Autonomous flight

Although fixed-wing drones can fly farther and faster than multicopters, they typically require runways to take off and land. The Vetal flying-wing drone addresses that compromise, with a rather striking "tail-sitter" design.

Kawasaki has shoehorned the supercharged 1,000cc engine from its wild H2R hyperbike into a heavy-lift autonomous cargo helicopter, and has now demonstrated a robotic system for loading and unloading it without exposing humans to those big blades.

It seems China's about to win the race to commercial, autonomous, electric VTOL air taxi operations, with daylight a distant second. eHang says its EH216 could be fully certified within months, several years ahead of competitors from the USA and EU.

Usually when we think of multicopter drones, we picture aircraft with four or more rotors. The V40 agricultural drone takes a different approach, using two tilting two rotors in an effort to improve range and spraying efficiency.

Google's drone-delivery sister company Wing is rapidly expanding its drone delivery services in Logan, a city in Queensland Australia that Wing says is now the drone delivery capital of the world. Only red tape is holding back world domination.

Through a novel algorithm that can plot a flight path with great efficiency, scientists at the University of Zurich are now claiming to have demonstrated an autonomous drone that can beat human pilots in a race.

The US Air Force has flight tested the Skyborg combat drone's Autonomy Core System for the first time. The "brain" of the autonomous Skyborg was installed in a Kratos UTAP-22 tactical uncrewed vehicle, and carried out a two-hour-and-10-minute flight.

Airbus is expanding the capabilities of its Flightlab helicopter designed to test out next-generation aviation technologies, by incorporating some advanced hardware geared toward autonomous flight, including LiDAR sensors from Luminar.

UK company Autonomous Flight has been working on eVTOL concepts for some years now, with several prototypes already flown. Now the company has revealed a six-seat air shuttle called the Y6S Plus that uses an interesting coaxial tricopter design.

China's air mobility company EHang has added another location to its autonomous air taxi roster with the launch of an aerial sightseeing trial in partnership with real estate company Greenland Hong Kong.

EHang is on a mission to get its autonomous air taxis into the air around the globe. After flying into Spain earlier this year, the air mobility firm has now been granted its first trial flight permit in the European Union – but it's not in Seville.

Boeing has successfully carried out tests of its autonomous flight platform involving five high-performance, pilotless surrogate jets operating as a full team of five at speeds of up to 167 mph.