The Bee Cave Police Department announced on Friday they would introduce the new AV8 autonomous drone pilot program to help respond to 911 calls. A police department in Texas may soon be using drones to respond to emergency calls, according to Police Chief Brian Jones. The Bee Cave Police Department offered a demonstration of their autonomous drone system on Friday morning, known as "AV8." The demonstration was part of a pilot project to test the AV8, which also consists of a computer system to keep drones on-target. Both are built by eve Vehicles, which is a start-up based in Austin.

The Ukrainian Air Force said it repelled a massive air attack by Russia across the country, shooting down 58 of 67 long-range drones that were launched overnight. Debris from a downed drone was also found next to Ukraine's parliament building in the capital, Kyiv, the Verkhovna Rada said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday. Air defence units were scrambled into action in 11 regions across Ukraine, the air force said in a statement on Telegram. It also said the Shahed drones were launched from two border regions in Russia as well as from the Russian-occupied peninsula of Crimea. There were no immediate reports on casualties from the attacks.

A dozen Republican U.S. lawmakers urged the administration of President Joe Biden on Friday to address the use of Chinese-manufactured agriculture drones, saying their use on American farms poses national security risks. Elise Stefanik, Ashley Hinson and John Moolenaar, who chairs a select committee on China, asked the Agriculture Department and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to detail the administration's efforts to address risks posed by aerosol-dispensing drones. The lawmakers asked for a briefing by Sept. 30, citing the large number of drones produced by Chinese drone manufacturer DJI as a security concern.

Multicopter drones are becoming a key platform in several application domains, enabling precise on-the-spot sensing and/or actuation. We focus on the case where the drone must process the sensor data in order to decide, depending on the outcome, whether it needs to perform some additional action, e.g., more accurate sensing or some form of actuation. On the one hand, waiting for the computation to complete may waste time, if it turns out that no further action is needed. On the other hand, if the drone starts moving toward the next point of interest before the computation ends, it may need to return back to the previous point, if some action needs to be taken. In this paper, we propose a learning approach that enables the drone to take informed decisions about whether to wait for the result of the computation (or not), based on past experience gathered from previous missions. Through an extensive evaluation, we show that the proposed approach, when properly configured, outperforms several static policies, up to 25.8%, over a wide variety of different scenarios where the probability of some action being required at a given point of interest remains stable as well as for scenarios where this probability varies in time.

DJI has just unveiled the Neo, its much-leaked 200 drone aimed at content creators and casual users. It's tiny and easy to use thanks to novice-friendly features like propeller guards, palm takeoff and voice control. However, the Neo is no toy (or Snap Pixy). It has a suite of powerful features like ActiveTrack, Quick Shots, FPV controller support, smartphone control and the ability to record yourself with the DJI Mic 2. Video specs look promising as well, but not everything is perfect -- it lacks obstacle detection and uses small propellers that are likely to be noisy. I wasn't able to give it a full look as some features were missing, but I was still astonished by what DJI got a small, cheap drone to do. The Neo is DJI's lightest drone by a long way at 135 grams and is nearly small enough to fit into a pocket.

An Israeli air attack on a car in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas has killed at least five Palestinians and left others wounded, local media and medical workers report. Israel said early on Thursday morning that military aircraft took part in "three different attacks" on Palestinian fighters who "posed a threat" to their forces in the Tubas region. Palestinian medics reported that five people were killed in an Israeli air strike targeting a car and two people were injured, one of whom was critical, according to the Palestinian state news agency, Wafa. The Reuters news agency later reported that the number of those killed in the drone attack had risen to at least six. According to Wafa, the attack was carried out by an armed drone, and Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance crews brought the bodies of the five deceased men and two wounded people to the Tubas Turkish Government Hospital.

Autonomous indoor navigation of UAVs presents numerous challenges, primarily due to the limited precision of GPS in enclosed environments. Additionally, UAVs' limited capacity to carry heavy or power-intensive sensors, such as overheight packages, exacerbates the difficulty of achieving autonomous navigation indoors. This paper introduces an advanced system in which a drone autonomously navigates indoor spaces to locate a specific target, such as an unknown Amazon package, using only a single camera. Employing a deep learning approach, a deep reinforcement adaptive learning algorithm is trained to develop a control strategy that emulates the decision-making process of an expert pilot. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system through real-time simulations conducted in various indoor settings. We apply multiple visualization techniques to gain deeper insights into our trained network. Furthermore, we extend our approach to include an adaptive control algorithm for coordinating multiple drones to lift an object in an indoor environment collaboratively. Integrating our DRAL algorithm enables multiple UAVs to learn optimal control strategies that adapt to dynamic conditions and uncertainties. This innovation enhances the robustness and flexibility of indoor navigation and opens new possibilities for complex multi-drone operations in confined spaces. The proposed framework highlights significant advancements in adaptive control and deep reinforcement learning, offering robust solutions for complex multi-agent systems in real-world applications.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Svitlana Menyaylo doesn't want to hear a word about the success of Ukrainian forces in the western Russian region of Kursk. Since August 6, Ukrainian soldiers have occupied dozens of Russian villages on more than 1,000 square kilometres (620 square miles) and are digging in to repel an imminent Russian counteroffensive. But for Menyaylo, a seamstress from the besieged town of Pokrovsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the very presence of Ukrainian troops in Kursk feels like treason. Pokrovsk, the administrative centre of a heavily industrialised agglomeration with a pre-war population of almost 400,000, is likely to be taken over by advancing Russian troops soon. They are less than 10km (6 miles) east of it – and keep inching in every minute after months of heavy bombardment and "meat marches", frontal attacks on Ukrainian positions that have cost Russian generals tens of thousands of servicemen.

A major shake-up of the government is under way in Ukraine after at least six ministers resigned and a presidential aide was fired. Among those who quit late on Tuesday was Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin who was in charge of weapons production. He said he expected to take another role in defence. Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna as well as the justice, environment and reintegration ministers also resigned, as did the head of Ukraine's State Property Fund, Vitaliy Koval. About a third of the positions in the cabinet are now vacant.

At least 51 people were killed and 271 injured when two Russian ballistic missiles hit a military academy and a nearby hospital in Ukraine's central town of Poltava in the deadliest single attack in the war this year. The missiles hit shortly after the air raid alert sounded when many people were on their way to a bomb shelter, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. A woman and her eight-year-old son were killed after the Zaporizhia region hotel where they were staying was hit in a Russian missile attack. Her husband and daughter were injured, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine's Ministry of Energy said three employees were injured in a Russian drone attack on a power facility in the northern region of Chernihiv.