We propose a context-sensitive grammar for the systematic exploration of the design space of the topology of 3D robots, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles. It defines production rules for adding components to an incomplete design topology modeled over a 3D grid. The rules are local. The grammar is simple, yet capable of modeling most existing UAVs as well as novel ones. It can be easily generalized to other robotic platforms. It can be thought of as a building block for any design exploration and optimization algorithm.

The U.S. Air Force now has the capability to use facial recognition on drones that could target specific people. Special operations forces can use the drones to gather intelligence and to aid in other missions, according to a contract first spotted by New Scientist. It's part of a growing movement to develop automated weaponry that raises legal and ethical questions. The drone software maker, Seattle-based firm RealNetworks, claims the uncrewed craft will use artificial intelligence (AI) to fly itself and discriminate between friend and foe. The company has said that its software can also be used for rescue missions, perimeter protection, and domestic search operations.

The edge computing market is expected to grow from $40.84 million in 2022 to $132.11 million by 2028. This is a compound annual growth rate of 21.8% percent. The use cases for the edge are limitless. Use cases can range from remote field offices operating drone fleets for utility and mining operations to employees working from home and automated manufacturing assembly lines. As this movement to edge computing has unfolded, more non-IT professionals are being asked to manage the technology that is located at the edges that they occupy.

President Biden marked the start of a second year of war in Europe on Friday by announcing billions of dollars in additional military aid for Ukraine, imposing more sanctions on those helping Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and delivering a grim warning about an alliance between Russia and Iran. Just days after making a secret trip to Ukraine's capital, Mr. Biden joined the leaders of the other Group of 7 nations -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain -- in reaffirming his support for the beleaguered country and condemning Russia's invasion a year ago. "A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase the people's love of liberty," Mr. Biden wrote in a statement on Twitter, alluding to Mr. Putin. "Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.

This paper presents an equivariant reinforcement learning framework for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles. Successful training of reinforcement learning often requires numerous interactions with the environments, which hinders its applicability especially when the available computational resources are limited, or when there is no reliable simulation model. We identified an equivariance property of the quadrotor dynamics such that the dimension of the state required in the training is reduced by one, thereby improving the sampling efficiency of reinforcement learning substantially. This is illustrated by numerical examples with popular reinforcement learning techniques of TD3 and SAC.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was designed for competitors to develop and deploy teams of autonomous robots to explore difficult unknown underground environments. Categorised in to human-made tunnels, underground urban infrastructure and natural caves, each of these subdomains had many challenging elements for robot perception, locomotion, navigation and autonomy. These included degraded wireless communication, poor visibility due to smoke, narrow passages and doorways, clutter, uneven ground, slippery and loose terrain, stairs, ledges, overhangs, dripping water, and dynamic obstacles that move to block paths among others. In the Final Event of this challenge held in September 2021, the course consisted of all three subdomains. The task was for the robot team to perform a scavenger hunt for a number of pre-defined artefacts within a limited time frame. Only one human supervisor was allowed to communicate with the robots once they were in the course. Points were scored when accurate detections and their locations were communicated back to the scoring server. A total of 8 teams competed in the finals held at the Mega Cavern in Louisville, KY, USA. This article describes the systems deployed by Team CSIRO Data61 that tied for the top score and won second place at the event.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A drone strike believed to have been carried out by the U.S.-led coalition in northwestern Syria on Friday killed two operatives with an al-Qaida-linked group, Syrian opposition activists said. The two militants were killed while riding a motorcycle near the northern village of Qah, close to the Turkish border, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, and several other activist collectives. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military.

When the war came to Sergiy Sotnychenko's neighborhood in March 2022, he found himself carrying out daily performances for the drones that hummed constantly overhead. Desperate to prove that he wasn't a combatant, he put on an orange hoodie which, out of all the clothing he owned, seemed least likely to be mistaken for military fatigues. He tried to show the drones he was carrying out innocent activities, like planting onions. That March was a nightmarishly violent month for Kyiv's outskirts, including Irpin, where Sotnychenko lives, but there were moments when he allowed himself to feel comforted by the drones flying above. He imagined the Ukrainian army watching his small acts of resistance.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., says Xi Jinping is turning Vladimir Putin into his'junior partner.' Russia is in talks with China to purchase 100 combat drones, according to a new report published just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. had evidence Beijing was weighing lethal aid to Moscow in its war against Ukraine. Der Spiegel reports that Moscow is looking to commission a Chinese manufacturer to mass produce the drones – with a delivery date as early as April. Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy chief Wang Yi during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023. Per the report, Xian Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology, a Chinese drone manufacturer, has said it was prepared to make 100 prototypes of its ZT-180 drone, which carry a 35-50kg warhead. The drones are similar to Iran's Shaheed-136, which Russia has used to kill hundreds of Ukrainians and damage infrastructure.

The ability to efficiently plan and execute search missions in challenging and complex environments during natural and man-made disasters is imperative. In many emergency situations, precise navigation between obstacles and time-efficient searching around 3D structures is essential for finding survivors. In this work we propose an integrated assessment and search planning approach which allows an autonomous UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) agent to plan and execute collision-free search trajectories in 3D environments. More specifically, the proposed search-planning framework aims to integrate and automate the first two phases (i.e., the assessment phase and the search phase) of a traditional search-and-rescue (SAR) mission. In the first stage, termed assessment-planning we aim to find a high-level assessment plan which the UAV agent can execute in order to visit a set of points of interest. The generated plan of this stage guides the UAV to fly over the objects of interest thus providing a first assessment of the situation at hand. In the second stage, termed search-planning, the UAV trajectory is further fine-tuned to allow the UAV to search in 3D (i.e., across all faces) the objects of interest for survivors. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated through extensive simulation analysis.