DroneDJ

Remember the mattress campaign from Netflix’s Emily in Paris where they put a bed in “the most irresistibly Instagrammable spots” around Paris? We may just have discovered Netflix’s real-world inspiration for that campaign: a French designer furniture brand called BoboChic.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) perform a great many tasks in countless places, with those capacities and venues expanding all the time. This week a drone was successfully flown in the UK on a less frequent mission than one usually hears about: policing areas exposed during low tides for illegal shellfish pickers.

When Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine first came out, it needed to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius – a temperature colder than the winter in Antarctica. But with the US Food and Drug Administration relaxing the temperature mandates for transportation and storage of undiluted vials, a new opportunity has opened up for delivery drones. And it’s an opportunity that delivery solutions company UPS is looking to leverage with the help of special cold chain packaging, developed specifically for drones.

Google’s drone delivery cousin Wing is flying high, and on course to drop its 100,000th order into a client’s hands later this week. The company’s announcement of that happy news starkly contrasts headlines generated earlier this month, when reports uncovered serious troubles in rival Amazon’s aerial delivery operations.

An Atlanta-area man has become the third defendant to be remanded to federal prison for using a drone to smuggle contraband into a Georgia state prison. The prosecutions in the case are believed to be among the first in the United States under federal law regulating non-passenger aircraft.

At first, Ignatius Asabor’s journey from Nigeria to Finland could sound like feel-good fiction. “You can’t imagine how happy I am,” he tells you with his trademark toothy grin. But dig deeper, and you realize it’s a story of ambition, hard work, and tenacity. It also serves as a case in point that social media can be a very powerful tool in landing your dream job.

Everyone’s talking about last night’s episode of HBO’s 18-time Sports Emmy-winning series Hard Knocks. But more than the Dallas Cowboys, the spotlight is on The Star – the football team’s state-of-the-art practice facility in Frisco, Texas. And that’s because of a dope three-minute FPV drone fly-through video.

Officials in Colorado have joined the rising chorus of park, game, and marine authorities around the world stepping up to make the same, increasingly louder appeal: Drone flights in natural settings often result in wildlife harassment, and must be entirely avoided.

With the Biden administration sounding serious about weening the US off fossil fuel consumption, the rapid development of sustainable energy production is becoming a major industrial challenge – and giant business opportunity. One Richmond, California-based company is looking to embrace both of those with a fully electric autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can radically speed seafloor mapping necessary to construct offshore wind turbines.

An Envoy Air passenger plane reported striking a drone while departing Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Sunday, in what is the just most recent incident of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) endangering commercial craft in restricted airspaces around the globe.

We’re back! After a brief summer vacation, the DroneDJ weekly panel returns August 25 at 10 a.m. ET.

Walmart is commercializing its delivery platform to allow small-town shops to arrange local deliveries with the retail giant. The just-announced Walmart GoLocal platform will see the retailer offer its existing network of drones, autonomous vehicles, and market fulfillment centers to businesses across the United States.

It’s only fair to warn drone enthusiasts that this post isn’t about the craft as such. But if you admire DJI engineering, hate damp hair, and have a chunk of change you weren’t planning on using to buy a new drone, this brief blurb about a dryer may interest you.

The Australian pilot vying to become the world’s favorite marine life play-by-play commentator has struck again. This time, he gleefully voices over his drone video footage of dolphins seriously pigging out on a gigantic school of salmon.

India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, wants to make its capital city, Lucknow, safer for women. And it wants to do so by establishing a broad-ranging surveillance setup that uses tools such as drones, facial recognition-enabled CCTV cameras, and AI-based video analytics. However, in the absence of robust data privacy laws, critics fear the program will infringe upon the privacy of citizens in a state infamous for communal polarization.

A friendly reminder to readers living or vacationing in New Mexico: Steer well clear of any nuclear research facilities you happen across. That is the unmistakable message coming from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is promising to smack down and confiscate any drones violating its off-limits airspace.

Residents and businesses in the 4000 block of Louis Avenue in Holiday, Florida, knew things were serious when Pasco County Fire Rescue issued evacuation orders last week. But just “how serious” is something that even first responders didn’t fully understand until they had a thermal drone up in the air to monitor what was initially considered a “small fire?”

Houston-based drone startup Paladin has spent the last three years living with first responders to build an autonomous system that runs itself, so that emergency personnel can focus on saving lives. Now, the company says it’s ready to unveil the system publicly and provide instant situational awareness to even more first responders across the United States.

Over the weekend, a couple of leaked DJI images appeared online. They seem to indicate DJI is nearing the launch of its first complete professional camera and gimbal system. Let’s take a look.

There aren’t many positive things you can say about global warming, but were one pressed to do so it might be that its consequences are at least democratic: Nobody, even the most privileged, escapes its harmful effects. That was reflected last week by amped-up waves battering expensive homes on Southern California’s vulnerable coastline, which a local drone pilot captured on video.

Though the mystery surrounding the super-drone that out-raced and out-maneuvered officials chasing it over Tucson earlier this year remains almost total, details regarding that astonishing performance have dribbled out over time. Most recent of those were audio recordings of police pursuing the enigmatic aerial vehicle describing it as “the most advanced drone we’ve dealt with.”

In response to a court order issued by Federal Probation Judge William Alsup, utility company PG&E had denied any knowledge of drone operations near the origin of the Dixie Fire – the second-largest recorded wildfire in California’s history. However, the court is now questioning PG&E’s claims, indicating that the company might know something about the drone after all.

An aircraft attempting to land at Buttonville, an airport with proximity to Toronto’s suburbs, sustained “major damage” after being hit by a York Regional Police (YRP) drone earlier this month. Strangely enough, the country’s air navigation service provider, NAV Canada, was not even informed of the police drone operation.

Florida’s Tampa Bay has been battling toxic red tide bloom for weeks now. Hundreds of tons of dead fish and other marine organisms, as well as debris, have been washing ashore routinely, causing trouble for beachgoers. So now, some counties are turning to modern technology solutions like drones to keep their beaches clean.