Amazon, UPS, Domino's Pizza and other companies planning drone delivery services may be heading for discord. A preliminary NASA study has discovered that people find the noise of drones more annoying than that of ground vehicles, even when the sounds are the same volume. "We didn't go into this test thinking there would be this significant difference," says study coauthor Andrew Christian of NASA's Langley Research Center, Virginia. It is almost unfortunate the research has turned up this difference in annoyance levels, he adds, as its purpose was merely to prove that Langley's acoustics research facilities could contribute to NASA's wider efforts to study drones. Nonetheless, the results indicate the extra irritation the 38 subjects experienced when listening to drone noises was as if a car were suddenly twice as close as it had been before.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, a pioneering photographer who had created his own panoramic lens put together what could be described as the world's first drone. With this innovative creation he captured incredible images of American cities from thousands of feet in the air. George R. Lawrence used a system of kites outfitted with a 49-pound camera to show a bird's-eye view of San Francisco, Chicago and New York City - among other cities and towns - in a way that they had never been seen before. He called his invention the Lawrence Captive Airship. However, during Lawrence's first attempt at aerial photography his balloon snapped free from the platform carrying him.

If you've ever wondered about what it's like to be inside the International Space Station through the lens of, say, a drone, look no further. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released images and video from its JEM Internal Ball Camera, known as "Int-Ball," -- a camera drone that can record images and video while moving in space -- and the new footage gives us earth-dwellers a sneak peek of the happenings on the space laboratory. According to the JAXA, the Int-Ball was initially delivered to "Kibo," the Japanese Experiment Module on the International Space Station, on June 4, 2017, aboard SpaceX's uncrewed Dragon capsule. With the device and it's recording capabilities, JAXA is giving people a fascinating look at the inner-workings of the International Space Station.

Wings are great for crusing over long distances and carrying heavy loads, but they aren't that great if your aircraft needs vertical agility. Rotors, on the other hand, are great for vertical agility, but they aren't that great for long distances and heavy loads. Any aircraft that wants to fly efficiently can be designed for cruising or hovering, but not both. Lots and lots of people have tried to figure out a way of making some sort of compromise work. Mostly, this involves stapling as many vertical rotors as you have a budget for to a fixed-wing aircraft and just calling it a day: When you want to go up or down, you use the vertical rotors, and the rest of the time, you use whatever other rotors you can afford to have mounted horizontally.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station have a new robotic companion to play around with. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released the first images shot by the "Int-Ball," a spherical camera that floats around alongside the rest of the crew. With its monochrome paint job and blue, circular eyes, it looks a little like Wall-E's Eva -- or at least her head, in some kind of prototype form. Notably, the Int-Ball can move around autonomously or be controlled by operators back on Earth. The images are transferred in near real-time allowing JAXA staff to quickly evaluate problems and offer possible solutions to ISS residents.

Two police forces have become the first in the UK to launch a fully operational drone unit. Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police forces began trialling the technology in November 2015 and the unit has now become fully established. Five officers have been trained, with a further 40 aiming to complete their Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) accreditation in the next 12 months. Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police forces began trialling the technology in November 2015 and the unit has now become fully established. The drones take part in missing person searches, crime scene photography and respond to major road traffic collisions.

The age of the robot has been predicted for decades. First used as a term to mean automated labor back in the 1920s, and popularised in the classic 1927 slient movie Metropolis, they have been a regular feature of science fiction ever since. The fact that robots and science fiction go hand in hand – and that predictions that we will soon have robot helpers being regular features of future-gazing since the 1930s – has meant that the idea of robots becoming a central part of our lives have become so familiar that we've come to ignore them. Yet robots have been a reality in manufacturing for decades, having become cost-effective production-line solutions by the 1970s. The Roomba – an automated vacuum cleaner that is perhaps the most famous domestic-helper robot – was launched back in 2002, and has sold more than 10 million units worldwide.

But a widely publicized new memoir about America's covert drone war fails to mention the "outflow increases," as one internal Air Force memo calls it. One might ask Velicovich to explain the deaths of Warren Weinstein, an American citizen, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen -- both aid workers who were killed by an American drone strike that was targeting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. In the acknowledgments section of the memoir, Velicovich mentions that the forthcoming movie will be directed and produced by Michael Bay, the filmmaker behind "Transformers," "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon." Alex Edney-Browne (@alexEdneybrowne) is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, where she is researching the psycho-social effects of drone warfare on Afghan civilians and veterans of the U.S. Air Force's drone program.

Robots that serve dinner, self-driving cars and drone-taxis could be fun and hugely profitable. They are likely much further off than the hype suggests. A panel of experts at the recent 2017 Wharton Global Forum in Hong Kong outlined their views on the future for artificial intelligence (AI), robots, drones, other tech advances and how it all might affect employment in the future. The upshot was to deflate some of the hype, while noting the threats ahead posed to certain jobs. Their comments came in a panel session titled, "Engineering the Future of Business," with Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett moderating and speakers Pascale Fung, a professor of electronic and computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Vijay Kumar, dean of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nicolas Aguzin, Asian-Pacific chairman and CEO for J.P.Morgan. Kicking things off, Garrett asked: How big and disruptive is the self-driving car movement? It turns out that so much of what appears in mainstream media about self-driving cars being just around the corner is very much overstated, said Kumar.

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 two 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. We could watch these water drones swim and dive all day. They were developed by APIUM Swarm Robotics, which took them for a swim off of Catalina Island in California.