Mock seemed pleased with the outcome. “You could look at this and say, ‘O.K., the A.I. got five, our human got zero,’” he told viewers. “From the fighter-pilot world, we trust what works, and what we saw was that in this limited area, this specific scenario, we’ve got A.I. that works.” (A YouTube video of the trials has since garnered half a million views.)

Brett Darcey, who runs Heron, told me that the company has used Falco to fly drones, completing seventy-four flights with zero crashes. But it’s still unclear how the technology will react to the infinite possibilities of real-world conditions. The human mind processes more slowly than a computer, but it has the cognitive flexibility to adapt to unimagined circumstances; artificial intelligence, so far, does not. Anna Skinner, a human-factors psychologist, and another science adviser to the ACE program, told me, “Humans are able to draw on their experience and take reasonable actions in the face of uncertainty. And, especially in a combat situation, uncertainty is always going to be present.”

And it can balance perfectly on power lines.

Scientists at UC Berkeley developed an experimental drone called the Midair Reconfigurable Quadcopter. As the name implies, the drone can shape-shift in midair, a report from NewAtlas reveals.

The team, from UC Berkeley’s High Performance Robotics Laboratory (HiPeRLab), used passive unactuated hinges, meaning that no extra battery-sapping actuators or sensors are required. In other words, each of the hinges folds inwards when its rotor stops or goes in reverse, and outwards when the rotor is powered up.

The quadcopter is able to fold any two of its arms using this method and still maintain stable flight. That means the drone can shift into a number of different shapes. The researchers say that it could, for example, squeeze through a narrow opening, and its folded-down arms can also be used to grasp objects.

Kawasaki has shoehorned the supercharged 1,000cc engine from its wild H2R hyperbike into a heavy-lift autonomous cargo helicopter, and has now demonstrated a robotic system for loading and unloading it without exposing humans to those big blades.

The K-Racer X1 is a beast of a drone, roughly the size of a small car. It rises vertically on a helicopter-style top rotor, but where there’s normally a tail rotor to balance out torque, this machine uses two forward-facing props mounted at the end of stubby wings. These props double as forward propulsion, with the wings providing some lift.

Kawasaki is yet to specify how fast this thing will fly, but we doubt it’ll be too quick; assuming that top rotor keeps spinning in cruise flight, top speed will be limited by retreating blade stall, which causes asymmetric lift.