WASHINGTON – The Trump administration has authorized the sale of unarmed surveillance drones to India, the manufacturer said Friday, as the two nations' leaders prepare for their first face-to-face meeting. India initiated its request to buy 22 Guardian MQ-9B unmanned aircraft for maritime surveillance last year. The deal is estimated to be worth about $2 billion. The offer is still subject to congressional approval. The green light from the administration marks a further deepening in defense ties before India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday. Modi's two-day visit to Washington, which starts Sunday, takes place amid uncertainty over the relationship because of differences on trade and other issues.

The idea of a Chinese-U.S. arms race for artificial intelligence conjures up images of an army of swarmbots defeating self-driving tanks on a smoldering, depopulated hellscape. It's an idea so captivating that Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants to make it harder for the Chinese to invest in U.S. technology development, including in companies developing artificial intelligence, out of fear that Beijing will use small investment positions in Silicon Valley firms to erode U.S. national security and technological advantage. But tech entrepreneurs, academics in the field, and former senior officials in the White House and Pentagon think the proposal would do more harm than good.

The Marine Corps has been forced to ground its F-35B Joint Strike Fighters in Arizona after flaws were found in the controversial jet's computer system. The problems relate to the Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, that transmits details about a jet's mechanical condition to the ground-based computer system. This allows the computers to automatically scheduling maintenance for the aircraft. Dozens of F-35 stealth fighters that were grounded for 11 days due to an oxygen-supply problem aboard the expensive warplanes will resume flying on Wednesday, the US Air Force said. Gen. Mark Wise, commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, made the call to suspend flights for Squadron 211 due to'some anomalies' with the latest ALIS 2.0.2 software upgrade, according to a statement given to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

FILE - In this June 2, 2017, file photo Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Trump administration is set to authorize the sale of surveillance drones to India as the two nations' leaders prepare for their first face-to-face meeting on June 26. That's according to a congressional aide and an industry representative speaking to The Associated Press.

"There are only two types of networks, those that have been compromised and those that are compromised without the operator's awareness," wrote James Scott, senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, in a collection of essays on next-generation cyber defenses. The writers, ICIT fellows and industry security experts, voiced a common theme: Cyber threats continue to pervade government systems and no one solution is a cure-all. The government sector is second only to the health care industry in system vulnerability and susceptibility to attack, based on total records breached, Scott wrote. In 2016, 36.6 million records were exposed, 13.9 million of which came from government systems. Between 2010 and 2016, he said, federal and state agencies publicly disclosed 203 breaches, and there was a 40 percent increase in public-sector data breaches in 2016.

Today, SpaceX will hopefully launch and land a Falcon 9 rocket that it's already flown to space. The launch window opens at 2:10 PM and lasts for two hours; launch time is currently scheduled for 3:10 PM ET. You can livestream the launch, with commentary, at SpaceX's website. This mission is called BulgariaSat-1 and will carry Bulgaria's first geostationary communications satellite into a high geostationary orbit around the Earth. It's launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and a drone ship called "Of Course I Still Love You" will be waiting in the Atlantic Ocean for the Falcon 9's first-stage landing. If things don't go as planned, there's another launch window tomorrow at 2:10 PM ET.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, roboticists have spent the last 14 years honing a robot navigation system modeled on the brains of rats. This biologically inspired approach, they hope, could help robots navigate dynamic environments without requiring advanced, costly sensors and computationally intensive algorithms.

Uber admitted that it hired a former Google employee despite being warned that he possessed sensitive documents from the Silicon Valley giant, adding a new twist to a court battle over trade secrets. Waymo, the self-driving car developer created by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google, has accused Uber of using stolen trade secrets in its own software that would serve as the backbone of autonomous vehicles. Uber has denied the charges. However, the ride-sharing company fired Anthony Levandowski, the ex-Google engineer and Uber executive, for failing to cooperate with an internal investigation. Waymo's lawsuit maintains that Uber then transplanted the intellectual property allegedly stolen by Levandowski into its own fleet of self-driving vehicles -- a charge that Uber has adamantly denied since Waymo filed its complaint in federal court four months ago.

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) subsidiary Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind Health has signed an agreement with a hospital that is part of the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) network to deploy Streams, an app that monitors critical indicators of a patient's health and alerts doctors. This is the second such deal signed by DeepMind this year. Earlier, the company signed a similar agreement for patient data with three hospitals that operate under the NHS umbrella. As part of the agreements, DeepMind receives access to important patient data and medical histories. News reports have alleged that DeepMind obtained the data without explicit consent from the affected patients.

Security strategies must undergo a radical revolution. Tomorrow's security devices will need to see and operate internally among them to recognize changes in the interconnected environments and thus automatically be able to anticipate risks, update and enforce policies. Devices must have the ability to monitor and share critical information and synchronize their responses to detect threats. A new technology that has recently grabbed attention lays the foundation for such an automation approach. This has been called Intent-Based Network Security (IBNS).