Drones

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.

When an unauthorized drone is being flown in a restricted airspace, the authorities understandably want to locate its operator. A new AI-based system may allow them to do so, succeeding where other technologies fail.

Parrot has launched a rugged drone for first responders and enterprise operators. The Anafi USA features a 32x zoom 4K HDR camera and FLIR thermal camera, can fly for up to 32 minutes per charge and has a top speed of 13.42 mph.

While there are now a great number of consumer drones on the market, they pretty much all just fly around and take pictures. There have been a few, however, that set out to do a bit more. Here are five in particular that caught our attention over the years.

One of the reasons that we're still not seeing delivery drones in common use is their limited battery range. According to a new study, though, that range could be extended if they hitched rides on top of buses.

Scientists have developed a new navigation algorithm that enables unmanned quadcopters to pull off some impressive acrobatics, a training pathway they hope can help boost drone efficiency in areas such as search and rescue operations.

Although many fossils are simply lying exposed on the soil's surface, finding all of them would require a great deal of walking over varying terrain. A new autonomous hexacopter drone could help, as it uses a laser to hunt for fossils at night.

Last month we heard about the Chasing M2, a device that sits somewhere between consumer underwater drones and full-on ROVs (remotely operated vehicles). Well, it turns out that the M2 isn't alone in that category … come check out Qysea's FiFish V6.

When it comes to remote-control "underwater robots," there are consumer drones at one end of the spectrum, and full-on industrial ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) at the other. The Chasing M2 ROV, however, appears to fall somewhere between the two.