Small drones are already effective weapons for urban warfare--when armed with miniature warheads, these stealthy spies can turn into lethal assassins. So far their biggest limitation is battery life, but Boeing's patent for a drone battle station sets out to overcome that. The aerospace giant's'Vehicle Base Station' resembles Amazon's proposed recharging stations on street lights, but with a different mission. John Vian, a research fellow at Boeing, says the station's main applications are likely to be civil and commercial--used for firefighting and search-and-rescue, for example--but the patent has a decidedly military slant. "The unmanned aerial vehicles may monitor for undesired activity… [which] may be the placement of an improvised explosive device in roadway."

The latest Google drones have just started taking flight in the real world. But the team behind the technology is slowing down, trimming headcount and shelving initiatives as the experimental unit becomes the latest target of tightening budgets across parent company Alphabet Inc. Project Wing, a unit of Alphabet's X research lab, nixed a partnership with coffee giant Starbucks Corp., according to people familiar with the decision. Following the departure of project leader Dave Vos in October, the unit also froze hiring and began asking some staff to seek jobs elsewhere in the company, according to some of those people. They asked not to be identified speaking about private company moves. The decisions are part of a broader Alphabet effort to rein in spending and try to turn more experimental projects from loss-making risky bets into real businesses.

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into an accident involving an enormous experimental drone belonging to Facebook which crashed earlier this year. The drone was built to bring internet to far-flung parts of the planet and designed to hover 60,000 ft above the surface of the Earth. However, in June the drone known as Aquila, ended up plummeting to earth after suffering a'structural failure' as it was coming into land. No one was hurt in the incident. The drone, called Aquila, suffered from a'structural failure' right before it landed According to Bloomberg the crash is one of several hiccups that the social network has faced in recent months, following an explosion earlier this year that destroyed one of its satellites.

Giant drone, called Aquila, experienced a "structural failure" during a test flight on June 28, according to the NTSB

The new, high-flying sport could be headed to a screen near you. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. The new, high-flying sport could be headed to a screen near you.

Now I know why I own cargo shorts: That's where I'll carry my drone. It also fits in less-embarrassing items, like a backpack. The magic of the $1,000 Mavic Pro--already sold out or back-ordered in many places--is that it's a Transformer. From a brick not much bigger than a fruitcake, it unfolds into some of the most advanced flying tech...

Airbus's vision for driverless flying taxis is one step closer to becoming a reality. MTSI and SOAR Oregon have been jointly awarded a'Flight Test and Range' to test the single seater self-piloted flying vehicle that can carry both cargo and human passengers. Airbus's innovation division, A³, unveiled plans for'Project Vahana' earlier this year, and says it hopes to have a full-sized prototype in the air by the end of 2017 and a model for sale on the market by 2020. Airbus's innovation division, A³, previously unveiled plans for'Project Vahana', which aims to have a full-sized prototype in the air by the end of 2017 and a model for sale on the market by 2020. Project Vahana began earlier this year and is one of the first projects at A³, the advanced projects and partnerships outpost of Airbus Group in Silicon Valley. The first conceptual renders have been revealed showing a sleek self-flying aircraft with room for one passenger who sits under a canopy that retracts similar to a motorcycle helmet visor.

Disney World's nightly fireworks might soon have some competition in the form of hundreds of swirling, whirling, LED-lit drones. They flash, fall, flock in unison and are all controlled by one person. I saw them and they were, for lack of a better phrase, absolutely amazing. The drones come from Intel. The electronics giant turned to Disney to showcase its next generation drones.

This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney. When John Allsopp invited me here, I told him how excited I was discuss a topic that's been heavy on my mind: accountability in automated systems. But then John explained that in order for the economics to work, and for it to make sense to fly me to Australia, there needed to actually be an audience. Let's start with the most obvious answer--the military. This is the Predator, the forerunner of today's aerial drones. Those things under its wing are Hellfire missiles. These two weapons are the chocolate and peanut butter of robot warfare. In 2001, CIA agents got tired of looking at Osama Bin Laden through the camera of a surveillance drone, and figured out they could strap some missiles to the thing. And now we can't build these things fast enough. We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance. There are also portable UAVs with explosives in their nose, so you can fire them out of a tube and then direct them against a target--a group of soldiers, an orphanage, or a bunker–and make them perform a kamikaze attack. The Army has been developing unmanned vehicles that work on land, little tanks that roll around with a gun on top, with a wire attached for control, like the cheap remote-controlled toys you used to get at Christmas. Here you see a demo of a valiant robot dragging a wounded soldier to safety. The Russians have their own versions of these things, of course. I imagine it asking you who you are in a heavy Slavic accent before firing its many weapons into your fleeing body. Not all these robots are intended as weapons. The Army is trying to automate transportation, sometimes in weird-looking ways like this robotic dog monster.

San Leandro-based Airspace Systems is making a business out of solving the toughest problems facing the emerging drone industry. The company designed a drone of its own, jam-packed with sensors and machine intelligence, to autonomously intercept threatening drones at high speeds and carry them away from large crowds. If you think this sounds difficult, you would be right. The company employs myriad technologies for its unmanned flying dogfighters that include computer vision, physics and some pretty serious engineering grit. To not only detect enemy drones, but predict where they will be in the future, CTO Guy Bar-Nahum, and a team of machine learning and computer vision experts, devised a creative method of training their machine learning frameworks using simulated test-flights.