The documents also include forms that local police officers can use to submit a photo to the FBI's Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation (FACE) Services Unit, which then runs it through a facial recognition search and returns possible matches. Officers can use the form to request the photos also be run through a biometric database of foreign citizens and combatants run by the Defense Department and the passport and visa photos managed by the State Department, the documents show.

WASHINGTON – Ukraine has broadened a request for controversial cluster bombs from the United States to include a weapon that it wants to cannibalize to drop the anti-armor bomblets it contains on Russian forces from drones, according to two U.S. lawmakers. Kyiv has urged members of Congress to press the White House to approve sending the weapons but it is by no means certain that the Biden administration will sign off on that. Cluster munitions, banned by more than 120 countries, normally release large numbers of smaller bomblets that can kill indiscriminately over a wide area, threatening civilians. Ukraine is seeking the MK-20, an air-delivered cluster bomb, to release its individual explosives from drones, said U.S. Representatives Jason Crow and Adam Smith, who both serve on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. That is in addition to 155 mm artillery cluster shells that Ukraine already has requested, they said.

Fast moving but power hungry unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can recharge on slow-moving unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to survey large areas in an effective and efficient manner. In order to solve this computationally challenging problem in a reasonable time, we created a two-level optimization heuristics. At the outer level, the UGV route is parameterized by few free parameters and at the inner level, the UAV route is solved by formulating and solving a vehicle routing problem with capacity constraints, time windows, and dropped visits. The UGV free parameters need to be optimized judiciously in order to create high quality solutions. We explore two methods for tuning the free UGV parameters: (1) a genetic algorithm, and (2) Asynchronous Multi-agent architecture (Ateams). The A-teams uses multiple agents to create, improve, and destroy solutions. The parallel asynchronous architecture enables A-teams to quickly optimize the parameters. Our results on test cases show that the A-teams produces similar solutions as genetic algorithm but with a speed up of 2-3 times.

Large-scale UAV switching formation tracking control has been widely applied in many fields such as search and rescue, cooperative transportation, and UAV light shows. In order to optimize the control performance and reduce the computational burden of the system, this study proposes an event-triggered optimal formation tracking controller for discrete-time large-scale UAV systems (UASs). And an optimal decision - optimal control framework is completed by introducing the Hungarian algorithm and actor-critic neural networks (NNs) implementation. Finally, a large-scale mixed reality experimental platform is built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which includes large-scale virtual UAV nodes and limited physical UAV nodes. This compensates for the limitations of the experimental field and equipment in realworld scenario, ensures the experimental safety, significantly reduces the experimental cost, and is suitable for realizing largescale UAV formation light shows.

Benefitting from UAVs' characteristics of flexible deployment and controllable movement in 3D space, odor source localization with multiple UAVs has been a hot research area in recent years. Considering the limited resources and insufficient battery capacities of UAVs, it is necessary to fast locate the odor source with low-complexity computation and minimal interaction under complicated environmental states. To this end, we propose a multi-UAV collaboration based odor source localization (\textit{MUC-OSL}) method, where source estimation and UAV navigation are iteratively performed, aiming to accelerate the searching process and reduce the resource consumption of UAVs. Specifically, in the source estimation phase, we present a collaborative particle filter algorithm on the basis of UAVs' cognitive difference and Gaussian fitting to improve source estimation accuracy. In the following navigation phase, an adaptive path planning algorithm is designed based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to distributedly determine the subsequent flying direction and moving steps of each UAV. The results of experiments conducted on two simulation platforms demonstrate that \textit{MUC-OSL} outperforms existing efforts in terms of mean search time and success rate, and effectively reduces the resource consumption of UAVs.

