Qualcomm has launched Flight RB5 5G, the "world's first" autonomous drone platform with 5G and AI capabilities. The company says the platform will support and accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous drones for commercial, enterprise, and industrial purposes. An onboard Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit achieves the modern cybersecurity requirements for drones. "We have continued to engage many leading drone companies, enabling 200 global robotics and drone ecosystem members in addition to consistently driving and promoting worldwide drone standardization and transformative 5G capabilities in organisations such as 3GPP, GSMA, the Global UTM Alliance, the Aerial Connectivity Joint Initiative (ACJA) and ASTM. We are proud to continue our momentum of enabling the digital transformation of global industries by unveiling the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform, a solution that is purpose-built for drone development with enhanced autonomy and intelligence features, bringing premium connected flight capabilities to industrial, enterprise and commercial segments."

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Qualcomm is unveiling its platform that enables aerial drones to tap both 5G and AI technologies. The Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G platform aims to accelerate development for commercial, enterprise, and industrial drones to help enterprises capture data from drone cameras and process that data at the edge of the network. The platform is powered by Qualcomm's QRB5165 processor, and it builds upon the company's latest internet of things (IoT) offerings. The idea is to enable a new generation of low-power 5G drones that can capture a lot of data with cameras and transmit that data via 5G to an operator or send it longer distances over a network.

Aerial navigation in GPS-denied, indoor environments, is still an open challenge. Drones can perceive the environment from a richer set of viewpoints, while having more stringent compute and energy constraints than other autonomous platforms. To tackle that problem, this research displays a biologically inspired deep-learning algorithm for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and its application in a drone navigation system. We propose an unsupervised representation learning method that yields low-dimensional latent state descriptors, that mitigates the sensitivity to perceptual aliasing, and works on power-efficient, embedded hardware. The designed algorithm is evaluated on a dataset collected in an indoor warehouse environment, and initial results show the feasibility for robust indoor aerial navigation.

Okay, so maybe the 21st century under-delivered on the whole flying car thing, but it appears we're a lot closer to another form of personal flight than you probably thought. It seems the hoverbike, a tried and true addition to any futuristic science fiction arsenal, is already a reality. Hoversurf just released a trailer for its first fully manned hoverbike, built on a heavy duty drone platform called the Scorpion 3, and it's just as cool as it sounds. The video shows off the team's successful attempt at a fully manned hoverbike -- and just seeing the speedy contraption in action is enough to get your blood pumping -- but the real star of the show here is the Scorpion 3 drone platform. Hoversurf built the Scorpion 3 platform to be used in a number of different applications, and the hoverbike seen here is just one of those.

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."

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."

SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, for the second month in a row, following a Japanese satellite mission. The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle's main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform. Due to the high altitude of the mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing, but the Falcon 9 rocket touched down on the drone platform - nicknamed Of Course I Still Love You - just over eight minutes after launching. SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean after a delivering a Japanese satellite into orbit early this morning, and is the second rocket to successfully land in the space of a month. A company webcast showed the 23-story-tall rocketsoaring off a seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation at 1:21 am EDT (06:21 BST).

Second stage continuing to carry JCSAT-14 to a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit. This is the second successful touchdown in a row on a floating platform, after the last one in April. There were previously four failed attempts. SpaceX also made a successful landing on a ground-based pad in December. About two and a half minutes after the launch, the rocket's first stage was scheduled to shut down and separate, leaving the second stage to deliver the satellite into its intended orbit more than 25,000 miles (40,000 km) above the Earth.