drones

DARPA and General Atomics are readying their fighter-launched LongShot missile-firing drone for flight testing. The aircraft is part of an effort to haul 4th-generation fighter planes into the 21st-century aerial battlefield.

While it's important to track and quantify airborne pollutants, most gas sensors are located at ground level, not up where the pollutants spread. A new lab-on-a-drone system is designed to address that limitation, by taking the tech to the sky.

At this week's DSEI Defence exhibition in London, SpearUAV unveiled its Multi Canister Launcher (MCL) Viper system, which is bolted onto the outside of conventional and robotic military vehicles to launch Viper drones without exposing soldiers to harm.

The US Deputy Secretary of Defense has officially kicked off the AI drone wars, announcing a radical "Replicator" plan to put many thousands of intelligent autonomous war drones into service within 18-24 months, to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The US Air Force's XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental combat drone has made its first flight under the control of artificial intelligence. On July 25, 2023, the robotic aircraft completed a three-hour sortie at the Eglin Test and Training Complex in Florida.

Arizona's Revolute Robotics has presented its autonomous Hybrid Mobility Robot (HMR), a whirling, spherical cage that can fly like a multicopter, or roll in any direction using two gyroscopic gimbal rings. It's one heck of a thing to see in motion.

Robots often struggle to adapt to changing conditions. Now engineers at Caltech have designed a new robot that can roll around on four wheels, flip them into rotors to fly, or transform for six other types of motion.

The US, UK, and Australia have field tested drones equipped with jointly developed autonomy and artificial intelligence systems capable of not only detecting and tracking military targets, but that are also able to retrain themselves in flight.

Drones are becoming a mainstay in modern warfare. Now, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has countered the emerging threat of drone swarms, using the Tactical High-power Operational Responder (THOR) to take out multiple targets.

Fresh video shows that one of the most fascinating eVTOL aircraft designs we've seen is now flying at larger scale. The Transwing platform uses a unique dihedral folding wing system to move between hover and cruise modes, unlocking huge advantages.

Understanding whales has historically been a time-consuming and difficult task for scientists, not least because these magnificent mammals spend about 95% of their days underwater. Now, drone technology is offering a new frontier of vital research.

The US Army has chosen the enhanced vertical liftoff V-BAT UAS developed by Northrop Grumman and Shield AI to take part in the Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System competition to find a replacement for the venerable RQ-7B Shadow tactical drone.