Zano drones promised a beautiful, ephemeral moment. The palm-sized drones, controlled by a smartphone app, were supposed to be the selfie-stick-without-a-stick, a drone based solution to a minor problem no one really had. It was still a delight, and when the project closed in January this year, 12,075 backers pledged £2,335,119 (or $3,556,386) to it. Now, Zano makers Torque Group Limited are pursuing a “creditor's voluntary liquidation,” which leaves the company dead and the already-in-production Zano drones with an uncertain future.
Legal drone delivery may still be a ways off, but quadcopters have been smuggling contraband into prisons for years now. Quadcopters are cheap enough and powerful enough to carry a few pounds of goods, like cigarettes, knives, cell phones, or drugs over a prison fence, and they're sometimes even recovered from the drop to do it again. Prisons, which understandably don't want drones to do this, are now looking for ways to keep the robots out.
Not all fires set by robots are bad. Sometimes an avalanche, even one triggered by a drone's bomb, is a good thing. We live in a weird world, and part of maintaining that weird world sometimes means asking robots to do horrible things. Meet the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's “Unmanned Aerial System for Fire Fighting”, the proactive fire-starting drone, and the bomb-dropping, avalanche-starting Prospect, from Mountain Drones.
No matter what country they're in, people living in rural places often don't have access to high-quality medical care. Everything from emergency facilities, to pharmacies, to sophisticated labs for tests are often farther away. But according to a study published recently in the free-to-read journal PLOS One, drones could help bring better medical care to rural communities all over the world.
Last week, the FAA granted the NFL legal permission to fly drones. The FAA's authorized over a thousand businesses to fly drones, but the NFL is the first major sporting league granted such permission. The rights extend to data collection and video capture, but are limited to times when teams aren't playing. The FAA specifically noted that drones are safer than manned aircraft for this, saying:
Is a paper airplane a drone? For the Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for regulating America's skies, this is no longer an idle question. The commercial use of drones is currently prohibited in the United States, unless an operator receives an exemption from the FAA that allows them to fly their drone.
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