An illustration from a patent filed by Amazon on July 21, 2016 for a multi-use drone docking station. SAN FRANCISCO -- A newly-granted patent gives a peek into Amazon's vision of how drones with its Prime Air service could deliver packages across large areas, and it looks a lot like the old Pony Express. The patent, filed July 12, is for a "Multi-use unmanned aerial vehicle docking station system." It paints a picture of flocks of unmanned aerial vehicles whizzing out of depots carrying packages bound for a broad geographical region. By the sound of it, instead of flying all the way to the customer's home the drones would instead wing their way towards the final destination but then stop at the nearest docking station along that path as they get low on charge.

A federal judge has ordered a Connecticut father and son to testify under oath at depositions and hand over documents about drones shown in YouTube videos firing a gun and deploying a flame thrower in their backyard. Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven ruled Monday in the case of 19-year-old Austin Haughwout of Clinton and his father, Bret Haughwout, who both have refused to comply with Federal Aviation Administration subpoenas seeking their testimony and documents. The judge ordered them to comply within 30 days. "Because I conclude that the FAA has a legitimate purpose for its subpoenas and that the subpoenas are otherwise appropriate in scope, I will grant the petition," Meyer ruled. One video, viewed nearly 3.8 million times, shows a flying drone equipped with a handgun firing rounds.

Controlling robots using the human mind might seem like something taken from science fiction. But the technology is already available, and it could soon be used by the US army. A team of researchers has developed technology that lets a human control multiple drones using their brain waves, and the group is now working on squadrons of drones that could perform complex operations. Controlling robots using the human mind might seem like something taken straight out of science fiction. The Arizona researchers are not the first to investigate using brain waves to control drones.

AirMap is an app that gives drone pilots access to low-altitude navigational info. The wildfire alerts it gets from the US Department of the Interior is more up-to-date than the ones published by the Federal Aviation Administration. If you'll recall, the local government of California offered a 75,000 reward in 2015 to catch the drone pilots who flew their UAVs over three different forest fires. Authorities can override temporary restrictions by logging into authorized DJI accounts, though, so first responders can still use DJI's machines to assess affected locations.

Researchers at ASU used this skull cap with 128 electrodes to control three drones. Hopefully this never gets reverse-engineered by AI. Panagiotis Artemiadis, director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab at Arizona State University, developed mind-controlled drone swarms by tracking electrical activity in the brain. When the cap-wearing human pictures the quadcopters doing a task, they respond. One person can control up to four drones this way, with the intention of eventually adding multiple people to control larger swarms.

Tesla's Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert is finally nearing completion. Set to open on July 29th, it will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. The 5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries each year to meet demand. When it's complete, Tesla's Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. At the Model 3 launch yesterday, founder Elon Musk said the 5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries annually to meet demand.

Airbus demonstrated its new inspection process at the Farnborough Airshow, where a drone equipped with an Intel RealSense camera autonomously circled an A330 while rapidly snapping photos. The images were then applied to a 3D model of the aircraft that allowed inspectors to get a close, detailed look at the subject. It still takes awhile to inspect the digital model, but in all, it's much faster. Gathering the inspection data by hand takes about two hours. Using a drone takes only 10 to 15 minutes.

When most people picture a drone, they probably either think of military-style behemoths or hobbyist quadcopters. But what if you couldn't tell a drone from something you expect to be in the sky, like a bird? That's the question raised after reports of what appears to be a bird-shaped unmanned aerial vehicle going down in Somalia. The alleged drone looks like it has a crudely welded metal body that would resemble a bird of prey if viewed from the ground. Pictures of the craft were shared on the Twitter account of someone who identifies himself as Adam A. Omar, who said the drone crashed in Mogadishu's Waabari district.

Technology created by an Australian startup is going to bring the conservation of orang-utans in a Sumatran jungle into the digital age. Adelaide-based Jemsoft's Monocular API is a computer vision machine learning technology, which can be taught to search for items in the real world. Under a new agreement the company will licence the software to conservationists to be applied to footage taken via drone above the canopies to identify nests of the endangered mammal. Rather than conservationists sifting through photos and video manually, Jemsoft's intelligent software can be trained to identify the orang-utan nests. Jemsoft, founded in 2013, is already being used by a number of large enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 companies, for other purposes.

They were the mischievous creatures blamed for causing mechanical failures and faults on aircraft during World War Two and later the destructive monsters in a hit film franchise. So Gremlins might not seem like the first choice for a fleet of robotic aircraft being developed by the US military. But the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing swarms of re-usable drone aircraft that can work together to perform a mission, which it has called the Gremlins program. Darpa said the program has been deliberately named Gremlins after the imps that British pilots during Wold War Two adopted as their good luck charms. The idea is to replace the expensive and increasingly vulnerable multi-function combat aircraft which currently perform a range of different missions.