Two people were arrested Thursday morning in Rolling Hills Estates on suspicion of attempting to burglarize homes that were evacuated in the major landslide that struck earlier this week, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Authorities attempted to surround the two suspects, who then tried to escape into landslide area -- which has remained closed to the public amid concerns about its stability, according to tweets from the Sheriff's Department's Lomita station. With assistance from aerial footage from Torrance police drone operators, deputies were able to detain the two people. Their identities were not immediately released. "We are also appalled that there are people who see another person's misfortune as an opportunity for them to benefit," the Sheriff's Department wrote.

"We have put to rest any doubts and ambiguities about whether Ukraine will be in Nato - it will," he said, adding that for the first time "a significant majority" of members are "vigorously pushing" for it.

Ukrainian air defence units repelled a Russian drone attack for the third consecutive night in and around Kyiv as emergency workers said they were investigating damage caused by falling debris from the destroyed aerial weapons. Kyiv's military administration said early on Thursday morning that falling debris from the destroyed drones had struck Solomyanskyi district in the centre of the Ukrainian capital. At least two people were injured. Kyiv's mayor Vitali Klitschko said material from the downed drones had also damaged a residential building in Darnytskyi district and there were reports of injuries. In the city's Shevchenkivskyi district, a balcony had caught fire.

Current perception models for different tasks usually exist in modular forms on Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which infer extremely slowly in parallel on edge devices, causing the asynchrony between perception results and USV position, and leading to error decisions of autonomous navigation. Compared with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), the robust perception of USVs develops relatively slowly. Moreover, most current multi-task perception models are huge in parameters, slow in inference and not scalable. Oriented on this, we propose Achelous, a low-cost and fast unified panoptic perception framework for water-surface perception based on the fusion of a monocular camera and 4D mmWave radar. Achelous can simultaneously perform five tasks, detection and segmentation of visual targets, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation and radar point cloud segmentation. Besides, models in Achelous family, with less than around 5 million parameters, achieve about 18 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, 11 FPS faster than HybridNets, and exceed YOLOX-Tiny and Segformer-B0 on our collected dataset about 5 mAP$_{\text{50-95}}$ and 0.7 mIoU, especially under situations of adverse weather, dark environments and camera failure. To our knowledge, Achelous is the first comprehensive panoptic perception framework combining vision-level and point-cloud-level tasks for water-surface perception. To promote the development of the intelligent transportation community, we release our codes in \url{https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous}.

The Drone Swarm Search project is an environment, based on PettingZoo, that is to be used in conjunction with multi-agent (or single-agent) reinforcement learning algorithms. It is an environment in which the agents (drones), have to find the targets (shipwrecked people). The agents do not know the position of the target and do not receive rewards related to their own distance to the target(s). However, the agents receive the probabilities of the target(s) being in a certain cell of the map. The aim of this project is to aid in the study of reinforcement learning algorithms that require dynamic probabilities as inputs.

Autonomous, agile quadrotor flight raises fundamental challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. A versatile and standardized platform is needed to accelerate research and let practitioners focus on the core problems. To this end, we present Agilicious, a co-designed hardware and software framework tailored to autonomous, agile quadrotor flight. It is completely open-source and open-hardware and supports both model-based and neural-network--based controllers. Also, it provides high thrust-to-weight and torque-to-inertia ratios for agility, onboard vision sensors, GPU-accelerated compute hardware for real-time perception and neural-network inference, a real-time flight controller, and a versatile software stack. In contrast to existing frameworks, Agilicious offers a unique combination of flexible software stack and high-performance hardware. We compare Agilicious with prior works and demonstrate it on different agile tasks, using both model-based and neural-network--based controllers. Our demonstrators include trajectory tracking at up to 5g and 70 km/h in a motion-capture system, and vision-based acrobatic flight and obstacle avoidance in both structured and unstructured environments using solely onboard perception. Finally, we demonstrate its use for hardware-in-the-loop simulation in virtual-reality environments. Thanks to its versatility, we believe that Agilicious supports the next generation of scientific and industrial quadrotor research.

Russia has launched a wave of drone attacks on Kyiv and nearby regions for a second consecutive night, with air defence systems engaged in repelling the attack, a Ukraine military official said. "The air raid alert is on! Air defence systems engaged in the region on approach to Kyiv," Serhiy Popko, head of the military administration for the Ukrainian capital, said on the Telegram messaging app early on Wednesday morning. The Kyiv military administration urged people to stay in shelters until the raids were over. Witnesses in Kyiv heard blasts resembling the sound of air defence systems intercepting air objects, the Reuters news agency reported.

If you're looking for a camera (or drone) for content creation, travel photography and more, Amazon Prime Day has some great deals, including rare sales on popular models. For example, Sony's latest A7 IV model is on sale for the first time at $2,400, or $2,600 with a 28-70mm kit lens -- saving you $100 on each. DJI, which doesn't often discount its popular drones, is selling the Mini 3 Pro with DJI RC remote for $729. Meanwhile, Canon is selling its R50 creator's kit for $850 for a savings of $150, Panasonic has its full frame Lumix S5 on sale with two lenses (including a prime) for $1,700 (40 percent off) and OM System is selling the OM-D E-M1 Mark III mirrorless camera for just $1,300, for an impressive $500 discount. There are plenty of other deals as well, and if you don't find what you want at Amazon, some of the products come with the same discount elsewhere.

This article explores the use of drones in agriculture and discusses the various types of drones employed for different agricultural applications. Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), offer numerous advantages in farming practices. They provide real-time and high-resolution data collection, enabling farmers to make informed irrigation, fertilization, and pest management decisions. Drones assist in precision spraying and application of agricultural inputs, minimizing chemical wastage and optimizing resource utilization. They offer accessibility to inaccessible areas, reduce manual labor, and provide cost savings and increased operational efficiency. Drones also play a crucial role in mapping and surveying agricultural fields, aiding crop planning and resource allocation. However, challenges such as regulations and limited flight time need to be addressed. The advantages of using drones in agriculture include precision agriculture, cost and time savings, improved data collection and analysis, enhanced crop management, accessibility and flexibility, environmental sustainability, and increased safety for farmers. Overall, drones have the potential to revolutionize farming practices, leading to increased efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in agriculture.

Ukraine's envoy to Japan said Monday that Tokyo has two key areas where it can provide support to Kyiv: providing funds and expertise for rebuilding cities devastated by Russia's invasion and transferring defense equipment such as anti-drone weapons. "What I see is that Japan's role could be in major infrastructure projects," Ukrainian Ambassador to Japan Sergiy Korsunsky told a news conference in Tokyo a day after Kyiv marked the 500th day of the conflict. Korsunsky, noting Japan's vast experience in rebuilding communities after disasters like the devastating March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, said Tokyo's role in supporting Ukraine would likely be bigger in the war-torn country's reconstruction than during the fighting. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.