Trajectory visualization and animation play critical roles in robotics research. However, existing data visualization and animation tools often lack flexibility, scalability, and versatility, resulting in limited capability to fully explore and analyze flight data. To address this limitation, we introduce Flymation, a new flight trajectory visualization and animation tool. Built on the Unity3D engine, Flymation is an intuitive and interactive tool that allows users to visualize and analyze flight data in real time. Users can import data from various sources, including flight simulators and real-world data, and create customized visualizations with high-quality rendering. With Flymation, users can choose between trajectory snapshot and animation; both provide valuable insights into the behavior of the underlying autonomous system. Flymation represents an exciting step toward visualizing and interacting with large-scale data in robotics research.

This new technology has evident social and economic impacts on our lifestyle and represents one of the most vital future trends [16]. In this context, Suab et al. have generally explained how different UAVs could be employed in forests and farming [7]. On the other hand, the mobility and flexibility of UAVs as well as their cheap costs represent their most powerful features for developing a new generation of cellular communication flying terminals as in [8][9][10], acquiring images rich of details for executing several geological applications as suggested in [11], or monitoring and tracking wildlife features [12]. Many engineers and researchers look at commercial multicopters as practical devices that could be adapted to perform a wide range of applications, even though they are unable to carry considerable payloads, and their batteries may sustain up to two successive flying hours if their maximal weight, including their payload, is around ten kilos. In such a case, building advanced types of flying robots that satisfy any special requirements regarding their payload or their maximal flying range requires new creative ideas. This paper presents a few novel designs with many technical details including computer vision systems and some modern AI-based algorithms that are required to perform smart missions. The organization of this paper is as follows: first, we present several recently designed and presented platforms for serving in different areas.

An Israeli start-up is replacing farmhands with flying robots who do the picking themselves. The robots fly around and pick fruit straight off the trees, depositing them in a bin. That makes life easier for farmers, may cut food prices and the work more cost-effective, according to Israeli start-up Tevel. The robots are already paired with farmers in orchards in Italy and the US. "Artificial Intelligence is definitely the future," says Amir Degani, associate professor, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

A two-legged robot inspired by birds can walk, skateboard, fly and balance on a slackline, which is like a loose tightrope. It could potentially become a new tool to monitor infrastructure in hard-to-reach environments. The robot, named LEONARDO by its creators at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Northeastern University in Boston, is a human-like machine with knee, hip and ankle joints, but rotor blades for arms that give it upward thrust. LEONARDO is 75 centimetres tall, weighs 2.6 kilograms and walks at up to 20cm per second. It is "the first robot to achieve seamless integration of walking …

Honeybees move quickly from flower to flower, landing easily on each one in turn – but a study involving small drones suggests that the undertaking is more difficult than it looks, implying the bees rely on learning as well as hardwired instinct. Bees and other insects judge movement using what is called "optical flow" – basically the rate at which things are moving through the field of view. Optical flow is useful during landing too, particularly to help a bee decelerate.

Aerial robotics research has brought us flapping hummingbirds, seagulls, bumblebees, and dragonflies. But if these robots are to do anything more than bear a passing resemblance to their animal models, there is one thing they'll definitely need: better vision. In February, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, two teams presented new work (PDF) aimed at building better-performing and lower-power vision systems that would help aerial robots navigate and aid them in identifying objects. Dongsuk Jeon, a graduate student working with Zhengya Zhang and IEEE Fellows David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, outlined an approach to drastically lower the power of the very first stage of any vision system--the feature extractor. That system uses an algorithm to draw out potentially important features like circles and squares from an overall image.

The next step on the road to robo-domination is, apparently, juggling. From Switzerland's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control comes this video of flying robots (quadrocopters) juggling a ball individually and in teams. The quadrocopters in the video are operated by humans (for now). They do, however, have onboard computers and are able to fly themselves if properly programmed. As humanity continues to propel itself toward the inevitable robot apocalypse, it's nice to know our future machine masters will at least be able to keep us entertained.

The system, dubbed "DroneRad," can go on either FlyCam's Cypher 6 hexacopter or FlyCam's The NEO octacopter, either of which seem like they're straight out of a cyberpunk novel set in 1998. The existing DroneRad sensor is just for radiation, but additional sensor sets could instead look for airborne chemical weapons like chlorine and nerve as, or for bioweapons like anthrax. There's also an option for the future that can pick up on methane and diesel fumes. FlyCam isn't the first drone to do this. As more and more drones are outfitted with chemical sniffers, the correct response to "does that smell weird?" in the future may just be sending a robot to check.