TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Florida could turn to the sky to fight Burmese pythons on the ground under a bill a Senate committee unanimously approved Monday to allow two state agencies to use drones in the effort to eradicate invasive plants and animals. The bill would create an exception to a current law that prohibits law enforcement from using drones to gather information and bans state agencies from using drones to gather images on private land. It would allow the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida Forest Service to fly drones to manage and eradicate invasion species on public lands. Sen. Ben Albritton said he has been told that drones equipped with lidar, which stands for "light detection and ranging," might be able to identify pythons. "As you know, chasing those nasty critters down there in the Everglades is a difficult task," Albritton said.

Since 2006, improvised explosive devices have killed more than 1,000 U.S. troops in Iraq as small groups of U.S. soldiers routinely travel in convoys on bomb-ridden roads, according to Congressional Research Service data. But General Motors is developing commercial vehicle technology that could dramatically lower the casualty count from IEDs. In fact, GM is gambling that it has a lot of technology that the military will want to buy. For example, "GM has demonstrated leader-follower capability," GM Defense President David Albritton told the Free Press. Leader-follower means a manned vehicle leads a dozen unmanned vehicles using GM's self-driving vehicle technology.