flying robot that can dart through the air like an insect has been unveiled by Dutch scientists. The DelFly Nimble's wings beat at 17 times per second to power the robot at speeds over 15 miles per hour (25kph) - and it can even do a loop-the-loop. Scientists behind the technology based it on the wing movements of fruit flies, and claim it could revolutionise our understanding of insect flight. The researchers, from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, say it can hover, dart left or right and even do barrel rolls. Lead designer Dr Matej Karasek said: 'The robot has a top speed of 25 km/h [15mph] and can even perform aggressive manoeuvres, such as 360-degree flips.

The aircraft can reach speeds of up to 120 mph as they negotiate a course of obstacles under strict safety rules.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Insects are among the most agile natural flyers. Hypotheses on their flight control cannot always be validated by experiments with animals or tethered robots.

Kespry announced the availability of the pulp and paper industry's first drone-based aerial intelligence solution. The new industry-specific solution improves the profitability of pulp and paper operations by delivering more accurate and timely supply chain material inventory data, while improving site operations and safety. "Measuring chip piles at a pulp mill has always been a challenge. In the past, a team of surveyors would climb onto the chip pile and arrive at a manual measurement," said Mitch Dunlop, Accounting Manager, Celgar, a leading North American pulp and paper organization. "This method is slow, poses safety concerns and is not very accurate.

Insects are quite good at not running into things, and just as good at running into things and surviving, but targeted, accurate precision flight is much more difficult for them. As cute as insects like bees are, there just isn't enough space in their fuzzy little noggins for fancy sensing and computing systems. Despite their small size, though, bees are able to perform precise flight maneuvers, and it's a good thing, too, since often their homes are on the other side of holes not much bigger than they are. Bees make this work through a sort of minimalist brute-force approach to the problem: They fly up to a small hole or gap, hover, wander back and forth a little bit to collect visual information about where the edges of the gap, and then steer themselves through. It's not fast, and it's not particularly elegant, but it's reliable and doesn't take much to execute.

As long as the volcano isn't about to erupt, each device remains dormant, consuming very little power – in fact, they're claimed to feature "the lowest stand-by power consumption in the world." Upon detecting even slight volcanic tremors, however, they wake up and begin sensing/recording temperature, humidity, vibrations, and the presence of various toxic gases. They can operate individually, or in a linked multi-egg network.

The Drone Racing League (DRL) will host a series of races and competitions where autonomous drones will try to beat a professional drone pilot. Teams of university students and other drone enthusiasts will be invited to compete for more than $2 million. The Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit will produce four AI vs. AI races in its inaugural season and will use the same video game-inspired courses as the kinds used by pro drone pilots in the DRL Allianz World Championship, DRL CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski told VentureBeat in an email. Both the AIRR Circuit and the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge, which pits human versus machine, will take place during the 2019 season. The first drone from an autonomous team to beat a human will receive $250,000, and the winning team of the AIRR Circuit will receive $1 million.

Lockheed Martin is launching AlphaPilot, an open innovation challenge focused on artificial intelligence for autonomous systems. Your challenge is to design an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) framework capable of flying a drone through several professional drone racing courses without human intervention or navigational pre-programing. By participating in this competition, your knowledge and ideas can contribute directly toward the future of autonomous transportation, delivery, disaster relief, and even space exploration! Lockheed Martin is launching AlphaPilot to address the role of autonomy in our collective futures. Through a fun and challenging objective, AlphaPilot will unite a diverse community of practice and emerging experts around the common challenges of trusted autonomous systems.

Stretchable plant wearables and smart tags dropped by drones aim to help give farming a big data makeover. The relatively cheap technologies for mass monitoring of individual plants across large greenhouses or crop fields could get field tests in three countries starting in 2019. The idea came from researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia with expertise in flexible electronics. After talking with colleagues who were cultivating genetically engineered plants in greenhouses, they recognized the need for inexpensive sensors that could be deployed en masse and report on individual plant conditions. Their early offerings include a stretchable sensor for measuring micrometer-level changes in plant growth and a "PlantCopter" temperature and humidity sensor designed to be dropped from a drone and corkscrew its way through the air for a gradual descent.