The FAA plans to release its remote identification ruling for UAS in July, UAS Integration Office Executive Director Jay Merkle said in front of Congress last week. The remote ID rules -- often compared to license plates for drones -- would allow the FAA, police officers and other public officials to look up a UAS by a broadcast unique identifier and find out information about the operator. This would go hand-in-hand with registration rules to prevent uncooperative flights around airports or other illegal uses from going unpunished. "We are working currently to ensure that we keep the policy component along with standards and remote id infrastructure all developed and harmonized," Merkle said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about integrating new entrants into the National Airspace System. Remote ID has its detractors, who say it exposes too much private information of operators, but the FAA determined that it is necessary since, unlike with a car, the operator is not present, and there needs to be some accountability attached to that anonymity.

A Navy scientist has re-engineered the software that allows long-endurance drones to powerlessly climb into the sky on bubbles of warm air. In a U.S. patent application published on May 2, Aaron Kahn, an engineer working on the Autonomous Locator of Thermals (ALOFT) project at the Naval Research Laboratory, reported that he has extensively tested the new software that detects and estimates the position of thermals, i.e., rising columns of warm air that birds use to stay aloft without flapping their wings. Unlike birds, soaring drones need the benefits of thermal detection and position estimation software as the warm air tends to drift relative to the ground due to winds. Prior systems relied on batch estimation processes that "require storing large arrays of data, which is not ideal for operation on small micro-controllers with limited memory resources." Kahn's new soaring software uses extended Kalman filtering, a kind of algorithm already used by the Navy for navigating submarines and cruise missiles. Now it can help orbit drones like the tiny CICADA glider or long-endurance solar-soaring UAVs that might also have photovoltaic or fuel cells feeding battery-powered propellers.

The ministry's new missive to lawmakers came in response to a request made late last year by Andrej Hunko and fellow Linke members of parliament about the status of the Eurodrone. The questioners appear especially curious about IABG's role in helping to define key performance parameters for the aircraft, particularly related to airworthiness in civilian airspace. According to the ministry's letter, the contractor recommended outfitting the drone with a twin-turboprop propulsion system, a design feature that the developer nations ultimately adopted.

Future airports will be more and more automated and remotely controlled, and drones are expected to be integrated with daily operations. A newly granted project ASAS – Airport Surveillance for Airport Safety, led by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and to be conducted together with LFV (Luftfartsverket), Swedish Regional Airports (SRF), Örnsköldsvik Airport (OER) and FlyPulse will develop and demonstrate drone solutions to help automate daily operations in airports. With multiple stakeholders from authorities, airports, and related professional domains, the project will identify use cases that address the needs of daily operations at airports, develop and demonstrate drone solutions that help automate the airport operations, improve the airport safety, optimize the resource utilization, and reduce the environmental impacts. As the first in the world and one big step towards automated airports, LFV introduced Remote Tower Center (RTC) in 2015 with which the traffic control for the OER airport was taken over by Sundsvall/Midlanda airport (SDL) through remote control. Again in 2017, connected vehicles were introduced for improving airport safety based on results from the project DRIWS – Digital Runway Incursion Warning Systems, where physical stop-lights were replaced by digital signals within the vehicles for preventing ground vehicles from approaching the runway without clearance from air traffic control (ATC).

Launching at Singapore port's Marina South Pier in quarter three 2018, Wilhelmsen Ships Service and Airbus will be piloting the delivery of spare parts, documents, water test kits and 3D printed consumables via Airbus' Skyways unmanned air system (UAS) to vessels at anchorage. With the signing of an MOU at maritime trade show Posidonia, the Maritime UAS project agreement covers a joint ambition to establish a framework for cooperation between the Parties, with the aim of investigating the potential deployment and commercialization of UAS for maritime deliveries use cases. Marking the very first time, the viability of autonomous drone delivery to vessels has been put to the test in hectic, real-world port conditions, Marius Johansen, VP Commercial, Ships Agency at Wilhelmsen Ships Service is confident with Airbus now onboard his agency team's long-term drone delivery aspirations will be fulfilled. "We are absolutely thrilled to be working with a forward thinking, industry leader like Airbus. When we announced last year that we were pursuing drone delivery, we were greeted with a fair amount of scepticism, but our collaboration with Airbus, shows we really do mean business".

According to an article published two days ago in the Chinese military's official journal, a team of researchers from the Chinese military university National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) successfully tested, in early December, a swarm of " several tens of fixed-wing drones. The text has given little detail – it is only learned that the test had the objective of evaluating autonomous flight technologies in training, and the ability of the swarm to conduct a reconnaissance mission to the above a certain area. The project and development work is led by Professor SHEN Lin Cheng (沈 林 成), PhD supervisor and Chair of the NUDT Institute of Artificial Intelligence Sciences. "The team has been working for nine months on the preparation of this swarm test, sometimes we have to do a hundred test flights a day," says the former director of the institute of electro-mechanical engineering and automation, "We have precise short, medium and long term objectives, which are consistent with those set by the government on the modernization of the Chinese armed forces by 2020, 2035 and 2050." Despite "rudimentary" testing site conditions, the NUDT research team of an average age of 30 years has achieved a breakthrough in the areas of parallel perception, behavioral intention prediction, and Autonomous flight control focused on the handling of random incidents, says the People's Liberation Army Daily article.