DroneDJ

The UK UAV company Skyports Drone Services didn’t wait long to put its decision to acquire Pyka heavy-lift cargo craft into action, announcing this week it had successfully completed a trial of their aerial applications during a Royal Navy tech demonstration event.

Drone delivery company Wingcopter has started a pilot project that would see drones delivering everyday goods for the first time in Germany.

From January 1, 2024, the European Union’s revamped drone regulations will become fully applicable and the open category will benefit from drones with a class identification label. This system categorizes drones based on their weight, capabilities, and intended use, and requires operators to obtain certification for certain categories of drones. The good news is that DJI has already placed several compliant drones on the EU market.

With the anticipated start of air taxi services in the US set for 2025, it’s not exactly premature for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to have issued its first approval of a vertiport – a conditional greenlight that nevertheless permits development and research of nearing advanced air mobility (AAM) activity.

Iowa-based agriculture spray drone service provider Rantizo says it has raised more than $6 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing round. The funding was led by Leaps by Bayer and included investors Fulcrum Global Capital and Innova Memphis.

New or expanded drone operation by police is always a sensitive, when not controversial proposition and one requiring careful examination. And that’s just what Philadelphia City Council members did in discussing the idea when they got an up-close-and-personal gander at a UAV flown inside the meeting hall.

Only a week after DJI introduced its new Mini 4 Pro consumer drone – whose full visual and tech details had been unearthed in months prior by online sleuths – the company’s rumored Matrice 3D docked enterprise UAV has taken over the central position in the crosshairs of reactivated leakers, who appear to have nabbed footage of the craft shot through the windows of the firm’s headquarters.

The DJI Mini 3 Pro has proven to be an incredible li’l drone, which means the new Mini 4 Pro has to work extra hard to justify why it’s worth the upgrade.

Inventive drone hardware and systems company FIXAR has announced a new flight capability for its fixed-wing 007 UAVs with the unveiling of its Surface Follow automated navigation feature, which both identifies and avoids low-altitude obstacles that many satellite maps fail to account for.

With Ukraine battling dozens of incoming, explosive-packed Russian drones assaulting its cities every night, one additional concern in shooting those craft down is the considerable cost to the nation’s financially strapped defense reserves that involves – a pinch an Australian counter-UAV tech producer is now acting to solve.

DJI has released an exciting new firmware update for the DJI Dock drone-in-a-box solution, bringing several new features and optimizations for users. One of the updates built to meet user feedback includes determining where a drone can fly on the site (geocaging), supported through FlightHub 2 and Cloud API for the Matrice 30 (M30) series. You can now even instruct the drone to intelligently Return to Home (RTH) around predetermined no-fly zones.

DJI has filed paperwork with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to bring its first-ever delivery drone, FlyCart 30, to North America. The drone was first unveiled in China in August 2023.

Police in the popular UK coastal city of Brighton have begun flying late-night drone patrols of the beachfront in an effort to halt a recent series of sexual assaults in the area.

Among all the cases of drones deployed to deliver drugs and other contraband into prisons around the globe that DroneDJ has reported over the months, the plot busted by Louisiana police this month is one of the largest and most audacious of those aerial criminal enterprises.

California drone startup Parallel Flight Technologies (PFT) has secured work from a unit of the US Department of Defense to develop its super heavy-lift Firefly UAV to fulfill the agency’s critical, long-distance mission objectives.

Skyports Drone Services is again expanding its global business footprint, this time in Australia through a new partnership developing the long-range beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations of Sydney-based UAV data collection specialist Carbonix.

ParaZero has announced the addition of a unique safety functionality for its drone safety parachutes to support geocaging capabilities.

In what may rank as one of the most “no kidding” cases of creativity, determination, and inspiration being given its rightful due, Australian UAV company SYPAQ Systems has been awarded the country’s 2023 tech innovation award, based in large part to the major benefits its cardboard-made drones have afforded Ukraine’s defensive efforts.

DJI has released an exciting new firmware update for the Air 3, making its all-around drone compatible with the latest-generation Goggles Integra as well as Goggles 2 and RC Motion 2 remote controller. These peripherals were first released alongside the DJI Avata FPV aircraft.

Adding to its collection of precedents in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft development, Joby said it has become the first manufacturer of future air taxis to deliver its craft to a US customer – in this case the Air Force.

The time-tested parental observation advises that one learns more about a situation by heeding what people do rather than what they say. That may also be said of the recent decision by the Baltimore Police Department in establishing its new drone fleet using DJI drones – and in doing so broadly reflecting the frequent response of independent administrations to the largely politicized moves by Congress, US government agencies, and several state legislatures to blacklist the UAV giant’s craft from official use across the nation.

This morning DJI released its latest sub-250 drone that we’ve seen leak over the last few weeks. Has the hype lived up after flying it for the past week? Are the changes worth upgrading from the Mini 3 Pro that came out less than a year and a half ago? Here’s our full review of the DJI Mini 4 Pro.