An October oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach, California, drove home the ongoing potential for ecological disasters stemming from leaky, malfunctioning, corroded and sometimes even sabotaged oil and gas pipelines. “The future belongs to the robot in the sky,” asserts Didi Horn, CEO of SkyX, an Israeli startup whose drones monitor real-world “assets” – pipelines, to be sure, but also railways, forests andwild-animal reserves – for signs of impending problems.