Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots can perform automatic power tool work. However, aerial vehicles could be deployed in untraversable environments and reach inaccessible places. Existing drone designs do not provide the large forces, payload, and high precision required for using power tools. This work presents the first aerial robot design to perform versatile manipulation tasks on vertical concrete walls with continuous forces of up to 150 N. The platform combines a quadrotor with active suction cups for perching on walls and a lightweight, tiltable linear tool table. This combination minimizes weight using the propulsion system for flying, surface alignment, and feed during manipulation and allows precise positioning of the power tool. We evaluate our design in a concrete drilling application - a challenging construction process that requires high forces, accuracy, and precision. In 30 trials, our design can accurately pinpoint a target position despite perching imprecision. Nine visually guided drilling experiments demonstrate a drilling precision of 6 mm without further automation. Aside from drilling, we also demonstrate the versatility of the design by setting an anchor into concrete.

Deployment of teams of aerial robots could enable large-scale filming of dynamic groups of people (actors) in complex environments for novel applications in areas such as team sports and cinematography. Toward this end, methods for submodular maximization via sequential greedy planning can be used for scalable optimization of camera views across teams of robots but face challenges with efficient coordination in cluttered environments. Obstacles can produce occlusions and increase chances of inter-robot collision which can violate requirements for near-optimality guarantees. To coordinate teams of aerial robots in filming groups of people in dense environments, a more general view-planning approach is required. We explore how collision and occlusion impact performance in filming applications through the development of a multi-robot multi-actor view planner with an occlusion-aware objective for filming groups of people and compare with a greedy formation planner. To evaluate performance, we plan in five test environments with complex multiple-actor behaviors. Compared with a formation planner, our sequential planner generates 14% greater view reward over the actors for three scenarios and comparable performance to formation planning on two others. We also observe near identical performance of sequential planning both with and without inter-robot collision constraints. Overall, we demonstrate effective coordination of teams of aerial robots for filming groups that may split, merge, or spread apart and in environments cluttered with obstacles that may cause collisions or occlusions.

This paper provides a summary of the 281 sorties that were flown by the 10 different models of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) at Hurricane Ian, and the failures made in the field. These 281 sorties, supporting 44 missions, represents the largest use of sUAS in a disaster to date (previously Hurricane Florence with 260 sorties). The sUAS operations at Hurricane Ian differ slightly from prior operations as they included the first documented uses of drones performing interior search for victims, and the first use of a VTOL fixed wing aircraft during a large scale disaster. However, there are substantive similarities to prior drone operations. Most notably, rotorcraft continue to perform the vast majority of flights, wireless data transmission capacity continues to be a limitation, and the lack of centralized control for unmanned and manned aerial systems continues to cause operational friction. This work continues by documenting the failures, both human and technological made in the field and concludes with a discussion summarizing potential areas for further work to improve sUAS response to large scale disasters.

In the realm of machine learning (ML) systems featuring client-host connections, the enhancement of privacy security can be effectively achieved through federated learning (FL) as a secure distributed ML methodology. FL effectively integrates cloud infrastructure to transfer ML models onto edge servers using blockchain technology. Through this mechanism, it guarantees the streamlined processing and data storage requirements of both centralized and decentralized systems, with an emphasis on scalability, privacy considerations, and cost-effective communication. In current FL implementations, data owners locally train their models, and subsequently upload the outcomes in the form of weights, gradients, and parameters to the cloud for overall model aggregation. This innovation obviates the necessity of engaging Internet of Things (IoT) clients and participants to communicate raw and potentially confidential data directly with a cloud center. This not only reduces the costs associated with communication networks but also enhances the protection of private data. This survey conducts an analysis and comparison of recent FL applications, aiming to assess their efficiency, accuracy, and privacy protection. However, in light of the complex and evolving nature of FL, it becomes evident that additional research is imperative to address lingering knowledge gaps and effectively confront the forthcoming challenges in this field. In this study, we categorize recent literature into the following clusters: privacy protection, resource allocation, case study analysis, and applications. Furthermore, at the end of each section, we tabulate the open areas and future directions presented in the referenced literature, affording researchers and scholars an insightful view of the evolution of the field.

