Identifying the fault in propellers is important to keep quadrotors operating safely and efficiently. The simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) UAV fault diagnosis methods provide a cost-effective and safe approach to detect the propeller faults. However, due to the gap between simulation and reality, classifiers trained with simulated data usually underperform in real flights. In this work, a new deep neural network (DNN) model is presented to address the above issue. It uses the difference features extracted by deep convolutional neural networks (DDCNN) to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Moreover, a new domain adaptation method is presented to further bring the distribution of the real-flight data closer to that of the simulation data. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve an accuracy of 97.9\% in detecting propeller faults in real flight. Feature visualization was performed to help better understand our DDCNN model.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. military announced Tuesday it shot down a drone believed to have been manufactured by Iran as it was allegedly conducting surveillance over an oil site in northeastern Syria. The drone was taken down at around 2:30 p.m. local time, according to U.S. Central Command. "US forces in Syria engaged and shot down an Iranian-manufactured UAV attempting to conduct reconnaissance of Mission Support Site Conoco, a patrol base in northeast Syria," U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

The tanks and trench warfare in Ukraine may seem old-school, but US experts say the conflict has provided strategic insights into future possible conflicts from the Middle East to Taiwan. They range from the mundane -- the need for bigger weapons stockpiles -- to the high-tech, with Ukraine a proving ground for artificial intelligence and robotic warfare. Ukraine has been a test for "sensor fusion," triangulating diverse sources of information to create a fuller picture of the battlefield, said Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at Columbia University. US firm Palantir has provided Kyiv with artificial intelligence-powered tools that sort through gigabytes of data to help commanders understand the war in real time: Russian troop movements, positions and targets. Drone warfare came of age in Ukraine, but now both sides are roughly matched in capabilities, and armies around the world are catching up.

This work presents a novel, inference-based approach to the distributed and cooperative flocking control of aerial robot swarms. The proposed method stems from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) dynamics by limiting the latent set to the robots' feasible action space, thus preventing any unattainable control inputs from being produced and leading to smooth flocking behavior. By modeling the inter-agent relationships using a pairwise energy function, we show that interacting robot swarms constitute a Markov Random Field. Our algorithm builds on the Mean-Field Approximation and incorporates the collective behavioral rules: cohesion, separation, and velocity alignment. We follow a distributed control scheme and show that our method can control a swarm of UAVs to a formation and velocity consensus with real-time collision avoidance. We validate the proposed method with physical UAVs and high-fidelity simulation experiments.

This work investigates the problem of simultaneous tracking and jamming of a rogue drone in 3D space with a team of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We propose a decentralized estimation, decision and control framework in which a team of UAVs cooperate in order to a) optimally choose their mobility control actions that result in accurate target tracking and b) select the desired transmit power levels which cause uninterrupted radio jamming and thus ultimately disrupt the operation of the rogue drone. The proposed decision and control framework allows the UAVs to reconfigure themselves in 3D space such that the cooperative simultaneous tracking and jamming (CSTJ) objective is achieved; while at the same time ensures that the unwanted inter-UAV jamming interference caused during CSTJ is kept below a specified critical threshold. Finally, we formulate this problem under challenging conditions i.e., uncertain dynamics, noisy measurements and false alarms. Extensive simulation experiments illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.

American defense officials on Tuesday sought to dispel any doubt that Iran is supplying drones for Russia's war in Ukraine, releasing photos and analysis of unmanned aircraft deployed in the conflict to demonstrate Tehran's involvement. During a briefing in London, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency displayed photos of drones that attacked Ukraine alongside images of those previously traced to Iran. A comparison of design details such as tail fins, nose cones and landing gear shows that the weapons used in Ukraine are "indistinguishable" from Shahed-131 and -136 attack drones and Mohajer 6 unmanned aerial vehicles used in the Middle East. The effort to "show the homework'' is intended to help persuade governments or international agencies of Tehran's involvement. Iran has said it supplied a "small number" of drones to Russia before the invasion of Ukraine but has denied providing any more since troops crossed the border last February. The evidence proves otherwise, an official from the Defense Intelligence Agency said while speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. "Iran is a partner in the conflict with Russia,'' the official said.

Paolucci co-authored "Oligarchi" or "Oligarchs" in English and "How Putin's Friends are Buying Italy." You will meet people in Italy who are actually pro-Russia. Or at least ready to lay some blame on the United States and/or NATO for provoking Vladimir Putin to attack Ukraine, as if somehow absolving the Russian president. Largely, however, such positions are expressed privately. So when former four-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, with cameras rolling before him, described his "very, very, very negative view" of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend, he set off a firestorm on this side of the Atlantic.

In 1992, Matt Moneymaker had an experience that would change his life. Some local farmers had told him about a number of mysterious sightings deep in the forests of Ohio. Without the internet or social media, Moneymaker did what you did back then: He placed classified ads in the hope that these witnesses might come forward and share their story and, crucially, the location where it had happened. "I went to the area where they had seen one, and I found tracks. And we heard their sounds, and I was at that point very, very, very committed to getting some video footage of these things" he told Engadget.

From April, revised traffic laws will allow self-driving delivery robots to navigate streets across Japan. Proponents hope the machines could eventually help elderly people in depopulated rural areas get access to goods, while also addressing a shortage of delivery workers in a country with chronic labor shortages. 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. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this FAQ.

These days, it's hard to go anywhere without encountering artificial intelligence (AI). Predictive text offers to finish our web searches and our text messages. AI learning-based software can produce everything from research papers to poetry, solving complex math equations to writing computer code. AI can be used to write algorithms, collect data on which areas experience the most gun violence and dictate which neighborhoods receive access to vital resources. This year, five students who make up the 2022-24 Lender Center for Social Justice Fellowship Project will set out to investigate how AI weapons systems transform war and surveillance, and they will also analyze how AI accentuates our social and political vulnerabilities to violence.