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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom, during a September 30 address at Quantico, Virginia. The new command, to be led by a four-star officer, would join the military's 11 existing combatant commands and oversee drones, AI, and command-and-control systems, with a target establishment date of October 1, 2027 pending congressional authorization.
DoorDash unveiled an AI agent that lets customers order food by texting through Apple Messages, understanding prompts like 'order my usual' or requests for specific dishes and recommendations. The agent can suggest carts with photos, handle group orders with mixed dietary needs, and is currently available via a U.S. waitlist. DoorDash also said it will begin testing delivery drones with select restaurants in Northern California.
Heven AeroTech, a maker of hydrogen-powered drones known for long flight endurance and high onboard power output, says its aircraft could serve as airborne platforms for directed-energy laser weapons. The company frames its technology as a potential answer to the Pentagon's challenge of getting high-energy lasers airborne.
A report from inside Kyiv's tech scene describes secretive startups, government engineers, and soldiers collaborating in ordinary-looking buildings and testing fields to rapidly develop new weapons technology. The reporting focuses on figures like Serhii Kupriienko, who is developing systems he says represent the next phase of warfare, built under wartime urgency and secrecy.
Amazon's Prime Air drones, operating from a distribution center in Richardson, Texas since the city approved the service last December, fly deliveries from 7 am to 8 pm across a 7.5-mile radius. Some nearby residents say the aircraft pass overhead throughout the day producing noise audible inside their homes, while Amazon says such complaints are rare and describes the sound as comparable to a window fan on low.
Ukraine's Third Army Corps used heavy bomber drones to air-drop explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian lines on September 21, 2026, targeting supply routes as part of Operation Vivaldi. Separately, ground robots cleared antipersonnel mines from over 18 miles of routes, a task that would normally require two sapper companies, according to Militarnyi and United24.
The XPRIZE Wildfire competition concluded without awarding either of its two $11 million grand prizes, though finalists were recognized for progress in space-based fire detection and autonomous firefighting drones. One track required teams to detect all fires across a wide area of Australia within 10 minutes, while another challenged autonomous systems to locate and extinguish a target fire in rural Alaska within the same timeframe, avoiding decoy fires. Program director Andrea Santy said the competition drew hundreds of teams proposing solutions ranging from sound-based suppression to robotic dogs and lasers before judges narrowed the field to more practical detection and response systems.
Joby Aviation flew a modified Cessna Caravan autonomously across the United States, covering 3,199 miles from Concord, California, with stops in Fort Worth and South Carolina. The onboard system independently handled taxiing, takeoff, landing, weather diversions and route changes, while a safety pilot on board did not intervene. Joby says it's the first fully autonomous cross-country airplane flight, and the trip ended with a symbolic pass near the Wright brothers' first flight site in Kitty Hawk.
Ifremer, France's state ocean agency, confirmed its two Deep-6000 prototype floats completed five dives reaching 6,000 meters between January and February this year, collecting rare data from the ocean's abyssal zone. This makes France the third nation, after China and the US, to build Argo floats able to reach such depths, and Ifremer plans to add 30 more deep-diving units to the global Argo fleet of 4,000 floats by 2028.
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.
Swedish startup Scaleout Systems, born from Uppsala University research in 2018, has shifted its machine learning work from commercial vehicles toward military applications following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company now builds compact computer vision models that run directly on drones, pilot tablets, and field command hardware to detect and select targets, and has joined NATO's DIANA accelerator program for a project called Federated Aerial Intelligence for Recon.
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.