Mainebiz recently conducted a reader poll asking, "What's the biggest challenge with the labor shortage?" Among the four answer choices of (1) wage pressure, (2) finding qualified workers, (3) lack of workforce housing, and (4) retaining good employees, the overwhelming number of votes went to No. 2; finding qualified workers. As any small business owner knows, all the above issues actively contribute to the ongoing labor shortage, as well as others not listed, including a new examination of lifestyle and career choices. I learned long ago it's not good enough to just list problems without offering solutions, so here are some short and long-term ideas being tried around the country to help alleviate the situation. While companies can choose to adapt or work towards the above, they can also take a hard look at inefficiencies and turn to software technology to handle time-intensive administrative tasks, or automate inventory management and outsource where possible.

Amazon recently stopped testing its Scout sidewalk delivery robot and made other decisions indicating that it's scaling back its experimental projects. Looks like its delivery drone development for Prime Air is still going strong, though, because the e-commerce giant has just released a sneak peek of its next-gen machine. The MK30 was designed to be lighter than the current model dubbed MK27-2. It will still have six rotors like its predecessor, based on the images the e-commerce giant has shared, except it no longer has a full hexagonal frame. The e-commerce giant is slated to start drone deliveries in College Station, Texas and Lockeford, California later this year to help it gauge people's interest in getting their orders flown over and dropped into their yards.

Fox News captured drone footage of trash and clothing discarded along a common crossing point for illegal immigrants near Normandy, Texas. Thousands of migrants have streamed across the border near Normandy, Texas, in recent weeks, leaving behind discarded trash and clothing in their wake. Drone footage of a frequent crossing point along the Rio Grande shows piles of discarded items at the end of an eroded walking trail. Similar scenes can be observed at the border in Eagle Pass and the surrounding area. Trash and clothing discarded along the Rio Grande in Normandy, Texas.

Landing is a challenging part of autonomous drone flight and a great research opportunity. This PhD proposes to improve on fiducial autonomous landing algorithms by making them more flexible. Further, it leverages its location, Iceland, to develop a method for landing on lava flows in cooperation with analog Mars exploration missions taking place in Iceland now - and potentially for future Mars landings.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is a promising new area for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The current practice of design of cyber-physical systems uses the digital twin methodology, wherein the actual physical design is preceded by building detailed models that can be evaluated by physics simulation models. These physics models are often slow and the manual design process often relies on exploring near-by variations of existing designs. AI holds the promise of breaking these design silos and increasing the diversity and performance of designs by accelerating the exploration of the design space. In this paper, we focus on the design of electrical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The high-density batteries and purely electrical propulsion systems have disrupted the space of UAV design, making this domain an ideal target for AI-based design. In this paper, we develop an AI Designer that synthesizes novel UAV designs. Our approach uses a deep transformer model with a novel domain-specific encoding such that we can evaluate the performance of new proposed designs without running expensive flight dynamics models and CAD tools. We demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the overall compute requirements for the design process and accelerates the design space exploration. Finally, we identify future research directions to achieve full-scale deployment of AI-assisted CAD for UAVs.

Precision landing is a remaining challenge in autonomous drone flight. Fiducial markers provide a computationally cheap way for a drone to locate a landing pad and autonomously execute precision landings. However, most work in this field depends on either rigidly-mounted or downward-facing cameras which restrict the drone's ability to detect the marker. We present a method of autonomous landing that uses a gimbal-mounted camera to quickly search for the landing pad by simply spinning in place while tilting the camera up and down, and to continually aim the camera at the landing pad during approach and landing. This method demonstrates successful search, tracking, and landing with 4 of 5 tested fiducial systems on a physical drone with no human intervention. Per fiducial system, we present the distributions of the distances from the drone to the center of the landing pad after each successful landing. We also show representative examples of flight trajectories, marker tracking performance, and control outputs for each channel during the landing. Finally, we discuss qualitative strengths and weaknesses underlying each system.

Amazon built an ecommerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliably--but a new robot called Sparrow could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines. Sparrow is designed to pick out items piled in shelves or bins so they can be packed into orders for shipping to customers. That's one of the most difficult tasks in warehouse robotics because there are so many different objects, each with different shapes, textures, and malleability, that can be piled up haphazardly. Sparrow takes on that challenge by using machine learning and cameras to identify objects piled in a bin and plan how to grab one using a custom gripper with several suction tubes.

Dressed in camouflage uniforms, they immediately pack up and move fearing Russian return fire, trying to hide from Russian surveillance drones and those with weapons. "Now we dominate, they are slowly retreating. The Russians used all [troop] reserves but they could only reach our front line," artillery commander Kosiak, 22, told Al Jazeera. "The situation with drones is complicated. They are flying always, every day and every hour. It was scary only at the beginning of war, now we just do our job. We are used to war," he said.

Asio Technologies is integrating its NavGuard optical navigation systems into the drone platforms of a US customer to enable accurate, autonomous GNSS-free navigation in areas where the GNSS signal is spoofed, jammed, or unavailable. Using cutting-edge machine vision technology, AI, advanced optics, and sensor fusion, NavGuard can be installed on unmanned aerial platforms to enable safe and sustainable 24/7 drone missions under complete GNSS blackout. Designed for a variety of applications, such as defense, homeland security, and infrastructure security, Asio's solution can aid tactical drone missions where payload capacity and flight time are limited, and continuous operation under all conditions is critical. "We are honored to announce that another customer is choosing NavGuard as the product of choice for their platforms," said David Harel, Asio Technologies CEO. "Based on real-time geo-referencing of optical video streams to an on-board geo infrastructure, the NavGuard systems generate low latency accurate positioning throughout the entire mission, enabling operational freedom anytime and anywhere."

Iran's top security official Ali Shamkhani called for dialogue to end the war in Ukraine during a meeting Wednesday in Tehran with his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev. Patrushev later met with President Ebrahim Raisi, who said that "broadening the scope of the war and its escalation are a source of concern for all countries," according to official news agency IRNA. The meetings come after Kiev and its Western allies accused Russia in recent weeks of using Iranian-made drones to carry out attacks in Ukraine. "Iran supports any initiative leading to a ceasefire and peace between Russia and Ukraine based on dialogue," Shamkhani said, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. The Islamic republic was "ready to play a role in ending the war", he added, IRNA reported.