Drones

Data-driven experiences are rich, immersive and immediate. Think pizza delivery by drone, video cameras that can record traffic accidents at an intersection, freight trucks that can identify a potential system failure. These kinds of fast-acting activities need lots of data -- quickly. So they can't sustain latency as data travels to and from the cloud. That to-and-fro takes too long.

China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus. Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease. There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks. The global death toll from coronavirus topped 2,100 people this week, with over 74,000 infected.

Fox News finds the coronavirus outbreak has left San Francisco streets and tourist sites including Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf largely deserted. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. New drone footage and other video shot by Fox News shows once-busy streets and tourist areas in Los Angeles and San Francisco eerily deserted as the coronavirus has kept people indoors. Fisherman's Wharf, one of San Francisco's busiest tourist areas, once brimming with souvenir shops and seafood stalls and situated near Ghirardelli Square, was shuttered after the city's mayor called for a shelter-in-place, restricting people from leaving their homes except for trips to the grocery store or for medical supplies. The Golden Gate Bridge, which usually has seen over 100,000 cars and other vehicles a day and Alamo Square -- which overlooks the famous "Painted Ladies" -- were surprisingly barren.

Perception-Action loops are at the core of most our daily life activities. Subconsciously, our brains use sensory inputs to trigger specific motor actions in real time and this becomes a continuous activity that in all sorts of activities from playing sports to watching TV. In the context of artificial intelligence(AI), perception-action loops are the cornerstone of autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles. While disciplines such as imitation learning or reinforcement learning have certainly made progress in this area, the current generation of autonomous systems are still nowhere near human skill in making those decisions directly from visual data. Recently, AI researchers from Microsoft published a paper proposing a transfer learning method to learn perception-action policies from in a simulated environment and apply the knowledge to fly an autonomous drone.

Experts are set to unleash a'pandemic drone' to help limit the spread of coronavirus. The drone is fitted with sensors and computer vision, allowing it to monitor and detect people with infectious respiratory conditions. The system could also identify people sneezing and coughing in crowds, offices, airports, cruise ships, aged care homes and other places where groups of people may work or congregate. Its creators hope to deploy the drone in six months and in various hotspots where'the most amount of detection is currently required.' Experts are set to unleash a'pandemic drone' to help limit the spread of coronavirus.

The Army Research Laboratory is exploring new applications of AI designed to better enable forward operating robot "tanks" to acquire targets, discern and organize war-crucial information, surveil combat zones and even fire weapons when directed by a human. "For the first time the Army will deploy manned tanks that are capable of controlling robotic vehicles able to adapt to the environment and act semi-independently. Manned vehicles will control a number of combat vehicles, not small ones but large ones. In the future we are going to be incorporating robotic systems that are larger, more like the size of a tanks," Dr. Brandon Perelman, Scientist and Engineer, Army Research Laboratory, Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Futures Command, told Warrior in an interview, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. The concept is aligned with ongoing research into new generations of AI being engineered to not only gather and organize information for human decision makers but also advance networking between humans and machines.

Japanese police arrested or took other action against 115 people for civil aviation law violations linked to unauthorized drone flights in 2019, up 31 from the previous year, government data showed Thursday. The National Police Agency tally included 51 foreign nationals, of whom 19, the largest group, were Chinese. Seven were from the United States. Last year, the number of cases that led to police actions stood at 111. Of them, 54 cases happened as offenders tried to take commemorative pictures, while 34 cases were flight operation exercises, according to the NPA data.

UPS has partnered with the German tech company Wingcopter to build a fleet of rugged, high speed delivery drones. The drones will be based on a model designed by Wingcopter, which can travel at speeds of up to 150mph and has a range of 75 miles. The drones can also endure a variety of difficult weather conditions, including wind speeds of up to 45mph. The agreements marks the first external partnership for UPS's Flight Forward program, which is focused on developing a range of drone delivery options, according to a report in TechCrunch. 'Drone delivery is not a one-size-fits-all operation,' UPS's Bala Ganesh said.

A little over a year ago we reported on a little yellow robot that was making deliveries around China. The two-foot-tall autonomous robot, called the RoboPony, comes from Zhen Robotics Corp. It has been seen in places like malls, hospitals, offices and retail spaces. Now with the recent coronavirus outbreak and many finding themselves under quarantine, the demand for the RoboPony has surged. Cities around the world are attempting to cut down on human to human interaction but there is still a demand for things like groceries and medication.

Data-driven experiences are rich, immersive and immediate. Think pizza delivery by drone, video cameras that can record traffic accidents at an intersection, freight trucks that can identify a potential system failure. These kinds of fast-acting activities need lots of data -- quickly. So they can't sustain latency as data travels to and from the cloud. That to-and-fro takes too long; instead, many of these data-intensive processes must remain localized and processed at the edge and on or near a hardware device.