TORONTO/OTTAWA – Officials say a Porter Airlines flight approaching Toronto's island airport took evasive action to avoid a suspected drone, injuring two flight attendants. Julie Leroux of Canada's Transportation Safety Board said the near collision occurred at 7:30 a.m. Leroux says the object involved in the near-miss was likely an unmanned aerial vehicle. Porter spokesman Brad Cicero says two flight attendants sustained minor injuries. They were taken to a hospital and released.

Various reports have surfaced in the past year about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) delivering packages and take-out to your door -- but some options are closer to the ground, literally. And one Silicon Valley city is jumping to test out this new technology, considered the newest frontier in automated delivery. Redwood City, Calif., recently passed a city resolution (PDF) for a nine-month pilot program in which Starship Technologies works with parcel delivery, grocery and food delivery firms who will use its autonomous robots to carry out the deliveries. As a demonstration for the city, the robot delivered a box of cookies from a local bakery. The company has run pilot programs in London; Düsseldorf, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and Washington, D.C.

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. This RHex dance contest was filmed in 2013, as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. More isn't always better, but with glowy flying drones, it definitely is: If you do the math (and the math is simple and exponential), by 2020 Intel will be flying 312,500 drones, which is a VGA display.

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Anthony Foxx waits for the countdown, then hits the plunger. The catapult releases its bungee cord, slinging the drone from to a standstill to 50 mph in half a second. The drone spins up its twin propellers and flies a few hundred feet up, circling overhead. "That's amazing," Foxx says, as the UAV drops its package within a few feet of the practice delivery zone, then belly flops onto a brown landing pad that resembles the base of a jumping castle. During the closing months of his four-year run as US Secretary of Transportation, Foxx has come to California on a fact finding mission.

And can do it all in high winds, and while carrying a maximum of 15 pounds. Its makers boast that it is ideal for pipeline inspection, and with the ability to travel almost 60 miles on the ground, as well as hopping over small obstacles, it's certainly nimble enough for some field work. Advanced Tactics first tested a version of the Panther in 2012, and last week released a video of the new, commercial model driving and flying as part of a presale promotion. The Panther is an interesting, novel drone design, but it's also a test case for Advanced Tactics far more interesting vehicle: the larger, human-carrying Black Knight Transformer. With a similar wheels-and-rotors configuration, the Transformer was floated in 2014 as a possible medical evacuation vehicle for the military.

Facebook has succeeded in transmitting data at almost 20Gbps between two towers in Southern California in tests of a technology key to its plans to deliver internet service to rural areas using drones. The tests were conducted earlier this year and made use of frequencies in the so-called E-band, a group of millimeter wave frequencies between 60 and 90GHz. Such signals are capable of high-bandwidth data transmission but are susceptible to attenuation from distance, weather, and obstacles, so they are typically used for short-range, point-to-point transmissions. Facebook used a 60-centimeter dish to send data over a 13-kilometer link between Malibu and Woodland Hills. That test initially shot data at between 100Mbps and 3Gbps and allowed engineers to collect transmission data on clear days and during clouds, fog, high winds, and rain, Facebook said in a Thursday blog post.

Regulations to protect people from falling drones moved a little closer to takeoff at the European Parliament on Thursday. Ensuring drone safety took on a new urgency this week, with GoPro's recall of its Karma drone after unexplained mid-air power failures caused a number of them to drop out of the sky. Under the European Union's proposed regulations, drones will have to be registered so that their owners can be identified. While that won't in itself stop drones from falling, it could lead pilots to take their responsibilities more seriously, legislators hope. A 1-kilogram drone like the Karma falling from as little as 11 meters (around three stories) could kill even someone wearing a safety helmet, according to a calculator developed by the Dropped Object Prevention Scheme, which promotes safety in the oil and gas industry.

The most entertaining video we posted on Video Friday a couple weeks ago was almost certainly Robot Drone Man, a parody of this PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) video, which for some reason has 150 million views on YouTube. Parody or not, Robot Drone Man actually exists, and it's a project of Ilhan Bae, a researcher and futurist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who wrote in to tell us about it. Robot Drone Man is an avatar drone, in the same category as other telepresence robots like Double and Beam. It allows a remote human to have an embodied physical presence through a mobile robot, although in this case, the robot can fly, since most of it is a DJI S1000 octocopter. With a height of 1.4 meters (landed), it's designed to match the eye level of people interacting with it, and the remote operator can "gesticulate with two hands and head as if a distant operator exists in person," says Bae, adding that this is "the first trial to couple a telepresence robot in an upright position and drone platform into one body."

An Australian man's idea to use a drone to bring a hot dog to his hot tub hit a snag when aviation authorities warned he could face fines of up to A$9,000 (about $6,970; £5,600) for breaching drone flight safety rules. The man, named by local media as "Tim", has insisted the stunt was safe but that the sky-borne sausage was "freezing" by the time it reached him.