The Department of Defense announced on Friday that it is investing 100 million in a drone base located in Agadez, in central Niger. The base will serve as a central surveillance hub in the fight against both Boko Haram and roaming militant groups linked to al Qaeda. "At the request of, and in close coordination with, the Government of Niger, United States Africa Command is establishing a temporary, expeditionary cooperative security location in Agadez, Niger," a US Africa Command spokesperson told Reuters via email. "Agadez is an ideal, central location to enable ISR collection (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to face the security threat across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin region." The US already has a military presence in both Agadez and the national capital, Niamey.

The United States is planning to invest in a military air base in the Northwest African country of Niger. The base will have the capacity of deploying drones and the investment reportedly stands at at least 50 million. The development of the new military base is expected to see the transfer of U.S. assets in the region from the U.S.'s shared air base with France's anti-Islamist force -- Operation Barkhane -- in Niger's capital city of Niamey to the new facility in the city of Agadez. This includes the MQ-9 Reaper drones. The new base, which will provide the U.S. greater access to Islamist extremists in neighboring countries like Libya, Mali and Nigeria, will cost the country an estimated 50 million, BBC quoted Michelle Baldanza, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, as saying.

New drone footage shows children playing football amid the ruins of rebel-held neighbourhood in Aleppo, Syria.

Despite escalating industry pressure for approval of package-delivery drones, safety experts and federal documents indicate widespread flights aren't likely before the next decade. U.S. aviation authorities only recently kicked off the formal, time-consuming process of defining the types of collision-avoidance systems considered essential for such operations to receive broad regulatory authorization. Drafting the technical standards is projected to take three or four years, envisioning a suite of ground-based and airborne sensors that haven't yet been developed. Even strong proponents of unmanned aerial vehicles predict that delivering packages to individual customers probably won't gain significant momentum until at least roughly 2020. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of the decade, we could see more routine uses" of package-delivery drones, according to Paul McDuffee, co-chair of the federal standards-setting panel and a high-ranking official with Boeing Co. BA -0.13 % 's drone-making unit, Insitu Inc.

DJI in a week slammed it's Foldable convenient drone "The Mavic Pro" this week making it one of the best foldable, convenient drones in business, after the much-anticipated drone "Karma", from GoPro was launched last week. The Mavic Pro is tiny, foldable and can be carried around in your pocket (A big one), belt, there's a clip which fits around your phone so you can still see the video from the drone, but it doesn't require either that massive controller from the Phantom range, which seems to make sense for travellers who want to take their drone everywhere with them. With the latest in tech, DJI includes a 4k camera stabilized by a 3-Axis gimbal and automated features like collision-avoidance, TapFly, and precision hovering all powered by a 24 core custom made processor. The DJI Mavic Pro can also be controlled with gestures and take selfies. Wave your hands to get the drone's attention.

Just a few weeks ago, we posted about some incredible research from Vijay Kumar's lab at the University of Pennsylvania getting quadrotors to zip through narrow gaps using only onboard localization. This is a big deal, because it means that drones are getting closer to being able to aggressively avoid obstacles without depending on external localization systems. The one little asterisk to this research was that the quadrotors were provided the location and orientation of the gap in advance, rather than having to figure it out for themselves. Yesterday, Davide Falanga, Elias Mueggler, Matthias Faessler, and Professor Davide Scaramuzza, who leads the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, shared some research that they've just submitted to ICRA 2017. It's the same kind of aggressive quadrotor maneuvering, except absolutely everything is done on board, including obstacle perception.

Warsaw prosecutors have officially informed a Russian citizen that he is suspected of violating Polish aviation law by flying a drone over Polish government buildings in Warsaw. In Poland, this is the first step toward charges being possibly pressed against the man, identified only as Ivan K., in line with Poland's privacy regulations. Police detained the man Monday on suspicion he was operating a drone that was flying in the prohibited area around Prime Minister Beata Szydlo's office and other state buildings. Spokesman for the prosecutors, Michal Dziekanski, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that following questioning the man was given a suspect status and released. If charged and convicted of flying a drone in an off-limits area, he could face up to five years in prison.

A drone is a flying, autonomous camera. A drone is so much a flying camera that in a release video for their newest drone, dronemakers DJI don't even say the word "drone," instead just referring to the latest unmanned aerial vehicle as a "flying camera." The features that make it drone-like: remote controls, onboard stabilization and obstacle avoidance sensors, GPS location and navigation programs, are really just camera accessories, part of the built-in airborne body for the new selfie machine. And the body is compact. "Mavic," DJI's latest drone, folds up, and is designed for backpacks and large pouches, rather than large, bulky, specialized carrying cases.

Dubai International Airport was forced to ground flights for half an hour due to a drone flying in the area, the airport says. It said airspace around the airport closed just after 0800 local time (0400 GMT) on Wednesday because of "unauthorised drone activity". Arrivals resumed at 0835, with full operations restarting by 0907. It is not the first time drones have delayed flights at the airport, one of the world's busiest. "We remind all [drone] operators that activities are not permitted within 5km (3.11 miles) of any airport or landing area,'' Dubai Airports said on Twitter. On June 12 a similar incident saw Dubai International Airport close for 69 minutes.

The Pentagon's oft-repeated line on artificial intelligence is this: we need much more of it, and quickly, in order to help humans and machines work better alongside one another. But a survey of existing weapons finds that the U.S. military more commonly uses AI not to help but to replace human operators, and, increasingly, human decision making. The report from the Elon Musk-funded Future of Life Institute does not forecast Terminators capable of high-level reasoning. At their smartest, our most advanced artificially intelligent weapons are still operating at the level of insects … armed with very real and dangerous stingers. So where does AI exist most commonly on military weapons? The study, which looked at weapons in military arsenals around the world, found 284 current systems that include some degree of it, primarily standoff weapons that can find their own way to a target from miles away.