The number of incidents in the UK involving drones reported to police has increased more than twelve-fold over the past two years. Complaints, including allegations of snooping, burglary "scoping" exercises, mid-air near-misses and the smuggling of contraband into prisons, rose to almost 10 a day (3,456) last year, compared with 283 in 2014. Last year's figure was almost three times higher than the 2015 total of 1,237 incidents. The true total is likely to be even higher as the data, obtained by the Press Association through freedom of information requests, was not available for all UK forces. Sales of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), available for as as little as £30 and often containing built-in cameras, have risen sharply in recent years but as their popularity has increased so have concerns about their use.

If you're a drone pilot who doesn't wear an Air Force uniform, chances are your aircraft looks something like a square with four rotors, a battery, and maybe a camera. The classic quadcopter, after all, works just fine. Well, maybe because you want a drone with five rotors. Or you want to mount the camera on top of the drone, not below. Or you want a drone shaped like a rabbit because you quite like rabbits and why the heck not?

Delivery drones have more than a few challenges, not the least of which is dropping off the package in a convenient place. Do you really want to head out to your yard to collect a box? You might not have to. Advanced Tactics has successfully tested delivery with a drone, the Panther sUAS Air/Ground Robot, that can both fly and drive up to your door. When it's too dangerous or costly to travel by air, the machine just has to touch down and wheel its way to its destination. It promises more considerate (not to mention less theft-prone) shipping to homes and offices, and it could also lead to faster deliveries in areas where no one transportation method is particularly speedy.

Heathrow is apparently a magnet for drone pilots fond of flying their devices near planes. According to the latest report from the UK Airprox Board, three planes narrowly missed drones roaming the skies near the airport last year. They're separate incidents from the British Airways plane that struck what authorities believe was an unmanned flying vehicle in April. These particular near-misses happened within a three-week period from October to November 2016. Two of the three were classified as "category A" or the most serious of near-misses.

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. Festo's Bionic Learning Network prototypes for this year are a bit less crazy than we're used to, but they're also far more practical, with immediate potential applications, especially in collaborative robotics: Festo presents a bionic gripper called the OctopusGripper, which is derived from an octopus tentacle. Free-moving, intuitive to operate and safe when interacting with the user: the pneumatic lightweight robot is based on the human arm and has great potential as a sensitive helper for human–robot collaboration in the future.

The government's demand for drones and drone operators continues to soar. In fact, earlier this month the head of Air Education and Training Command said that the U.S. Air Force now has more jobs for MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones than any other type of pilot position. Now, a new initiative hopes to speed up the procurement process for smaller drones – saving time, money, and lives. It is part of a new mission for Customs and Border Protection: helping agents in the field see beyond their line of sight, and secure a wider area, without sacrificing safety. "They want to see what's over the next hill," explains Kevin McAleenan, CBP's acting commissioner.

Accomplished pilots compete in racing leagues and championships backed by big-name sponsors and watched by fans on the internet and ESPN.

Seen from a drone's eye view, the enormous earthmoving trucks, buses and tractors criss-crossing this corner of Somerset look like toy town models. The vehicles are dwarfed by their surroundings at Hinkley Point, where new footage has revealed the full scale of the site being prepared for Britain's first new nuclear power station in a generation.

A drone flew within 20 metres of a plane on the approach to Heathrow, while another shocked pilots by appearing at 3,000 metres (10,000ft), a monthly update on near-misses has revealed. Commercial jet pilots reported two "category A" incidents, the most serious class of near-miss, involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as drones. The latest report comes amid concern that drone near-misses are on the rise, potentially posing a threat to recreational and commercial planes. In one case, an Airbus A320 pilot on the approach to Heathrow in October last year spotted a drone within just 20 metres, or "possibly within the wingspan" of the aircraft. Investigators concluded that the drone had flown so close to the passenger jet that "providence had played a major part in the aircraft not colliding".

Amazon just made news when its Prime Air delivery drone did its first public demo, landing on a lawn in California to drop off a few bottles of sunscreen for attendees of an Amazon conference on automation. But the cofounder and CTO of the drone delivery startup Zipline doesn't think much of Amazon's experiments in this area, or Google's either. Have you been near one of those quadrocopters when it sets down, Zipline's Keenan Wyrobek asks? "They're huge things with the power and blade size of four lawnmowers," he says. While Amazon dropped off sunscreen for Silicon Valley insiders, and Google has talked with Domino's about pizza delivery, Zipline is delivering life-saving blood to hospitals in Rwanda.