Ford is partnering with DJI one of the largest drone makers to challenge developers to create technology that will deploy and fly a drone straight from the cab of an F-150.

The goal is to sell trucks to the UN that will allow them to survey disaster areas without getting out of the vehicle.

Ford Challenging Developers to Create Drone-to-Vehicle Communications System » AutoGuide.com News

So essentially, connect a camera to a drone and stream live feedback to the car's infotainment system or a separate screen inside the f150?
Think Parrot already has something like that but someone just needs to detach the screen from the controller. They managed to rig NVIDIA's gaming device to do this.

No the point is that the drone can talk to the truck without you acting as the middle man. The goal is to have the drone return itself to the truck, by itself...

They should even make that available to local emergency services since there are situations where it can come in handy.

Tall order for a drone to find it's way back to the truck in a large area like a city or forest. Even military drones can't do that as they're ultimately controlled by a middle man.

Closest thing we have is the Roomba vacuum but it only works in a confined space.

Well one would imagine thats probably the point of the initiative...

Going to require a larger prize than $100,000.

Why? Sounds like what they're asking for isn't terribly complicated. I'm more then willing to bet both companies are capable of figuring such out on their own but would rather the publicity...

I'm not familiar with programming so I assumed it's complicated to make a drone fully autonomous.

Well the technology is being worked on and on the surface we already see it happening with cars and that can have some application to drones. Plus there's all the stuff we don't see, we just see the end of x amount of years of development come to light when it does.