Drones Take on New Civilian and Military Roles Maxiphoto/iStock.com email Plus, an update on the military's flying cars. This week I thought I might have jinxed the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. In my last column, I wrote about how Ingenuity, and robots in general, often overperformed in their roles as space explorers, meaning that we may not need to risk the lives of human astronauts anytime soon. Ingenuity was designed to accomplish a single proof-of-concept mission to show that flight on Mars was possible. At the time of my previous column, it had already accomplished fiv...