Researchers at the University of Southern California are teaching tiny drones to fly in packs for safety, search and rescue and other social missions. LOS ANGELES -- Rarely a day goes by without tales of another drone advancement, usually for deliveries to a remote area, something Amazon and other companies are pursuing. University of Southern California students Wolfgang Hoenig and James Preiss check drones before they take flight on March 8, 2017, in Los Angeles. It's not here yet, but another futuristic use of drones is having large groups of quadcopters in packs, working together like bees, to assist in search and rescue, fire safety, coastal surveillance and other useful actions. Researchers at the University of Southern California are hard at work at just that, looking to spend the next five years perfecting synchronized drones for prime time.

Residents and local officials said on Friday the attack took place in Mozno in al-Wadie district of Abyan province. The three killed included the local leader of the militant group, Waddah Muhammed Amsouda, who was meeting the others in a house in the area, they said.

The bill would ban the use of weaponized drones, but exempt police. Details on how law enforcement could use drones with weapons would be spelled out in new rules to be developed by the state Police Officer Standards and Training Council. Officers also would have to receive training before being allowed to use drones with weapons. "Obviously this is for very limited circumstances," said Republican state Sen. John Kissel, of Enfield, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee that approved the measure Wednesday and sent it to the House of Representatives. "We can certainly envision some incident on some campus or someplace where someone is a rogue shooter or someone was kidnapped and you try to blow out a tire."

Construction sites in Japan are enjoying a wave of automation amid an increasing shortage of labourers, with the introduction of robots to do the heavy lifting and drones that fly from above and instantly collect data.

Last week, Wal-Mart filed a patent for in-store service drones that could locate and deliver items to customers within the store. From the patent's description, the drones would be equipped with a number of sensors to be able to detect and grab the correct product and then drop it off at a designated landing area where consumers can grab the item. Just last fall, Wal-Mart also filed a patent for electronic self-driving shopping carts that can find the items on customers' shopping lists, and would also self-sort once a customer is finished with the cart, clearing aisles. Wal-Mart, which employs roughly 1.5 million people and is the 15th biggest public company in the world, makes about $482 billion in revenue a year. Adding drones to the mix could signal that Wal-Mart is looking to downsize its in-store employee number and replace them with robotic help.

In late 2015, mandatory drone registration went into effect in the United States. Since then, anyone who wants to fly a drone (or model aircraft) weighing over 0.55 pounds (0.25 kilograms) must register with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to receive a unique identification number. This number needs to be placed on the drone, but there is no requirements for it to broadcast signals to allow for remote identification. That might change in the future. The FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016 required the FAA administrator to "convene industry stakeholders to facilitate the development of consensus standards for remotely identifying operators and owners of unmanned aircraft systems and associated unmanned aircraft."

Domino's has unleashed another set of pizza delivery drones, this time in Germany and the Netherlands. Last year, it worked with Flirtey to drop pizza to customers in New Zealand using unmanned aerial vehicles. For this pilot program, however, it chose to use autonomous rovers developed by Starship Technologies, a company built by two of Skype's founders. Domino's told Engadget that launching this program doesn't mean it has given up on developing its own delivery drones, which it's been doing for a year now. Both this pilot and the one in New Zealand come under the auspices of DRU (Domino's Robotic Unit), the same division that's developing its homegrown machine.

A Dutch startup is set to release a fleet of'drones' to combat the 220 million pounds of dog droppings left on the Netherlands' streets each year. Called Dogdrones, the vehicles will work together as a team to detect and scoop up the poop. The aerial drone is fitted with cameras and thermal energy technology that transmits GPS coordinates of the feces to a rolling robot on the ground that immediately leaves its hub to clean up the waste. A Dutch startup is set release a fleet of'drones' to combat the 220 million pounds of dog droppings left on the Netherlands's streets each year. Watchdog 1, uses a camera and thermal imaging to scan the environment for canine waste. The thermal imaging will then crate a heat map showing the location, which is translated into GPS coordinates and sent to Patroldog 1 – the ground robot.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. and map publisher Zenrin Co. said Wednesday they will collaborate to develop safe flight routes for drones. Under the "drone highway" initiative, Tepco will offer information on its power grid network, such as locations of transmission towers, power poles and electric cables, for mapping on Zenrin's three-dimensional map database to create flight-support infrastructure for guiding drones. "Drone ports" to charge drones will also be set up. The two companies aim to launch the drone flight aid service in fiscal 2019, after conducting tests. A Tepco official said other power companies, telecommunication carriers and railways will be asked to join the drone highway initiative.

Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing "Money," one of the novels that defined the nineteen-eighties, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary icon. "I have spent weeks in a PacMan-fed stupor, unwilling and unable to think about anything else," he wrote in "Invasion of the Space Invaders," his "addict's guide" to the nascent arcade. Amis was not alone in his obsession. The Japanese-made game, in which players guide an auto-munching yellow head through a Daedalian maze, consuming a trail of pellets while fleeing four candy-tone ghosts, earned more than a billion dollars in quarters in its first year, surpassing the highest-grossing "Star Wars" film at the time. Pac-Man towered, Amis wrote, over "a vast garbage dump of rocky romances and wrecked careers."