A little more than a month after a startup announced it was unleashing robots to deliver food to San Franciscans, a city lawmaker wants them curbed. Marble's robot is technically semi-autonomous, as a human operator monitors each robot in case it gets in any trouble. But that's not good enough for San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, who just proposed legislation to ban delivery robots of all types, saying they're a public safety hazard. "For me to wait for something to happen is silly," Yee says, "because I think it's going to happen." Unlike self-driving cars, autonomous delivery robots roll purposefully on sidewalks, detecting the world around them with cameras and lasers.

Security was greater than ever at the French festival, with stepped up efforts to restrict access and even an anti-drone system. France remains under a state of emergency since the November 2015 Paris attacks. This is also the first festival held since the nearby Nice attack last year that killed 86 people.

Just a few months after GoPro threatens to close its entertainment doors, DJI is ready to step in. The drone-cum-camera company has just announced that it's launching a Smart TV app that'll stream plenty of aerial content and 4k videos captured from DJI drones and cameras. The app will initially be made available on Samsung's Tizen TVs and Apple TV. This is yet another instance in which DJI and GoPro have overlapping businesses. GoPro started with cameras and moved into drones, while DJI went from making drones and then moved into the camera business (The DJI Phantom Vision 2 was the first to ditch GoPro cameras for its own). GoPro has also been trying to make inroads as an entertainment company for a few years now -- indeed, there's a GoPro channel on Xbox, PS4, Roku, Samsung and LG TVs, as well as Virgin America's in-flight entertainment center.

A picture has emerged on social media which claims to show a new military drone China is building. The unnamed aircraft, said to be a torpedo bomber, is able to skim the surface of the sea and carry out'lethal attacks' on warships, said a post on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. In addition, the alleged drone would be able to avoid radar detection as it could fly at an extremely low altitude above the waters, according to Chinese news website Sina. Mysterious and powerful: Source suggested this is a new military drone being built by China. It's said to be a member of the CH drone series and can fly at a low altitude above the sea The picture, thought to be of China's new military drone, was first posted by a Chinese internet user on Weibo on May 3. The picture appeared to be a part of a brochure. The brochure claimed that the featured drone could attack large waterborne targets and carry out quick, long-distance strikes with air-dropped torpedoes.

As the drone industry continues to grow, aerial enthusiasts are flying -- and leaping -- to new heights. Latvia-based company Aerones completed "the world's first drone jump" last week with their 28-propeller drone. Skydiver Ingus Augstkalns, who came up with the daring idea, used the top of a 393-foot communications tower as a launch pad. Augstkalns clung to handlebars suspended from the bottom of the aircraft as he rose to over 1,000 feet before letting go and deploying his parachute. "Emotions are fantastic," Augstkalns said in a statement.

The dawn of autonomous robots brings a question of automated modeling of robot behavior such that the learned robot capabilities can be used to plan robot activities. To bridge the continuous world of sensor readings and control signals with the symbolic world of planning, one needs to identify robot activities as somehow compact behaviors that can be repeated later when a given activity is planned to be performed. In this paper we focus on identifying activities from a sequence of sensor reading and corresponding control signals by using the methods of machine learning, both supervised and unsupervised. The methods are experimentally evaluated using data from a flying drone.

The Pentagon has revealed a new AI system designed to lead the hunt for Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. Codenamed Project Maven, it will analyse aerial surveillance video to look for patterns that can help operators. It comes as military bosses say the thousands of military and civilian intelligence analysts are'overwhelmed' by the amount of video being recorded over the battlefield by drones with high resolution cameras. A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle: Military bosses say intelligence analysts are'overwhelmed' by the amount of video being recorded over the battlefield by drones with high resolution cameras. 'We have to tackle the problem a different way,' Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T.'Jack' Shanahan, director for defense intelligence for warfighter support, and the man tasked with finding the new technology, told Defense One.

Drone swarms can be used for lots of things, like creating holograms, putting on a Superbowl halftime show or collecting military intelligence. One of the problems with a bunch of quadcopters executing maneuvers in close proximity, however, is that they can crash when they touch or fly under each other. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a way to avoid both issues by creating a virtual bumper area around each copter so that they don't accidentally touch. They've also ensured that each copter has a little "top hat" of space above it so it won't go underneath another drone and get caught up in its airflow. Ph.D. student Li Wang figured out that the top hat must be as tall as five times the diameter from one rotor to another by flying drones atop one another.

Claridge, founder of xCraft, is best known for being the first contestant on Shark Tank to receive money from all the Sharks – even Kevin O'Leary! Walking the floor of Xponential 2017, the annual convention of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems Integration (AUVSI), Claridge remarked to me how the drone industry has grown up since his TV appearance. Claridge has gone from pitching cellphone cases that turn into drones (aka phonedrone) to solving mission critical problems. The age of fully autonomous flight is near and the drone industry is finally recovering from the hangover of overhyped Kickstarter videos (see Lily drone's $34 million fraud). During the three days of Xponential 2017, several far-reaching announcements were made between stalwarts of the tech industry and aviation startups.

Formula 1 bosses have brought in the latest anti-drone technology to protect Lewis Hamilton and other drivers from Islamic State terrorists at this year's British Grand Prix. Race officials fear that jihadis could use drones carrying explosives to attack drivers and spectators at the Silverstone racetrack. So to counter the threat, security guards with electronic jammers and net guns will be on patrol before and during the race, which will be attended by tens of thousands of fans on Sunday, July 16. The move is in response to IS using drones to drop bombs on UK-backed forces in Syria and Iraq – and the danger posed by'lone wolf' jihadis who could buy a drone online or on a British high street. Last night, Silverstone officials confirmed that they have hired the British company Drone Defence to cover the race.