With the number and variety of commercial drones and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) set to escalate, there will be high future demands on popular regions of airspace and communication bandwidths. This raises safety concerns and hence heightens the need for a generic quantitative understanding of the real-time dynamics of multi-drone populations. Here, we explain how a simple system design buil...

But there is a set of aircraft tasks that takes long times, are monotonous, are performed in sensitive geographic places that demands specialized equipment and well trained crew. The examples of these tasks are: surveillance, patrol, data collection, search and rescue and so on. These tasks are being progressively substituted by drones or robotic aircrafts, which eliminated crew fatigue and imp...

Providing users with awareness and control about privacysensitive information flows is a major challenge in Internet of Things scenarios, because of constrained input and output capabilities of the involved sensors and devices. We propose the use of autonomous personal drones, specifically nanocopters, as device-independent drone-based privacy interfaces. Nanocopters have the potential to indic...

On 30 September 2011, the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in what has become the most controversial incident of US ‘targeted killing’, or, as its critics would prefer, of the US practice of ‘extrajudicial executions’. This controversy over wording expresses a profound disagreement over the legal status of the US drone program. Target killing suggests that the drone program may be...

Drones enhance military capability and form a potent element of force protection, allowing humans to be removed from hazardous environments and tedious jobs. However, there are moral, legal, and political dangers associated with their use. Although a time may come when it is possible to develop a drone that is able to autonomously and ethically engage a legitimate target with greater reliabilit...

Ranging from dwarfs to giants, the species of honeybees show remarkable differences in body size that have placed evolutionary constrains on the size of sensory organs and the brain. Colonies comprise three adult phenotypes, drones and two female castes, the reproductive queen and sterile workers. The phenotypes differ with respect to tasks and thus selection pressures which additionally constr...