Robotics

Outside a solar farm in the California desert, the labor math is brutal: temperatures above 110 degrees, injury rates that make construction look tame, and a workforce that turns over fast.

The FCC's first conditional approvals under its Covered List framework create a defined pathway for specific drone systems — but all four expire at the end of 2026, and nobody knows what happens after that.

The robot dog is not a gimmick.

During a live-fire drill at Fort Campbell, the 101st Airborne sent drones ahead of ground troops in every breach scenario — before sappers, before scouts, before anyone whose life the Army would rather not lose to a $500 unmanned system.

A Minneapolis photojournalist is asking a federal court to strike down what federal press freedom advocates describe as the most consequential restriction on aerial newsgathering in years. Rob Levine, who flies drones for photojournalism work, filed a petition March 16 in the U.S.

The Valuation Is $20 Billion.

The Man Who Brought Uber's Speed to the Pentagon Built a Drone That Actually Works Emil Michael spent years at Uber trying to build flying cars.

The Robot That Learned Tennis From Amateurs There is a version of this story that leads with the video — a small humanoid robot, roughly four feet tall, shuffling across a court and swatting tennis balls back over the net with what looks, at first glance, like genuine athletic competence.

SAIL, a new imitation learning system from Georgia Tech, lets robots execute complex tasks faster than the humans who taught them — and the whiteboard-wiping exception is the most honest part of the paper.

Amazon has acquired Rivr, the Zurich-based robotics startup formerly known as Swiss-Mile, confirming what multiple outlets reported Thursday and what an Amazon spokesperson confirmed directly to The Information.

The Day Two Defense Contractors Proved Their Drones Can Talk to Each Other In the jargon of military aviation, what happened in the Mojave Desert this week is called a partner-powered autonomy flight.