The "Pandora's box" of unmanned aircraft in the UK has been opened, according to the Astraea consortium. Yet many technology and ethics issues surrounding civilian drones are yet to be solved, journalists at London's Science Media Centre were told. The UK-led, £62m Astraea project - which has participation of the UK Civil Aviation Authority - is attempting to tackle all facets of the idea. Later in November, they will carry out a crucial collision-avoidance test. Unmanned aircraft or UAs is something of a new name for drones, which have gained notoriety principally in the theatre of war where remotely operated aircraft are used for surveillance or air strikes.

Aeronautics researchers at MIT have developed a manned-to-unmanned aircraft guidance system that allows a pilot in one plane to guide another unmanned airplane by speaking commands in English. In a flight test, the pilotless vehicle, called a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), responded to sudden changes in plan and avoided unexpected threats en route to its destination, in real time. "The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level--not just'turn right, turn left' but'fly to this region and perform this task,'" said Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. "The pilot essentially treats the UAV as a wingman," said Valenti, comparing the UAV to a companion pilot in a fighter-plane squadron. Tom Schouwenaars, a Ph.D. candidate in aeronautics and astronautics, and Valenti are principal researchers on the guidance system, which is part of the capstone demonstration of the Software Enabled Control (SEC) program. Professors Eric Feron and Jonathan How of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (aero/astro) are among the principal investigators on the SEC program.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column on Wednesday November 1 2006 In the report below we describe John Pike as "director of global security and spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists". He has not held that position for some years. He is the founder and director of GlobalSecurity.org In November 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah, an American uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) - a robot plane - located a mortar battery that had been hampering the US operation to retake the town.The mortar's position was logged by the UAV's operator, who was sitting at his desk in Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas, thousands of miles away. Using the internet, the operator contacted the operator of another armed UAV at a desk in central command ("Centcom") - a safe area away from the theatre of war, with centres in Kuwait, Qutar or Iraq.

Aerial robotics research has brought us flapping hummingbirds, seagulls, bumblebees, and dragonflies. But if these robots are to do anything more than bear a passing resemblance to their animal models, there is one thing they'll definitely need: better vision. In February, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, two teams presented new work (PDF) aimed at building better-performing and lower-power vision systems that would help aerial robots navigate and aid them in identifying objects. Dongsuk Jeon, a graduate student working with Zhengya Zhang and IEEE Fellows David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, outlined an approach to drastically lower the power of the very first stage of any vision system--the feature extractor. That system uses an algorithm to draw out potentially important features like circles and squares from an overall image.

No matter how much time and energy and money we put into a robot, it's going to be a very very very long time before we come up with anything that's anywhere close to as capable as a dog. From a robotics perspective, dogs are utterly amazing: they're fast, efficient, able to cover all sorts of terrain, can understand both verbal and gestural commands, and they run on dog food. Dogs do have some limitations: they can't move rubble, and they're not that great at flying, either. Robots can do these things, but in a disaster scenario, the key is getting all these different pieces (robots, dogs, humans, and anything else) to work together in a coherent way. The Smart Emergency Response System (SERS) is trying to make this work, using a combination of "ground and aerial autonomous vehicles, drones, humanoids, human-operated telerobots, and trained search-and-rescue dogs equipped with real-time sensors" to save as many lives as possible in an emergency.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. The DARPA Robotics Challenge this past summer showcased how far humanoid robots have come--but also how far they have yet to go before they can tackle real-world practical applications. Even the best of the DRC behemoths stumbled and fell down, proving, as IEEE Spectrum noted at the time, that "not walking is a big advantage." There is, in fact, a new not-walking way for robots to perform many kinds of tasks better and faster: the dexterous drone.

My confidence in humanity's superiority over robots has been shaken...but not stirred. Flying drones can play the James Bond theme song from the series of famous action films. In one of the most fun and impressive robotics video seen this year, nine flying quadrotors from UPENN's GRASP Lab play six different instruments including the cymbals, piano, and "couch-guitar". Amazingly, this clip was conceived of, programmed, and shot in just three days! Debuted on Wednesday February 29th at this year's TED talks in Long Beach, the Bond theme quadrotor video has already received more than 2 million views on YouTube.

It's not a vulture or crow but a Falcon--a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff's office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon's potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone's flickering images of a nearby highway. Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds.

Venture Beat covered the closing ceremonies of the third summer session of the Singularity University. Matternet is the most technologically ambitious. In the first phase, it utilizes small-scale electric vehicles deployed with vertical take-off and landing capability, limited payload-bearing capacity and range. In the longer term, we will have a wide range of AAVs suitable for different payload capacity, flying range and weather conditions. Ground stations They create and use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to ferry medicine and other goods to remote places such as rural villages in Africa.

Friends and colleagues were aware, at some level, that Nick Roy, a researcher in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), had been using his sabbatical to take on some sort of robotics-related role at Google. But few people knew the full scope of his work until this past week, when Google X -- the infamous idea incubator known for Google Glass, self-driving cars, and wireless hot-air balloons -- unveiled a video introducing Project Wing, an ambitious delivery-drone initiative that Roy has overseen for the past two years. At Google X's secret Mountain View headquarters, Roy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, led a team of several dozen autonomy experts to determine the technical feasibility of self-flying delivery vehicles. Project Wing lined up nicely with Roy's work as head of CSAIL's Robust Robotics Group, which focuses in part on sensing, planning, and controlling unmanned vehicles in environments without GPS. He even brought on board a handful of key MIT collaborators, including recent graduates Abraham Bachrach PhD '13 and Adam Bry SM '11, whose state-estimation algorithms have drastically improved unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in indoor spaces.