This paper proposes a novel algorithm, named quantum multi-agent actor-critic networks (QMACN) for autonomously constructing a robust mobile access system employing multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In the context of facilitating collaboration among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the application of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques is regarded as a promising approach. These methods enable UAVs to learn collectively, optimizing their actions within a shared environment, ultimately leading to more efficient cooperative behavior. Furthermore, the principles of a quantum computing (QC) are employed in our study to enhance the training process and inference capabilities of the UAVs involved. By leveraging the unique computational advantages of quantum computing, our approach aims to boost the overall effectiveness of the UAV system. However, employing a QC introduces scalability challenges due to the near intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) limitation associated with qubit usage. The proposed algorithm addresses this issue by implementing a quantum centralized critic, effectively mitigating the constraints imposed by NISQ limitations. Additionally, the advantages of the QMACN with performance improvements in terms of training speed and wireless service quality are verified via various data-intensive evaluations. Furthermore, this paper validates that a noise injection scheme can be used for handling environmental uncertainties in order to realize robust mobile access.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. You're gonna need a bigger ... drone. Researchers at California State University, Long Beach-based Shark Lab used drones to study juvenile white sharks along the Southern California coastline and how close they swim to humans in the water. Turns out, it's pretty close.

Kyiv, Ukraine – The enemy "turns border districts into a dead zone", a war correspondent covering the Russia-Ukraine war wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday. But retired colonel Yuri Kotyonok, who reported from almost every war zone in the former Soviet Union and whose Telegram channel has 420,000 subscribers, was not talking about Ukraine. The districts belong to the western Russian region of Belgorod that borders Ukraine. In recent months, it has been shelled and attacked by drones hundreds of times – 130 in May alone, Russian officials say. As a result, 32 people were killed and 157 wounded, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in late April.

Naftali Bennett spoke exclusively with Fox News Digital about the benefits of AI and the need to set parameters for its use now. The new drone swarm test conducted by the U.S. and its allies last week shows some of the wider applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in military settings while also raising some potential issues about how multiple militaries will be able to cooperate. "Just like coordination is needed to conduct classic, joint and coalition maneuvers and military operations, similar clear definitions of boundaries, tasks, responsibility and authority are needed to control and de-conflict drone swarms," retired Brig. Gen. Uri Engelhard, AI and cyber expert, member of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, told Fox News Digital. "If planned and conducted properly, the deployment of drone swarms should not be more challenging than other military activities."

This paper proposes a state-machine model for a multi-modal, multi-robot environmental sensing algorithm. This multi-modal algorithm integrates two different exploration algorithms: (1) coverage path planning using variable formations and (2) collaborative active sensing using multi-robot swarms. The state machine provides the logic for when to switch between these different sensing algorithms. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a gas source localisation and mapping task. We use hardware-in-the-loop experiments and real-time experiments with a radio source simulating a real gas field. We compare the proposed approach with a single-mode, state-of-the-art collaborative active sensing approach. Our results indicate that our multi-modal switching approach can converge more rapidly than single-mode active sensing.

Exploiting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to execute tasks is gaining growing popularity recently. To solve the underlying task scheduling problem, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods demonstrate notable advantage over the conventional heuristics as they rely less on hand-engineered rules. However, their decision space will become prohibitively huge as the problem scales up, thus deteriorating the computation efficiency. To alleviate this issue, we propose a double-level deep reinforcement learning (DL-DRL) approach based on a divide and conquer framework (DCF), where we decompose the task scheduling of multi-UAV into task allocation and route planning. Particularly, we design an encoder-decoder structured policy network in our upper-level DRL model to allocate the tasks to different UAVs, and we exploit another attention based policy network in our lower-level DRL model to construct the route for each UAV, with the objective to maximize the number of executed tasks given the maximum flight distance of the UAV. To effectively train the two models, we design an interactive training strategy (ITS), which includes pre-training, intensive training and alternate training. Experimental results show that our DL-DRL performs favorably against the learning-based and conventional baselines including the OR-Tools, in terms of solution quality and computation efficiency. We also verify the generalization performance of our approach by applying it to larger sizes of up to 1000 tasks. Moreover, we also show via an ablation study that our ITS can help achieve a balance between the performance and training efficiency.

