DARPA boasts that the system can snag a "full-size" drone, but don't expect it to catch any Predators. SideArm can snag a drone as heavy as 1,100 pounds, which means it's not quite strong enough to catch the plane-sized Predator or its larger siblings. There already exist rail-and-hook systems to catch small and medium-sized drones like the ScanEagle. In those systems, the drone deliberately flies into a tall net, halting its momentum. DARPA's experimented with alternative landing and launching systems before, like this quadcopter-launching body and sky hook, with modest success.

Quadcopter drones are great for aerial photography, racing, and backing up Lady Gaga during the Super Bowl halftime show. But puny propellers don't cut it for serious jobs, which is why military missions and humanitarian aid drops use unmanned aerial drones that resemble airplanes. Fixed-wing drones can fly further and carry more. The trouble is, winged aircraft can't takeoff or land vertically like quadcopters, and the hybrid machines that combine the utility of wings and the ease of quads tend to be complex and expensive. Further compounding the challenge, fixed-wing drones need runaways, which you don't often find in the remote locations where drones are most useful.

It'll likely take a long time before DARPA's autopilot system flies military planes on its own, but this latest demonstration proves that it works. Aurora Flight Sciences, the aviation company that's developing the technology for the agency, has successfully tested it on a Cessna Caravan turboprop aircraft. Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System or ALIAS is comprised of a robotic arm and a tablet-based user interface with speech recognition, among other components. When installed on a plane, it acts as the co-pilot in charge of flying the aircraft -- its human companions can chill and spend their time keeping an eye on the weather or looking out for any potential threats. This is the technology's third demonstration in merely a year, following two test runs on a simulator and a Diamond DA-42 plane.

Hunting submarines is dull, dangerous work. It's an elaborate game of sonar-fueled cat-and-mouse in vast stretches of open water, where the stakes are "finding foreign nations' seaborne nuclear weapons," or finding the foreign subs looking for our own seaborne nukes. DARPA, the Pentagon's future-war focused agency, wants to make it easier to find submarines, and they're enlisting robots to do it. The A is short for "Anti-submarine warfare", or ASW, and the rest of the name is ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel. The ship hit water in the middle of February, looking like nothing so much as a sparse gray Battleship piece.