The safe operation of drone swarms beyond visual line of sight requires multiple safeguards to mitigate the risk of collision between drones flying in hyper localised scenarios. Cooperative navigation and flight coordination strategies that rely on pre-planned trajectories and require constant network connectivity are brittle to failure. Drone embedded sense and detect offers a comprehensive mode of separation between drones for deconfliction and collision avoidance. This paper presents the first airborne LiDAR based solution for drone-swarm detection and localisation using 3D deep learning. It adapts and embeds the PointPillars deep learning neural network on the drone. To collect training data of close-quarter multi drone operations and safety critical scenarios, a scenario Digital Twin is used to augment real datasets with high fidelity synthetic data. The method has been validated in real-world tests. The trained model achieves over 80% recall and 96% precision when tested on real datasets. By incorporating a detection-by-tracking algorithm the system can reliably monitor the separation distance of multiple drones in challenging environments.

Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence are now finding and attacking targets without human assistance, New Scientist has learned, in what would be the first confirmed use of autonomous weapons or "killer robots". While the drones are designed to target vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry, it is almost certain that the resulting explosions are killing Russian soldiers without a direct command from a human operator, although no casualties have been confirmed.

With the increasing prevalence of drones in various industries, the navigation and tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in challenging environments, particularly GNSS-denied areas, have become crucial concerns. To address this need, we present a novel multi-LiDAR dataset specifically designed for UAV tracking. Our dataset includes data from a spinning LiDAR, two solid-state LiDARs with different Field of View (FoV) and scan patterns, and an RGB-D camera. This diverse sensor suite allows for research on new challenges in the field, including limited FoV adaptability and multi-modality data processing. The dataset facilitates the evaluation of existing algorithms and the development of new ones, paving the way for advances in UAV tracking techniques. Notably, we provide data in both indoor and outdoor environments. We also consider variable UAV sizes, from micro-aerial vehicles to more standard commercial UAV platforms. The outdoor trajectories are selected with close proximity to buildings, targeting research in UAV detection in urban areas, e.g., within counter-UAV systems or docking for UAV logistics. In addition to the dataset, we provide a baseline comparison with recent LiDAR-based UAV tracking algorithms, benchmarking the performance with different sensors, UAVs, and algorithms. Importantly, our dataset shows that current methods have shortcomings and are unable to track UAVs consistently across different scenarios.

At least two people were killed and two injured when debris from a destroyed Ukrainian drone fell on homes in Russia's Belgorod region, according to a local official. Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said early on Thursday that Russian air defences shot down an "aircraft-type" unmanned aerial vehicle as it approached Belgorod city. "To great sorrow, there are dead. Operational services recovered the bodies of two people from the rubble – a man and a woman," Gladkov wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "As a result of falling debris, a private residential building caught fire," Gladkov said, adding later that the falling debris had completely destroyed one residential building, and partially damaged two others.

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of MiFly, a self-localization system for autonomous drones that works across indoor and outdoor environments, including low-visibility, dark, and GPS-denied settings. MiFly performs 6DoF self-localization by leveraging a single millimeter-wave (mmWave) anchor in its vicinity - even if that anchor is visually occluded. MmWave signals are used in radar and 5G systems and can operate in the dark and through occlusions. MiFly introduces a new mmWave anchor design and mounts light-weight high-resolution mmWave radars on a drone. By jointly designing the localization algorithms and the novel low-power mmWave anchor hardware (including its polarization and modulation), the drone is capable of high-speed 3D localization. Furthermore, by intelligently fusing the location estimates from its mmWave radars and its IMUs, it can accurately and robustly track its 6DoF trajectory. We implemented and evaluated MiFly on a DJI drone. We demonstrate a median localization error of 7cm and a 90th percentile less than 15cm, even when the anchor is fully occluded (visually) from the drone.

This paper presents a unique outdoor aerial visual-inertial-LiDAR dataset captured using a multi-sensor payload to promote the global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied navigation research. The dataset features flight distances ranging from 300m to 5km, collected using a DJI M600 hexacopter drone and the National Research Council (NRC) Bell 412 Advanced Systems Research Aircraft (ASRA). The dataset consists of hardware synchronized monocular images, IMU measurements, 3D LiDAR point-clouds, and high-precision real-time kinematic (RTK)-GNSS based ground truth. Ten datasets were collected as ROS bags over 100 mins of outdoor environment footage ranging from urban areas, highways, hillsides, prairies, and waterfronts. The datasets were collected to facilitate the development of visual-inertial-LiDAR odometry and mapping algorithms, visual-inertial navigation algorithms, object detection, segmentation, and landing zone detection algorithms based upon real-world drone and full-scale helicopter data. All the datasets contain raw sensor measurements, hardware timestamps, and spatio-temporally aligned ground truth. The intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations of the sensors are also provided along with raw calibration datasets. A performance summary of state-of-the-art methods applied on the datasets is also provided.