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Welcome to your weekly US news update. We have three stories for you this week: DARPA hands out half prizes at the Lift Challenge, we have a drone that saves a life during a really cool delivery, and we also have the FCC weighing in on banning more DJI drones and more foreign drones. So, let’s get to that.

DARPA Hands Out Half Prizes At The Lift Challenge

The DJI Mavic 4 Pro Creator Combo is selling for $3,500 on Amazon as of August 13, a $499 cut from the $3,999 list price. Deal coverage this morning called it a record low, citing the price tracker camelcamelcamel. DroneXL’s archive says otherwise. The same Creator Combo sold for $3,400 during Prime Day, a price we reported on June 25. Today’s number sits $100 above t...

Valqari CEO Ryan Walsh rebuilt his delivery drone in eight weeks after the original aircraft could not handle Northwestern Medicine’s specimen boxes, he told DroneXL in an interview on Monday. The replacement, the VQ1600, roughly doubled the payload and weight of its predecessor and kept the hospital ...

DJI put the Osmo 360 II on sale in China on Thursday, August 13, at 8:00 pm Beijing time, pricing the standard package at 3,299 yuan, about $460. The second generation of DJI’s panoramic camera records native 8K video at 60 frames per second, swaps its lenses by hand, and ships with 105GB of internal storage. The company’s US store, c...

Insta360 launched the X6 on Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 9 a.m. Eastern, pricing its new flagship 360 camera at $699.99 for the Standard Bundle. That is $150 more than the Insta360 X5 cost when DroneXL covered its launch on April 22, 2025, and $150 more than DJI charged for the Osmo 360 that arrived three months afte...