The control problem of a multi-copter swarm, mechanically coupled through a modular lattice structure of connecting rods, is considered in this article. The system's structural elasticity is considered in deriving the system's dynamics. The devised controller is robust against the induced flexibilities, while an inherent adaptation scheme allows for the control of asymmetrical configurations and the transportation of unknown payloads. Certain optimization metrics are introduced for solving the individual agent thrust allocation problem while achieving maximum system flight time, resulting in a platform-independent control implementation. Experimental studies are offered to illustrate the efficiency of the suggested controller under typical flight conditions, increased rod elasticities and payload transportation.

Former Army Ranger and Save Our Allies co-founder Tim Kennedy discusses the trauma experienced by military veterans following the evacuation of Afghanistan on'Fox News Live.' Top U.S. officials held their first in person meeting with the Taliban since a U.S. military strike killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in July. The Biden administration sent CIA deputy director David Cohen to the Qatari capital of Doha on Saturday to meet with a Taliban delegation led by Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban's head of intelligence, Fox News has confirmed. The meeting marks the first time the two sides have met in person since a U.S. drone strike this summer killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in the Taliban controlled Afghanistan capital of Kabul raising questions about the terror group's presence in the country. The Taliban claimed it was unaware that the Al-Qaeda chief was in the country and called the drone strike a "clear violation" of the Doha agreement struck with former President Donald Trump in 2020. AFGHANISTAN ONE YEAR LATER: HOW DAILY LIFE IN THE WAR-TORN COUNTRY HAS CHANGED SINCE THE TALIBAN'S TAKEOVER Taliban fighters escort women march in support of the Taliban government outside Kabul University, Afghanistan.

As far as delivery robots go, Amazon's in-house Scout program seemed like a no-brainer. Few -- if any -- companies stand to gain more from a successful sidewalk deliver service. As noted by Bloomberg earlier this week, however, Amazon is pumping the brakes on the program. In a statement offered to TechCrunch, Amazon notes the company isn't killing the robot altogether, but is instead scaling back the program. This is still a dramatic setback for the program, not to mention the 400 or so humans that were working on it.

Amazon's Scout robot, a small machine that looks like a cooler and can navigate sidewalks, won't be delivering anybody's packages anymore. The e-commerce giant has shut down field testing for the experimental machine and is "reorienting" the program. According to Bloomberg, the Scout team has been disbanded and most of its 400 members will be offered new positions within the company. Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll told Reuters that the company will not be abandoning the project completely. Only a skeleton crew will remain to consider the use of autonomous robot for deliveries, though, and that could mean that it's the end for the cooler-like Scout.

The United States Defense Department (DoD) has added more than a dozen Chinese companies, including the world's largest drone manufacturer, to a blacklist of firms with alleged ties to the Chinese military, clearing the way for restrictions on their business. Shenzhen-based DJI Technology, which is estimated to control more than half of the global market for commercial drones, is among the 13 firms added to the blacklist released by the Pentagon on Wednesday. The blacklist grants the US president authority to impose sanctions against companies deemed to have connections to the Chinese military. The announcement comes after the US Treasury Department last year banned US-based persons from trading shares of DJI and seven other Chinese companies over their alleged involvement in the surveillance of ethnic minority Uighurs in China's far-western region of Xinjiang. BGI Genomics Co, a genetic testing company; CRRC Corp, which manufactures rolling stock; and Zhejiang Dahua Technology, a Hangzhou-based surveillance equipment maker, were also added to the updated list.

Multiple opportunities lie at the intersection of multi-robot systems and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In this work, we investigate the potential of new DLT solutions such as IOTA, for detecting anomalies and byzantine agents in multi-robot systems in a decentralized manner. Traditional blockchain approaches are not applicable to real-world networked and decentralized robotic systems where connectivity conditions are not ideal. To address this, we leverage recent advances in partition-tolerant and byzantine-tolerant collaborative decision-making processes with IOTA smart contracts. We show how our work in vision-based anomaly and change detection can be applied to detecting byzantine agents within multiple robots operating in the same environment. We show that IOTA smart contracts add a low computational overhead while allowing to build trust within the multi-robot system. The proposed approach effectively enables byzantine robot detection based on the comparison of images submitted by the different robots and detection of anomalies and changes between them.

An MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone flies in tests for the Royal Australian Air Force. WASHINGTON -- The US Air Force is set to begin flight experiments with Boeing's MQ-28 Ghost Bat, a combat drone developed for the Australian air force that may help its American counterpart learn how to operate unmanned aircraft alongside fighter jets. Lt. Gen. Clint Hinote, who leads Air Force Futures, told Breaking Defense in a September 20 interview that the service is "getting ready to take delivery" of a drone prototype through the Pentagon's research and engineering office, also known as OSD (R&E). "It might look a lot like an Australian thing," he joked, referring to the Ghost Bat, which first flew in 2021 at Royal Australian Air Force Base Woomera. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cdr. Tim Gorman confirmed that the research and engineering office is involved in development and experimentation efforts involving Ghost Bat, saying that "OSD (R&E) continually works with the services to validate technologies that are key to advancing and fielding next generation capabilities."

Killer whales have been caught on camera hunting and eating Great White Sharks for the first time, in an hour-long feeding frenzy. The extraordinary scenes were shot by both helicopter and drone pilots off the coast of South Africa, providing the first direct evidence of orcas preying on sharks. They reveal that the killer whales were attacking at least four sharks for about an hour, and that this unusual predatory behaviour might be spreading in the species. While a short drone video of the attack was released in June, a paper has been released this month analysing the clip plus all the footage taken from the helicopter. Scientists from the Marine Dynamics Academy studied the videos, and analysed drone and cage dive boat survey data before and after these predation events.

We propose TRADE for robust tracking and 3D localization of a moving target in cluttered environments, from UAVs equipped with a single camera. Ultimately TRADE enables 3d-aware target following. Tracking-by-detection approaches are vulnerable to target switching, especially between similar objects. Thus, TRADE predicts and incorporates the target 3D trajectory to select the right target from the tracker's response map. Unlike static environments, depth estimation of a moving target from a single camera is a ill-posed problem. Therefore we propose a novel 3D localization method for ground targets on complex terrain. It reasons about scene geometry by combining ground plane segmentation, depth-from-motion and single-image depth estimation. The benefits of using TRADE are demonstrated as tracking robustness and depth accuracy on several dynamic scenes simulated in this work. Additionally, we demonstrate autonomous target following using a thermal camera by running TRADE on a quadcopter's board computer.

Building upon the theory of Kalman Filtering on Lie Groups, this paper describes an Extended Kalman Filter and Smoother for Loosely Coupled Integration of GNSS/INS tailored for post-processing applications. The approach employs a dynamic model on a matrix Lie Group that aggregates position, velocity, attitude, and the IMU biases as a single element of a Lie group. The development was motivated by a drone-borne Differential Interferometric SAR (DinSAR) application, which requires high-precision navigation information for short-flight missions using low-cost MEMS sensors. The filter and the Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) smoother are both implemented and validated. The paper also presents a novel algorithm to initialize the heading value as an alternative to gyro-compassing or magnetometer-based alignments. The Mahalanobis Distance and the $\chi^2$-test are employed during the filter update step to address the practical issue of outlier rejection for the GNSS measurements. The paper uses synthetic data to compare classic navigation schemes based on multiplicative quaternions and Euler angles. Finally, real data experiments demonstrate that the Kalman Filter based on Lie Groups performs better DinSAR processing than state-of-the-art commercial software.