Drone racing has become a big budget sport - and its biggest league has revealed the world's fast machine. Called the RacerX, the craft recently set a Guinness world Record of 179.9mph - despite weighing just 800 grams. The first prototypes of the drone burst into flames when hitting its highest point of acceleration, but the latest model, flown in Cunningham Park in Queens, New York, hit the record speed. The handbuilt drone completed the record attempt in Cunningham Park in Queens, New York. The Drone Racing League (DRL), set the record using the specially designed battery-powered remote-controlled quadcopter.

Setting up the Spark drone is a relatively simple process that takes about 10 minutes once you have the battery charged and the DJI app downloaded. Sync up a smartphone with the Spark's ad hoc wifi signal and you'll seen see a remote feed from the drone's built-in camera. Setup will, however, require that you register your new flying machine with DJI. Recently, the FAA stopped requiring users to register small craft like this, and DJI responded by implementing restrictions of its own. If you don't agree to the terms of a DJI account, functionality like range and top speed is restricted.

From crop dusting to package delivery, commercial drones are about to become a part of everyday life. "Just in the last 18 months, we've registered twice as many unmanned aircraft (as) we registered all aircraft from the previous 100 years," said Earl Lawrence, director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office. To safely integrate the vast numbers of new unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the nation's airspace, the FAA is relying on a group of 23 research institutions led by Mississippi State University. The Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE) is conducting in-depth studies on virtually every aspect of drone operations, including air traffic control, pilot certification and crash avoidance. "What happens when a drone hits a wing or a windshield or any other part of the aircraft is (one) of our key questions," Lawrence said.

The team behind the Drone Racing League (DRL), which is in the midst of its second aired racing season, have just set a Guinness World Record for the fastest battery-powered remote-controlled quadcopter. The drone earning the title is the DRL RacerX, which was designed and built by Ryan Gury, DRL's director of product, and the company's team of engineers. The 800 gram drone hit a speed of 179.6MPH, but because the official record is the average top speed of both legs of a back and forth flight, the Guinness entry is 163.5MPH. "The record-setting RacerX represents the culmination of years of technological innovation by our team of world class engineers, and we're very excited to unveil the fastest racing drone on earth," said DRL CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski in a statement. DRL said that earlier versions of the RacerX burst into flames when reaching top acceleration speeds because of how much power was used.

Fukuoka Mayor Soichiro Takashima hopes to make his city a living laboratory for such cutting-edge technology. About 70 percent of the city will be covered by the LoRaWAN network this fiscal year, setting a wide testing ground for future services. True, it's difficult to find a place to test these technologies in a real-life environment as it often requires social infrastructure and the removal of legal restrictions. The city of Fukuoka also carried out two drone tests last November and December between the city center and Nokonoshima Island in the middle of Hakata Bay, about 2.5 km offshore.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Let's kick off our June review by looking at some great new robotics research and development in action: Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Harvard Professor George Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski--a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides' Harvard lab--have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

The civilians crowd together in a narrow alleyway, stranded near house-to-house fighting and surrounded by the stark devastation of western Mosul, where the battle against the Islamic State was supposed to be over. Video taken from a drone on Monday quickly confirmed that the battle to seize Mosul from the Islamic State continues, and that at least 100 civilians were still trapped by the fighting. For days since the government officially declared victory in the city, Times journalists and other witnesses in Mosul had confirmed that the sounds of intense fighting could still be heard from pockets within Western Mosul. Now, these drone images have provided the clearest account yet of a grinding battle that continues against the Islamic State's holdout force. And in one section of the city, a large number of civilians can be seen in a tight and enclosed section of alleyway, confirming fears that many Mosul residents have been unable to escape.

In the most nightmarish drone scenarios, one of the little whirlybirds flies into an airliner, or wanders into military airspace, or swoops down on the White House. At best, such things are mild annoyances. At worst, they pose a grave threat to safety and security. The sky is a big, open place, with a great many no-go zones that aren't clearly delineated. That makes it easy for a drone, or its pilot, to cause trouble.

Even though these huge fish are 12 feet across, the social behavior of the reef manta ray has generally remained secretive--until now. In rare drone footage captured off the coast of Oahu in Hawaii by Mark Merkley, the unique and graceful feeding behavior of the reef manta ray is captured in great detail. Manta ray individuals "stack" behind one another while feeding. The social groupings of manta rays are intriguing in part because they aren't necessarily family groups.