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Alphabet’s Project Wing plans to deliver burritos by drone in South Eastern Australia

Burrito's delivered by drone - Alphabet’s Project Wing in South Eastern Australia

It has been a little quiet around Alphabet’s Project Wing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress. Over the last few years, Project Wing has made thousands of test flights and now they are ready to start testing burrito deliveries… again.

The test market is Queanbeyan, South Eastern Australia, where two merchants have signed up for Project Wing. Guzman y Gomez, a Mexican food chain, and Chemist Warehouse, a chain of pharmacies. These companies will receive orders from test consumers, who’ve purchased items using the Project Wing app on their smartphones. Project Wing’s drones will then fly out and make the deliveries.


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Xiaomi’s first drone records 4K video, lasts 27 mins and costs $460

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Xiaomi — a company normally associated with affordable Android phones — has just taken the wraps off its very first drone and it looks set to take on DJI by being an incredibly affordable and capable machine. The Mi Drone boasts a bunch of features you’d expect to find in a modern-day quadcopter and its most expensive version costs just ¥2999 (~$460).


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9to5Toys Lunch Break: Mophie juice packs from $50, DJI Phantom 3 w/ camera $440, more

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Keep up with the best gear and deals on the web by signing up for the 9to5Toys Newsletter. Also, be sure to check us out on: TwitterRSS FeedFacebookGoogle+ and Safari push notifications.

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DR-1 drone confirmed as next OnePlus product, available sometime in April

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OnePlus said in an AMA on Reddit late last week that its upcoming #OneGameChanger product would be a drone called the DR-1, but thanks to an assortment of winky faces left on the posts, it wasn’t clear if the company was making a joke or not. It seemed plausible, but it’s also an interesting direction from a company that single-handedly disrupted the smartphone market with their super-cheap and high-powered OnePlus One smartphone. Now the company has confirmed officially that the #OneGameChanger that they’ve been teasing is indeed a drone…

I think it’s probably safe to say that this drone isn’t just going to your standard drone, as OnePlus seems to believe that something about their product is going to be a “game changer”. Drones are definitely a hot trend in the ranks of technology geeks, but they’re usually not cheap if you want one that’s high-quality. Maybe OnePlus is planning on doing the same thing with drones that it did with smartphones, bringing the “Never Settle” philosophy to the remote control quad-copters. According to OnePlus, the drone will be hitting stores at some point in April.

OnePlus apologizes for missing deadline on Oxygen OS, says CM12 coming ‘as soon as possible’

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OnePlus missed its March 27th goal for bringing its new Oxygen OS to the public today, and the company has now taken to its forum to apologize. It’s not exactly surprising to see this happen as OnePlus definitely hasn’t been known for being the most reliable deliverer of software, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless.
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OnePlus says that its new product is a drone called the DR-1

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It’s not exactly clear whether or not this is all a big joke, but Carl Pei, the founder of OnePlus, came out on Reddit yesterday in an AMA to say outright that its mysterious upcoming product release is going to be a drone. The company has been teasing this new product for a while, assuring us that it’s not a tablet nor a smartwatch, but recent teases seemed to point more toward some kind of gaming system.


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Next-generation drones will go where you point your smartphone and never crash, say ex-Google X engineers

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM3BPixFVq0]

Drones are a lot of fun, but making them to exactly what you want them to isn’t always easy, and a fair number of them are damaged or destroyed in crashes. Skydio, a startup formed by ex-MIT and Google X engineers, is hoping to change that by turning your smartphone into a ‘magic wand’ controller, reports TechCrunch.

To demo its auto-pilot system, it’s built a drone “magic wand” that lets you direct a drone by simply pointing your phone where you want it go. That means you don’t need the traditional, clunky dual joystick drone controller.

Today’s drones use cameras to allow you to shoot photos and video, and feed the video back to your phone or controller. What Skydio does is use that same video feed to construct a 3D map of the surroundings and feed it to the drone’s flight controller, so it can automatically avoid obstacles.

The team demonstrated the technology by flying a radio-controlled aircraft at speed through an underground parking garage, and a drone through a cluttered office–seen in the above video.

Some of today’s drones have ‘follow me’ functions aimed at those into action sports like mountain biking and skiing, but Skydio believes that using 3D mapping will allow a drone to perform this kind of function far more intelligently, using its awareness of the terrain to ensure the best possible coverage of your heroic endeavors.

The team plans to partner with drone manufacturers, and recently raised $3M in seed capital to create the custom hardware to pitch it to drone makers.

Google is taking a different approach with its Project Tango 3D interior mapping technology, which uses a grid of infra-red emitters to map its surroundings.

Drone equipped with Project Tango smartphone flies accurately to within 1cm

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Google’s Project Tango 3D interior mapping technology, which will shortly be appearing in a tablet, is also taking to the air. A team from University of Pennsylvania led by Professor Vijay Kumar are using a Tango-equipped smartphone to enable a quadrocopter to navigate the interior of a building … 
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