Drones

Quadcopter drones certainly can come in handy, but those exposed propellers make them unsuitable for work in close quarters. Flyability's Elios drone doesn't have that problem, so it was recently used to explore deep ice caves in Greenland.

Zipline has announced a new partnership with Walmart to conduct pilot trials using its drones to fulfil health and wellness orders in one hour, with hopes of expanding to general merchandise if the first runs are successful.

Drones may be seeing more use by police forces, but they're still limited by short flight times, and the need for certified operators. Tech company Axon has set out to address the problem, by leveraging the existing Fotokite tethered drone.

While crop-spraying drones do have advantages over full-size piloted aircraft, they're limited by their battery range. Dutch startup Drone4Agro is developing a solution to that problem, though, in the form of a range-extended electric multicopter.

When seeing an underwater drone for the first time, some people say "That would make a great fish-finder!". The problem is, the device's user can't always tell where the drone is. That's where the Chasing F1 Fish Finder Drone comes in.

There are now a number of heavy-lift cargo drones on the market, and they pretty much all incorporate six to eight horizontal propellers. The Avidrone 210TL is different, though, in that it goes with two sets of full rotor blades.

While autonomous drones are now pretty good at avoiding large obstacles, thin suspended power lines can still pose a challenge. A new onboard sensing system, however, could change that.

We've already heard about drones that spray crops with herbicides and fertilizers. The AeroSeeder is a bit different, however, in that (as you might have guessed) it disperses seeds that might otherwise be difficult to plant.

Most multicopter drones can only fly for about 30 minutes, after which their battery has to be recharged for one to two hours. According to Israeli company StoreDot, though, its FlashBattery tech delivers a full charge in just five minutes.

Vertical take-off and landing drones, or VTOLs, have some big advantages, but there's also a trade-off, which the Latvian-made Fixar is designed to address.

An international team of scientists has turned to swifts for inspiration to produce a bird-inspired drone with flapping wings that can hover, dart, glide and dive, all while weighing the same as two tablespoons of flour.

Skydio is leveraging the power of what it calls "the most advanced AI device ever shipped" to make its enterprise-grade X2 drone a nigh-on uncrashable machine with some pretty amazing autonomous 3D point-mapping capabilities.