This paper presents a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) scheme for proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration in 3D Human Pose Estimation in dynamic human crowds. Traditional fixed-viewpoint multi-camera solutions for human motion capture (MoCap) are limited in capture space and susceptible to dynamic occlusions. Active camera approaches proactively control camera poses to find optimal viewpoints for 3D reconstruction. However, current methods still face challenges with credit assignment and environment dynamics. To address these issues, our proposed method introduces a novel Collaborative Triangulation Contribution Reward (CTCR) that improves convergence and alleviates multi-agent credit assignment issues resulting from using 3D reconstruction accuracy as the shared reward. Additionally, we jointly train our model with multiple world dynamics learning tasks to better capture environment dynamics and encourage anticipatory behaviors for occlusion avoidance. We evaluate our proposed method in four photo-realistic UE4 environments to ensure validity and generalizability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms fixed and active baselines in various scenarios with different numbers of cameras and humans. Figure 1: Left: Two critical challenges in fixed camera approaches. Right: Three active cameras collaborate to best reconstruct the 3D pose of the target (marked in). Marker-less motion capture (MoCap) has broad applications in many areas such as cinematography, medical research, virtual reality (VR), sports, and etc. Their successes can be partly attributed to recent developments in 3D Human pose estimation (HPE) techniques (Tu et al., 2020; Iskakov et al., 2019; Jafarian et al., 2019; Pavlakos et al., 2017b; Lin & Lee, 2021b). A straightforward implementation to solve multi-views 3D HPE is to use fixed cameras. Although being a convenient solution, it is less effective against dynamic occlusions. Moreover, fixed camera solutions confine tracking targets within a constrained space, therefore less applicable to outdoor MoCap. On the contrary, active cameras (Luo et al., 2018; 2019; Zhong et al., 2018a; 2019) such as ones mounted on drones can maneuver proactively against incoming occlusions. Owing to its remarkable flexibility, the active approach has thus attracted overwhelming interest (Tallamraju et al., 2020; Ho et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2017; Kiciroglu et al., 2019; Saini et al., 2022; Cheng et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2021).

This article proposes a visual inertial navigation algorithm intended to diminish the horizontal position drift experienced by autonomous fixed wing UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles) in the absence of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals. In addition to accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, the proposed navigation filter relies on the accurate incremental displacement outputs generated by a VO (Visual Odometry) system, denoted here as a Virtual Vision Sensor or VVS, which relies on images of the Earth surface taken by an onboard camera and is itself assisted by the filter inertial estimations. Although not a full replacement for a GNSS receiver since its position observations are relative instead of absolute, the proposed system enables major reductions in the GNSS-Denied attitude and position estimation errors. In order to minimize the accumulation of errors in the absence of absolute observations, the filter is implemented in the manifold of rigid body rotations or SO(3). Stochastic high fidelity simulations of two representative scenarios involving the loss of GNSS signals are employed to evaluate the results. The authors release the C++ implementation of both the visual inertial navigation filter and the high fidelity simulation as open-source software [1].

Vasyl Bilous's last name means "white mustache." His actual mustache is dark brown with a hint of gray. He's worn one since high school. In a picture that he took on the first day of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vasyl has a chevron mustache, a neat barbershop cut--close on the sides, paintbrush-thick on top. At the time, he was an assistant professor of forensics at the National Law University, in Kharkiv, and a lawyer in private practice.

This paper presents a self-contained system for the robust utilization of aerial robots in the autonomous exploration of cave environments to help human explorers, first responders, and speleologists. The proposed system is generally applicable to an arbitrary exploration task within an unknown and unstructured subterranean environment and interconnects crucial robotic subsystems to provide full autonomy of the robots. Such subsystems primarily include mapping, path and trajectory planning, localization, control, and decision making. Due to the diversity, complexity, and structural uncertainty of natural cave environments, the proposed system allows for the possible use of any arbitrary exploration strategy for a single robot, as well as for a cooperating team. A multi-robot cooperation strategy that maximizes the limited flight time of each aerial robot is proposed for exploration and search & rescue scenarios where the homing of all deployed robots back to an initial location is not required The entire system is validated in a comprehensive experimental analysis comprising of hours of flight time in a real-world cave environment, as well as by hundreds of hours within a state-of-the-art virtual testbed that was developed for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge robotic competition. Among others, experimental results include multiple real-world exploration flights traveling over 470 meters on a single battery in a demanding unknown cave environment.

This paper presents a new Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation to find optimal solutions to the problem. The paper also proposes a new heuristic called the multi-trip algorithm for the problem whose solutions are compared against solutions of heuristics from literature and the optimal solutions obtained from the MILP formulation by testing them on both benchmark instances and real-world instances generated from road maps. Results show that the proposed heuristic was able to solve all the instances and produce better solutions than heuristics from the literature on 37 of 39 total instances. Due to the high requirement of memory and compute power, the Gurobi optimizer used for solving the MILP formulation, although it produced optimal solutions, was only able to solve benchmark instances but not real-world instances.