Drones are often touted as being the answer to a great number of modern day challenges. Soon, we are told, they will be making shopping deliveries for us, dropping off pizzas, and even taxiing us around. A similar expectation about drone capability has been seen in the world of insurance. It was thought that insurers would have large drone divisions, allowing them to easily assess large or hazardous properties, or make claims assessments on otherwise difficult to view property. But this has not happened for a few reasons.

RoboFly is only slightly bigger than a real fly. A new type of flying robot is so tiny and lightweight -- it weighs about as much as a toothpick -- it can perch on your finger. The little flitter is also capable of untethered flight and is powered by lasers. This is a big leap forward in the design of diminutive airborne bots, which are usually too small to support a power source and must trail a lifeline to a distant battery in order to fly, engineers who built the new robot announced in a statement. Their insect-inspired creation is dubbed RoboFly, and like its animal namesake, it sports a pair of delicate, transparent wings that carry it into the air. But unlike its robot precursors, RoboFly ain't got no strings to hold it down.

The huge swell that hit the South West has been amazingly captured near Margaret River and Yallingup by Matt Durell, the local drone pilot. The captured stunning images are awe-inspiring and all thanks to the UAV and the pilot. "I saw the swell coming in and I've always wanted to fly the drone out there so I thought I'd put it up," says Durell. The three main breaks were captured via drones, namely- Cow Bombie, Yallingup's main break, and Injidup. He also adds that this was something the biggest swell he had ever filmed.

Insect-sized flying robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks. These robots soar by fluttering tiny wings because they are too small to use propellers, like those seen on their larger drone cousins. Small size is advantageous: These robots are cheap to make and can easily slip into tight places that are inaccessible to big drones. But current flying robo-insects are still tethered to the ground. The electronics they need to power and control their wings are too heavy for these miniature robots to carry.

Artificial intelligence can't replace your doctor yet but it can help diagnose illness. Pfizer Inc. is expanding its AI-enabled analytics toolset to catch diseases that are easy to miss because they're rare or disguised by other illnesses a patient may have. The cloud-based system, called Virtual Analytics Workbench, brings together physicians notes, lab reports, demographics and other patient particulars, as CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos reports. Health care presents exciting opportunities to apply AI, but we're still far from Dr. McCoy's tricorder instant diagnostic device on Star Trek. One obstacle slowing AI's progress generally is a lack of suitable data with which to train algorithms, according to Kate Crawford, a distinguished research professor at New York University and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York, She spoke at the WSJ Future of Everything Festival this week.

At exactly 5 p.m. one recent Friday at Taisei Co., a flying drone alerted workers at the building maintenance firm that the day's work was done. The fully automatic drone, which goes by the name T-Frend, is an example of the unique ways unmanned aerial vehicles are being used to seize control of what people are failing at or incapable of. "This drone will identify who remains in the office after hours. . . . And by accessing recorded data, human resources or administration departments will be able to deal with those who abuse overtime," said Chikara Kato, manager of the Tokyo firm's corporate planning division and inventor of the device. In recent years, Japan has been strengthening efforts to limit overtime amid outrage sparked by the continuing deaths caused by Japan's excessively long working hours.

As Japan positions itself to take advantage of the growing trend in drones, another sector is popping up in the promising market -- drone schools. Industries ranging from agriculture to security are setting their eyes on the benefits of the device. And although the aerial vehicles are capable of autonomous flight, skilled pilots need to be on hand in case something goes wrong. "The industrial use of drones will grow more to replace some work previously handled by humans," said Kazunori Fujiwara, a spokesman at the Drone Pilot Association, a Tokyo-based group that promotes pilot education. "There are still not enough pilots. It's been just three or four years since drones started spreading, so we need to raise greater awareness," he said.

A drone carrying a package sails through the air, touching down to make a delivery right on a customer's doorstep. Inc. wowed the world in 2013 with a video purporting to show what the future of the delivery industry would look like. But are we any closer to that now? The answer seems to be no -- at least in Japan. The nation is set to take a step forward in the sector this year as the government prepares to deregulate aviation rules so delivery firms can use drones in rural areas.

A drone footage of the Niger ambush that killed four U.S. and five Nigerian soldiers that surfaced recently shows the service personnel desperately trying to escape and fighting for their lives after friendly Nigerien forces mistook them for the enemy. The video shows the harrowing hours of troops holding off their enemy and waiting for rescue. It shows how the soldiers set up a defensive location on the edge of a marsh and wrote letters to their loved ones thinking they were going to die. Pentagon released the video with explanatory narration and it contains more than 10 minutes of drone footage, animation and file tape that was not made public last week when the military released a portion of the final report on the October attack, the Guardian reported. In a failed attempt to target a local ISIS leader, 46 U.S. and Nigerien troops were involved in the initial mission in the West African nation.

Recently, Virginia Tech revealed their new drone park, which will be used as a space for students and researchers to test out drones for different uses. "I think the chance of something happening here that is big is higher than anywhere else in the world," says Timothy Sands, Virginia Tech President. The drone park stands 85 feet above the ground and has a nice controlled environment. "Drones can get lost, they can get damaged, they can damage other things, this provides a nice safe space for students to test and easily recover their drone," says Domonic Bisco, first-year engineering students. "Almost every field can use unmanned aerial systems in one way or another," says Sands.