--Wildlife-induced crop damage, particularly from deer, threatens agricultural productivity. Traditional deterrence methods often fall short in scalability, responsiveness, and adaptability to diverse farmland environments. This paper presents an integrated unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V) system designed for autonomous wildlife deterrence, developed as part of the Farm Robotics Challenge. Our system combines a YOLO-based real-time computer vision module for deer detection, an energy-efficient coverage path planning algorithm for efficient field monitoring, and an autonomous charging station for continuous operation of the UA V . In collaboration with a local Minnesota farmer, the system is tailored to address practical constraints such as terrain, infrastructure limitations, and animal behavior . The solution is evaluated through a combination of simulation and field testing, demonstrating robust detection accuracy, efficient coverage, and extended operational time. Crop damage caused by wildlife, particularly deer incursions, represents a challenge for modern agriculture. Deer damage to crops is responsible for disagreements among farmers, hunters, and the Department of Natural Resources over how the deer population should be controlled [1].

Human respiration rate (HRR) is an important physiological metric for diagnosing a variety of health conditions from stress levels to heart conditions. Estimation of HRR is well-studied in controlled terrestrial environments, yet robotic estimation of HRR as an indicator of diver stress in underwater for underwater human robot interaction (UHRI) scenarios is to our knowledge unexplored. We introduce a novel system for robotic estimation of HRR from underwater visual data by utilizing bubbles from exhalation cycles in scuba diving to time respiration rate. We introduce a fuzzy labeling system that utilizes audio information to label a diverse dataset of diver breathing data on which we compare four different methods for characterizing the presence of bubbles in images. Figure 1: Robotic estimation of diver respiration rate during Ultimately we show that our method is effective at estimating a closed-water evaluation of the proposed detection HRR by comparing the respiration rate output system. The Aqua autonomous underwater vehicle [8] is with human analysts.

Unmanned ariel vehicle (UAV) can provide superior flexibility and cost-efficiency for modern radar imaging systems, which is an ideal platform for advanced remote sensing applications using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. In this paper, an energy-efficient passive UAV radar imaging system using illuminators of opportunity is first proposed and investigated. Equipped with a SAR receiver, the UAV platform passively reuses the backscattered signal of the target scene from an external illuminator, such as SAR satellite, GNSS or ground-based stationary commercial illuminators, and achieves bi-static SAR imaging and data communication. The system can provide instant accessibility to the radar image of the interested targets with enhanced platform concealment, which is an essential tool for stealth observation and scene monitoring. The mission concept and system block diagram are first presented with justifications on the advantages of the system. Then, the prospective imaging performance and system feasibility are analyzed for the typical illuminators based on signal and spatial resolution model. With different illuminators, the proposed system can achieve distinct imaging performance, which offers more alternatives for various mission requirements. A set of mission performance evaluators is established to quantitatively assess the capability of the system in a comprehensive manner, including UAV navigation, passive SAR imaging and communication. Finally, the validity of the proposed performance evaluators are verified by numerical simulations.

A Tulane University student was fatally struck at a rest stop on Tuesday by two wheels that had reportedly flown off a tractor-trailer. A Tulane University student was killed at a highway rest stop in Mississippi on Tuesday after a pair of tires flew off a passing tractor-trailer and struck her. The victim was Margaret Maurer, an ecology and evolutionary biology major originally from Forest Lake, Minnesota. Mauer and two friends were about to get back into their car at rest stop on eastbound I-10 in Gautier when the tires hit her, their car and a nearby SUV, authorities said. UBER WON'T FACE CRIMINAL CHARGES IN DEADLY SELF-DRIVING CAR CRASH, PROSECUTOR SAYS The tractor-trailer that struck her was traveling westbound when it lost the wheels, then turned around and drove east.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. The way it worked was, Penrose spoke for a half hour about his ideas about consciousness (Gödel, quantum gravity, microtubules, uncomputability, you know the drill), then I delivered a half-hour "response," and then there was an hour of questions and discussion from the floor. Below, I'm sharing the prepared notes for my talk, as well as some very brief recollections about the discussion afterward. I unfortunately don't have the text or transparencies for Penrose's talk available to me, but--with one exception, which I touch on in my own talk--his talk very much followed the outlines of his famous books, The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. Admittedly, for regular readers of this blog, not much in my own talk will be new either. Apart from a few new wisecracks, almost all of the material (including the replies to Penrose) is contained in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, Could A Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience? (my talk at IBM T. J. Watson), and Quantum Computing Since Democritus chapters 4 and 11. See also my recent answer on Quora to "What's your take on John Searle's Chinese room argument"? Still, I thought it might be of interest to some readers how I organized this material for the specific, unenviable task of debating the guy who proved that our universe contains spacetime singularities. The Seven Pines Symposium was the first time I had extended conversations with Penrose (I'd talked to him only briefly before, at the Perimeter Institute). At age 84, Penrose's sight is failing him; he eagerly demonstrated the complicated optical equipment he was recently issued by Britain's National Health Service. But his mind remains … well, may we all aspire to be a milliPenrose or even a nanoPenrose when we're 84 years old.