Remember back when you could fly drones without having to pay the government money first, and when the only thing you had to worry about was a midair takedown by an anti-drone hit squad made up of highly-trained Dutch eagles? We're sad to have to report that we probably won't be seeing compelling videos of eagles handling rogue drones anymore, and also that the United States government has flexed its muscles and mandatory drone registration is now back on. You probably remember how the FAA finalized its mandatory drone registration rules just in time for the holiday season in 2015. Any drone that weighed more than 0.55 pounds was required to be registered before being flown outdoors, a process that involved providing your complete name, physical address, mailing address, email address, and a credit card that was charged a one-time fee of US $5. In exchange, you got a unique registration number that had to be visible on all of your drones.

The world's top 32 drone pilots will compete Saturday in Las Vegas for the world champion title in the International Drone Racing Assn.'s top challenge. Semi-professionals wearing virtual reality headgear compete for a $50,000 cash prize in the Challengers Cup Final on Friday and Saturday at the South Point hotel-casino at 9777 S. Las Vegas Blvd. Competitors qualified during 2017 races that began in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and concluded in Manila, the Philippines. Visitors can buy tickets to watch for $20. You'll be admitted to Friday's practice runs and the competition on Saturday afternoon. The elimination round will get underway at 12:30 p.m. with the finals set for 3:20 p.m. Saturday.

In this paper, an interference-aware path planning scheme for a network of cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. In particular, each UAV aims at achieving a tradeoff between maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing both wireless latency and the interference level caused on the ground network along its path. The problem is cast as a dynamic game among UAVs. To solve this game, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, based on echo state network (ESN) cells, is proposed. The introduced deep ESN architecture is trained to allow each UAV to map each observation of the network state to an action, with the goal of minimizing a sequence of time-dependent utility functions. Each UAV uses ESN to learn its optimal path, transmission power level, and cell association vector at different locations along its path. The proposed algorithm is shown to reach a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) upon convergence. Moreover, an upper and lower bound for the altitude of the UAVs is derived thus reducing the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better wireless latency per UAV and rate per ground user (UE) while requiring a number of steps that is comparable to a heuristic baseline that considers moving via the shortest distance towards the corresponding destinations. The results also show that the optimal altitude of the UAVs varies based on the ground network density and the UE data rate requirements and plays a vital role in minimizing the interference level on the ground UEs as well as the wireless transmission delay of the UAV.

Last month, we wrote about autonomous quadrotors from the University of Pennsylvania that use just a VGA camera and an IMU to navigate together in swarms. Without relying on external localization or GPS, quadrotors like these have much more potential to be real-world useful, since they can operate without expensive and complex infrastructure, even indoors. One potential application for drones like these is disaster operations, but honestly, that's just what everyone says when you ask them how their mobile robot could potentially be useful. What's much more interesting to us are commercial applications, and with drones, that inevitably means talking about delivery. There are a lot of reasons why we're skeptical about most commercial delivery drones, but that doesn't meant that the idea of using drones to move things from place to place isn't a good one. Vijay Kumar's lab at UPenn has been working on using their GPS-independent quadrotors for transporting payloads, and they're doing it collaboratively--the idea is that objects that are too large or heavy for one quadrotor to move can instead be moved by multiple quadrotors working together, and ultimately, they could be the best way to move items around a warehouse.

Apple's spaceship is getting its finishing touches. The latest drone video of the $5bn HQ have revealed the final landscaping touches being made to the huge campus. It shows the landscaping that has transformed the giant building site into a lush green park. The drone footage reveals the incredible landscaping inside the giant ring to turn it into a park. Apple Park contains over 9,000 native and drought-resistant trees, and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

This article was originally published on the Motley Fool. Flying a plane with solar energy alone may seem like a far-fetched idea, but it's now a reality. In 2016, a prototype plane built by Solar Impulse with a single pilot flew around the world on nothing but solar energy, a first for humanity. A number of companies are trying to take that test flight from prototype to commercial viability. A realistic commercial application for solar-powered aircraft could be drones flying high above Earth where energy requirements to maintain altitude are lower.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Chris Charron of Titusville is a drone hobbyist who takes aerial photos of the local landscape. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- It was but two days after Christmas when the Fenno family lost their new gift: a drone. The Melbourne residents were visiting family in Georgia when they took the drone for its first spin. It was dark, said Kaitlee Fenno, but the drone had lights so the family assumed it was in the clear.

Most likely, your expectations for the age of drone delivery involve cute li'l quadcopters that descend onto your porch with a gentle bzzzz, deposit a box of diapers or a pizza or whatever else you just ordered online, before zooming back to base, ready to deliver the next whim. That's the vision pitched by the likes of Amazon, UPS, and DHL, and it's an appealing one. Boeing has a different idea for delivery drones, one that's bigger by an order of magnitude. Last week, the aerospace giant revealed a prototype for an electric, unmanned cargo air vehicle that it says could haul as much as 500 pounds--that's 400 large Domino's pizzas or 11,291 newborn-sized diapers--as far as 20 miles. "It's a concurrent exploration of a nascent market and nascent technology," says Pete Kunz, the chief technologist for HorizonX, the Boeing skunk works-venture capital arm hybrid division ///something like that/// that built this thing (the marketing team hasn't given it a catchy moniker yet).

Drones are going to see significant new capabilities in 2018. The use of multiple high-functioning cameras as well as upgraded Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) will enhance navigational acumen far beyond that of today's drone models. This, combined with ultra-fast charging and longer-lasting batteries, means the drones of 2018 will have far greater range and performance flexibility. Expect to see more and more sectors incorporating drones into their operations this year as a result. Drones offer a vast, bird's eye view for collecting data, which can contribute enormously to diverse areas such as weather, traffic flow, and even disaster forecasting.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a series of modular flying robots that can autonomously assemble themselves in midair and fly. In the video above, the robots can be seen hovering near one another and then slowly moving close until magnets attached to each corner of a vehicle's cage quickly snaps them together. The system, called ModQuad, is just in its early stage of development, but the researchers say they can imagine scenarios where much larger drone systems with such autonomous capability might actually be able to self-assemble over an impassable chasm and create a bridge, for example. The system is modeled after biological systems like ant or bee colonies, where collective effort can accomplish goals like transporting material or building large structures. Think of army ants that can build bridges to overcome water hazards.