Europe

Since mid-March, Swiss Post, the Ticino EOC hospital group, and drone manufacturer Matternet have been successfully conducting initial drone flights in Lugano, after the Federal Office for Civil Aviation (FOCA) gave the green light. A spokesperson from Swiss Post explains about how the trial is shaping up.

Devon and Cornwall police have launched the UK’s first dedicated police drone unit. Testing of the drones began in Dorset in 2015, and has now become permanent with three full-time staff attached.

Filipe Vilas-Boas, who describes himself as a new media artist and interaction designer, has filmed an art project involving a robotic arm writing out lines at a desk, with the sound of children at school in the background. Repeatedly, the robot writes, “I must not hunt humans” as its punishment, indicating an earlier indiscretion.

The threat of human safety engineers falling asleep at the wheel as well as their potentially staggered reaction times has opened up the debate on level 3 automation in driverless cars. Gun Bengtsson, Senior Safety Communication Manager at Volvo explains about automation and what the legal challenges concerning it are.

Artificial intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The promise is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.

Kuka, which is Germany’s largest maker of industrial robots, and one of the largest in the world, is planning to move into a new market: personal assistant robots. It intends to do this in partnership with Midea, the Chinese robotics firm that acquired it last year for €4.5bn.

A partner at one of the UK’s first law firms to develop a specialism in drones and autonomous technologies has sounded a warning about the development of drone countermeasures, with the first of its kind set to be installed at a Channel Islands prison.

Durham police are about to go live with an artificial intelligence system designed to help officers assess whether or not a suspect should remain in custody. Suspects are classified as a low, medium, or high risk of offending and has already been tested by the force.

On the 8th May, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published a proposal to regulate the operation of small drones in Europe. All interested parties are welcome to comment this proposal from 12 May until 12 August 2017.

On 12th January, MEPs voted for a set of regulations to be drafted to govern the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence, hot off the back of the UK government setting up a commission to look at the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Across continents, the law is unclear and differing and is likely to evolve in this area.

Independent UK think tank Reform has released a report called “Work in progress” examining the public sector, the issues surrounding its efficiency, and what can be done to reform and improve it for the future.

International law firm Pinsent Masons has announced the roll out of an AI-powered commercial contracts solution to support clients responding to challenges posed by Brexit.

Self-driving cars and AI received a boost from the Chancellor Philip Hammond in the budget, with a £270m investment fund for “disruptive technologies that have the potential to transform the UK economy”. The newly-formed Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund will support collaborations between businesses and the UK science base.

A new form of transportation is coming to the streets of Greenwich in London, the first extended trial of a driverless shuttle bus.

An investigation has found UK police forces are being “flooded” with reports involving drones, citing the 3,456 incidents with UAVs recorded last year. This is in comparison with 1,237 in 2015, an almost 180% increase.

As US state legislatures consider stringent restrictions on drones, a leading City of London lawyer is warning against following in their footsteps, as the UK hosts trials of Amazon’s drone delivery services.

Fabrizio Cugia di Sant’Orsola, founding partner of the Cugia Cuomo & Associati Law Firm in Rome, examines the potential implications of new regulations on embedded SIM cards in cars.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has claimed that the UK will become a “world leader” of driverless cars after the drafting of new laws concerning the attribution of blame in the event of a crash.

Over the next 15 years, almost 250,000 public sector workers could lose their jobs, according to a new report.

London-based startup StatusToday offers monitoring services, powered by AI. Relying on a continual supply of employee metadata, such as which files they are accessing and how often they look at them, it feeds back the information to the employer.