Drones & UAVs News & Discussions

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Wing to expand drone delivery to another 150 Walmart stores
Kirsten Korosec
7:00 AM PST · January 11, 2026

Wing, the Alphabet-owned company that delivers groceries, over-the-counter medicine, and hot lattes, is expanding its partnership with Walmart for the second time in less than a year.

The two companies announced on Sunday plans to bring the on-demand drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores. The rollout, which builds off existing services at stores in Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, will occur throughout this year and into 2027, Wing’s new chief business officer Heather Rivera told TechCrunch.

The expansion suggests customers are using Wing’s drone delivery service enough to warrant growth. Rivera said its top 25% customers are using the service three times a week. Some of the most commonly ordered items are eggs, ground beef, fresh tomatoes, avocados, limes, lunchables, and snacks such as Takis.

The 150-store expansion announcement follows plans shared in June 2025 to launch in Houston, Orlando, Tampa, and Charlotte. Rivera said Wing will launch in Houston on January 15. Once the expansion is complete, Wing will operate from more than 270 Walmart stores, including Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Miami and serve about 10% of the U.S. population.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/11/wing- ... rt-stores/

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World's fastest drone hits 408 mph to reclaim speed record
By Stefan Ionescu
January 15, 2026

Luke and Mike Bell, a father-son duo from South Africa, have reclaimed the Guinness World Record for the fastest quadcopter drone. Their 3D-printed Peregreen V4 drone clocked a top speed of 657.59 km/h (408 mph).

The new record surpassed the 626 km/h (389 mph) flight set a month earlier by Australian engineer Benjamin Biggs. Before Biggs, Luke and Mike Bell had clocked a record 480 km/h (298 mph) with their Peregreen 2 drone in June 2024, and 585 km/h (363.5 mph) with their Peregreen 3 in October 2025. The latest iteration has now brought the record back to the Bells in what has been an intensely competitive race.

https://newatlas.com/drones/luke-mike-b ... ess-speed/

[Yuli Ban]

To contrast this with 5 years ago

Light show with 3,281 drones breaks Guinness World Record

A luxury car company broke a Guinness World Record in China by using 3,281 drones to put on a light show in the night sky.

The Genesis light show in Shanghai, which celebrated the brand's launch of the Genesis G80 car, featured 3,281 unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, being arranged in multiple 3D images including depictions of the Genesis G80 and GV80 cars.

[wjfox]

Absolutely stunning.

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Drone-Powered Food Delivery Is Taking Off in Texas
Over a decade on from Amazon's promised deliveries, maybe it's finally starting to go mainstream.
By Jon Martindale January 21, 2026
https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/d ... f-in-texas

The drone delivery company Zipline has spent the last decade proving its technology worldwide, and it's now starting to make an impact in the US. The Verge reports that the brand has begun delivering food and other goods in Texas, and locals have found the service less intrusive than one might expect.

Before this, Zipline showcased its drone delivery capabilities across Africa, delivering much-needed supplies to hard-to-reach places. Its P1 drone system can travel 190 miles round-trip and carry up to 4 pounds of cargo. The newer P2 drones being used in Texas, however, are very different.

The P2 system is less efficient than its predecessor, using five motors and less fixed-wing surface area for just a 24-mile round-trip range. But it's overall a more sophisticated system. It has a drone buddy on a little wire that, when it reaches its destination, lowers packages safely and gently. This makes it easier to deliver packages and cargo to urban areas with smaller delivery zones.

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411 mph and counting: Race for world's fastest RC drone ramps up
By Omar Kardoudi
February 06, 2026

Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs has just clocked 411 mph (661 km/h) with a battery-powered, remote-controlled drone. No official Guinness stamp yet, but it's faster than the current record held by South African father-son team Mike and Luke Bell.

The sporting rivalry between Biggs and the Bells has turned into an ever more thrilling speed race. What started in May 2024 with the Bells' Peregrine 2 hitting 300 mph (482 km/h) has become a dizzying escalation: 363 mph (585 km/h) in October 2025, 389 mph (626 km/h) in December, and 408 mph (656 km/h) in early January 2026. Now Biggs has fired back with a from-scratch design that hit 411 mph (661 km/h).

"So, a couple of weeks after we set our new world record, Luke went and beat our record," Biggs explains at the start of his video documenting his latest attempt. "So, we couldn't have that!"

https://newatlas.com/drones/biggs-blackbird-411mph/

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Ultralightweight Sonar Plus AI Lets Tiny Drones Navigate Like Bats
By Nitin Sanket
March 27, 2026

Introduction:

(The Conversation) To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation.

Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow or complete darkness.

I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echolocation while weighing as little as two paper clips. They emit sound waves and listen to weak echoes reflected from objects.

However, enabling this sensing on aerial robots is extremely challenging because propellers generate a lot of noise. It is a bit like trying to listen to your friend while a jet engine is taking off next to you.

To overcome this issue, we present two key ideas. First, a physical acoustic shield inspired by bat’s ear cartilage reduces propeller noise around the acoustic sensors, which act like the robot’s ears. Second, a neural network called Saranga recovers weak echo signals from very noisy measurements by learning patterns over time, inspired by how bats process sound.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/ultralight ... ts-279287

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Omnidirectional propulsion system makes for super-nimble drones
By Etiido Uko
March 30, 2026

Up, up, and away! That's the flight sequence for most commercially available drones. However, for drones powered by Aerix Systems’ proprietary omnidirectional propulsion technology, a more fitting description would be: up, zoom off, twist, and slide … often all at once!

To understand the innovation behind the technology – or why it should even be considered an innovation in the first place – it's important to have a refresher on how drones, a.k.a Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), work. Most drones in existence today fall into two categories of flight systems: fixed-wing and rotor-based. Fixed-wing drones (think miniature airplanes) generate lift through forward motion. Air flows over the wings, creating pressure differences that keep the aircraft aloft. Most defense drones fall under this category.

https://newatlas.com/drones/aerix-syste ... on-drones/

[raklian]

[wjfox]

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