San Bernardino County Fire Protection District has contracted Seneca Systems to supply a fleet of five autonomous drones, a mobile operations base, and autonomy software that lets one pilot oversee the whole team. The drones can jointly deliver more than 500 gallons of firefighting foam and are built to operate at night and in hard-to-reach terrain. The system is expected to be operational before the 2027 wildfire season.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-11-01
Purdue computer science professor Aniket Bera's IDEAS Lab posted a video showing a quadcopter autonomously following a person through dense woods using only onboard computing, without GPS, maps, or cloud processing. The drone uses an occlusion-prediction method to estimate the target's path when trees block its view, and relies on open-source navigation tools including SUPER and FAST-LIO, originally developed by the University of Hong Kong's MaRS Lab, despite Bera's claim his team built the system from scratch.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-28
Engineers at Delft University of Technology built a lightweight whisker sensor system that lets tiny drones under 100 grams navigate by physical contact rather than cameras or LiDAR. Two whiskers mounted at the front connect to miniature pressure sensors that detect surface contact, letting the drone estimate depth, avoid obstacles, and map its surroundings using just 34KB of software.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-20
An industry commentator argues that software engineers face far less accountability than structural engineers, despite code failures already causing mass casualties, citing examples like AI-driven military drones and safety-critical AI systems. The piece contrasts civil engineering's licensing system, born from disasters like the 1928 St Francis Dam collapse, with software's near-total lack of formal oversight. It also outlines why regulating code is structurally harder than regulating physical construction, including the sheer number of self-taught coders and software's borderless nature.
petewarden.com
· 2026-09-14
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