In the coming robot revolution, one area believed to be relatively safe from automation is creativity. While artificial intelligence may soon usurp taxi drivers, receptionists, and even lawyers, the uniquely human faculty of artistic creation will presumably mean musicians, writers and artists will be safe from automation. In its second year, the RobotArt competition is challenging these assumptions by encouraging teams to "create something beautiful using a physical brush and robotics." The CARP (Custom Autonomous Robotic Painter) robot painted "Apple" from the image of the apple on the left. Teams have used a variety of robotic systems to create works of art, ranging from flying drones, to robotic arms used in manufacturing assembly lines.

Bird strikes can cause costly damage at airports and are dangerous to aircraft, and the effect of a collision with an aircraft can even be fatal. But a Canadian airport hopes to resolve this problem by using'Robird' - a drone that mimics the flight of a falcon. The lifelike falcon drone can be used to chase off birds, convincing them that it's a real life predator. 'This is a historic step for the Robird and our company,' says Nico Nijenhuis (pictured), the CEO of Clear Flight Solutions, the company that makes the Robird The Robird will scare real birds away from Edmonton International Airport, Canada's largest airport in terms of surface area, starting at the end of May. Flocks in the vicinity will be scared off by the combination of silhouette and wing movement.

A team of agricultural engineers are attempting a world-first of growing and harvesting a field of cereal crop without a human setting foot on the land. Researchers have pioneered an autonomous tractor which can be steered by a farmer from a control room to carry out the drilling, seeding and spraying of the land. Then an automated combine harvester will harvest the field in the ground-breaking project. Researchers have pioneered an autonomous tractor which can be steered by a farmer from a control room to carry out the drilling, seeding and spraying of the land. Drones are also being used to monitor the crops so agronomists don't have to enter the field to carry out their observations.

In the Looney Tunes show, the Roadrunner character is infamous for his speedy escapes from his arch nemesis, Wild. Now, a team of drone experts who named themselves after the fast-running cartoon character have lived up to the name, setting a new record for long-distance drone delivery. Team Roadrunner managed to fly a fixed-wing drone 97 miles (156km) over Texas this week, using cellular connectivity. Team Roadrunner used a combination of a mobile command and control, a visual observer team and stationary visual observers equipped with radios to fly the UAV. The drone launched from a central Texas location, and flew a pre-planned route through the National Airspace System. It landed and delivered its four pound (1.8 kilogram) package in Austin.

Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and big data are fuelling venture capital (VC) investment into London's technology sector, according to research from the founders of London Tech Week. Analysis of VC flows into the capital's tech sector found that AI and machine learning have proved particularly attractive, securing £85.75m in 2016 – 20 times the £3m raised in 2011. The sectors have collectively attracted £207m in VC funding over the last five years, with companies such as Deep Mind and Magic Pony leading the charge. Meanwhile, after raising just £40,000 in 2014 and £70,000 in 2015, more than £14m was ploughed into London companies developing robotics and drone technology last year. However, financial technology (fintech) has attracted more funding that any other tech sub-sector, amounting to £2bn in VC investment over the last five years.

The timing of the FBI director's dismissal, the Senate minority leader said, raises questions about the integrity of the Justice Department's look at potential collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"Learning to Fly by Crashing," a paper from CMU roboticists Dhiraj Gandhi, Lerrel Pinto, and Abhinav Gupta, has such a nice abstract that I'll just let them explain what this research is all about: The reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes! In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects [. . We use all this negative flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. One way to think of flying (or driving or walking or any other form of motion) is that success is simply a continual failure to crash.

Drone-maker AeroVironment has developed a handheld quadcopter that it says can be carried by soldiers on the battlefield and quickly deployed to get an aerial look at a potentially hostile location. The drone, called Snipe Nano Quad, has retractable rotor arms so it can be carried in a compact form and unpacked when needed. It weighs just 140 grams (5 ounces). It's equipped with cameras that can send a visible or infrared image back to a handheld controller unit. The infrared view provides a way to see the body heat of a person who may be hidden. The drone has a top speed of around 20 miles per hour and a radio range of about 1 kilometer.

Drone-maker AeroVironment Inc unveiled a small four-rotor surveillance helicopter on Tuesday that can be carried in a small pouch and launched from the palm of a hand. The smaller size and simplicity of operation means it can used by ordinary soldiers, offering squads and other small military units the kind of surveillance capacity previously reserved for larger military units, where drones are operated by specialists. AeroVironment said it delivered 20 of the 5-ounce (140-gram) Snipe unmanned aircraft to its first U.S. government client in April. The company declined to identify the government agency that purchased the drones, but Aviation Week reported last year that AeroVironment was developing prototypes for the U.S. Army. AeroVironment said the drone benefited from advances in technology achieved in the development of its Nano Hummingbird drone for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been responsible for many technological and scientific breakthroughs used by the military.

Drone-maker AeroVironment Inc unveiled a small four-rotor surveillance helicopter on Tuesday that can be carried in a small pouch and launched from the palm of a hand.