Drones & UAVs News & Discussions

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https://mashable.com/tech/amazon-prime- ... 500-cities

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India’s Airbound bags $37M to take on trucks with rocket-like drones
Jagmeet Singh
8:30 PM PDT · August 24, 2026

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in fresh capital as it pushes to make moving goods through the air as cheap as trucking them by road.

The Series A round, led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures, comes less than a year after Airbound raised an $8.65 million seed round. With this funding, the three-year-old startup has raised nearly $50 million.

Airbound, and other startups in this nascent sector, argue that drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than vehicles on the road. And while there have been successful deployments, drone delivery is still far from matching the scale and versatility of trucking.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/india ... ke-drones/

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Cat-clawed drone is the first to land on near-vertical ice walls
By Omar Kardoudi
September 01, 2026

The Ice Dart is a quadcopter designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec to solve a problem that has quietly limited drone science for years: there's almost nowhere safe to land in the harshest environments on Earth.

Ice is especially bad. Standard rubber-footed drones start losing grip on slopes as gentle as 9 degrees, and the steeper the slope gets, the less of the drone's own weight presses it into the surface – on a 60-degree wall, gravity only pins the aircraft down with half its usual force. The Ice Dart flips that problem, becoming – according to the team's new paper in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics – the first drone able to perch on ice that steep and hold its position.

The Ice Dart belongs to a broader push in robotics called perching, an approach borrowed from nature that tries to give drones the ability to grab onto surfaces the way birds, insects, and geckos do. Instead of burning battery to hover indefinitely, a perching drone lands, shuts down its noisiest systems, and turns into a fixed sensor for as long as it needs. Researchers have built versions that grip tree branches, cling to rough walls, and even latch onto moving vehicles, but ice – especially steep, unpredictable glacier ice – had remained one of the field's toughest holdouts.

https://newatlas.com/drones/ice-dart-ca ... ice-walls/