The distributed flocking control of collective aerial vehicles has extraordinary advantages in scalability and reliability, \emph{etc.} However, it is still challenging to design a reliable, efficient, and responsive flocking algorithm. In this paper, a distributed predictive flocking framework is presented based on a Markov random field (MRF). The MRF is used to characterize the optimization problem that is eventually resolved by discretizing the input space. Potential functions are employed to describe the interactions between aerial vehicles and as indicators of flight performance. The dynamic constraints are taken into account in the candidate feasible trajectories which correspond to random variables. Numerical simulation shows that compared with some existing latest methods, the proposed algorithm has better-flocking cohesion and control efficiency performances. Experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry allows for the creation of orthophotos and digital surface models (DSMs) of a terrain. However, DSMs of water bodies mapped with this technique reveal water surface distortions, preventing the use of photogrammetric data for accurate determination of water surface elevation (WSE). Firstly, we propose a new solution in which a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as a WSE estimator from photogrammetric DSMs and orthophotos. Second, we improved the previously known "water-edge" method by filtering the outliers using a forward-backwards exponential weighted moving average. Further improvement in these two methods was achieved by performing a linear regression of the WSE values against chainage. The solutions estimate the uncertainty of the predictions. This is the first approach in which DL was used for this task. A brand new machine learning data set has been created. It was collected on a small lowland river in winter and summer conditions. It consists of 322 samples, each corresponding to a 10 by 10 meter area of the river channel and adjacent land. Each data set sample contains orthophoto and DSM arrays as input, along with a single ground-truth WSE value as output. The data set was supplemented with data collected by other researchers that compared the state-of-the-art methods for determining WSE using an UAV. The results of the DL solution were verified using k-fold cross-validation method. This provided an in-depth examination of the model's ability to perform on previously unseen data. The WSE RMSEs differ for each k-fold cross-validation subset and range from 1.7 cm up to 17.2 cm. The RMSE results of the improved "water-edge" method are at least six times lower than the RMSE results achieved by the conventional "water-edge" method. The results obtained by new methods are predominantly outperforming existing ones.

It is highly predicted that the roads and parking areas will be extremely congested with vehicles to the point that searching for a novel solution will not be an optional choice for conserving the sustainability rate of the overall humanity's development growth. Such issue could be overcome by developing modified generations of the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles that essentially depend on the Vertical and/or Short Take-Off and Landing (V/STOL) feature to increase the efficiency of landing capabilities on limited-space parking areas. The complexity of integrating an efficient and safe V/STOL feature in such UAM vehicles is notably difficult comparing with the conventional and normal techniques for landing and take-off. The efficient V/STOL feature should be carried out by a complete and collaborative Cyber-Physical System (CPS) processing architecture, such as the CPS-5C architecture. In this paper, we only proposed two CPS-5C physical layers of a V/STOL Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistant System (ALGAS2) processing unit to increase the reliability of the vertical landing mechanism. The proposed V/STOL-ALGAS2 system depends on Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) as the advanced control unit. Furthermore, the proposed ALGAS2 system depends on four symmetric and segregated processing ALGAS2 cores that processing the data in a fully parallel and independent manner to enhance many essential security and safety factors for the futuristic UAM vehicles. The proposed ALGAS2 digital circuits architecture has been designed using MATLAB and VHDL. Also, it has been further analyzed for the implementation and validation tests using the Intel Altera OpenVINO FPGA board. The proposed ALGAS processing unit attained a maximum computational processing performance of about 21.22 Giga Operations per Seconds (GOPS).

Federated edge learning (FEEL) enables privacy-preserving model training through periodic communication between edge devices and the server. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-mounted edge devices are particularly advantageous for FEEL due to their flexibility and mobility in efficient data collection. In UAV-assisted FEEL, sensing, computation, and communication are coupled and compete for limited onboard resources, and UAV deployment also affects sensing and communication performance. Therefore, the joint design of UAV deployment and resource allocation is crucial to achieving the optimal training performance. In this paper, we address the problem of joint UAV deployment design and resource allocation for FEEL via a concrete case study of human motion recognition based on wireless sensing. We first analyze the impact of UAV deployment on the sensing quality and identify a threshold value for the sensing elevation angle that guarantees a satisfactory quality of data samples. Due to the non-ideal sensing channels, we consider the probabilistic sensing model, where the successful sensing probability of each UAV is determined by its position. Then, we derive the upper bound of the FEEL training loss as a function of the sensing probability. Theoretical results suggest that the convergence rate can be improved if UAVs have a uniform successful sensing probability. Based on this analysis, we formulate a training time minimization problem by jointly optimizing UAV deployment, integrated sensing, computation, and communication (ISCC) resources under a desirable optimality gap constraint. To solve this challenging mixed-integer non-convex problem, we apply the alternating optimization technique, and propose the bandwidth, batch size, and position optimization (BBPO) scheme to optimize these three decision variables alternately.