"Star Wars" star Mark Hamill has been appointed as the ambassador of UNITED24, a fundraising platform supporting the "Army of Drones" project for the benefit of Ukraine. The 71-year-old veteran actor, famous for his role as Luke Skywalker in the galactic franchise, was introduced as the ambassador via an online call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Thursday, according to CNN. The president reportedly "expressed his gratitude" toward Hamill, who had been actively showing his support to his home country, which was invaded by Russia earlier this year. "Mark, you have become the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds to support its defenders," Zelenskyy said. "For Ukrainians, this means a lot. As in'Star Wars,' good will triumph over evil, and light will overcome darkness. Hamill responded and said he was "honored" to have such a vital role in this "long and unequal fight" between Russia and Ukraine because the latter needed "continuous additional support." "I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom, and the values of the entire democratic world.

Thousands of residents were left without electricity after a food delivery drone crashed into power lines in Australia. The power company, Energex, had to shut down the network after a crew was called to the incident Thursday in Browns Plains, south of Brisbane. While Energex was able to restore electricity for about 2,000 customers within 45 minutes, 300 remained without power for at least three hours, due to being in close vicinity of the drone crash, ABC News said Friday. Energex spokesman Danny Donald told ABC Radio they had never seen delivery drones hitting the network. "We've never seen these delivery drones hit the network. "This is the first time that I've seen it happen.

While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present an autonomous UAV landing system for landing on a moving platform. In contrast to existing attempts, the proposed system relies only on the camera sensor, and has been designed as lightweight as possible. The proposed system can be deployed on a low power platform as part of the drone payload, whilst being indifferent to any external communication or any other sensors. The system relies on a Neural Network (NN) based controller, for which a target and environment agnostic simulator was created, used in training and testing of the proposed system, via Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Proximal Policy optimization (PPO) to optimally control and steer the drone towards landing on the target. Through real-world testing, the system was evaluated with an average deviation of 15cm from the center of the target, for 40 landing attempts.

The paper presents a novel learning-based sampling strategy that guarantees rejection-free sampling of the free space under both biased and approximately uniform conditions, leveraging multivariate kernel densities. Historical data from past states of a given autonomous system is leveraged to estimate a non-parametric probabilistic description of the domain, which in turn also describes the free space where feasible solutions of the motion planning problem are likely to be found. The tuning parameters of the kernel density estimator, the bandwidth and the kernel, are then used to alter the description of the free space so that no sampled states can fall outside the originally defined space. The proposed method is demonstrated in two real-life case studies: An autonomous surface vessel (2D) and an autonomous drone (3D). Two planning problems are solved, showing that the proposed approximately uniform sampling scheme is capable of guaranteeing rejection-free sampling of the considered workspace. Furthermore, the planning effectiveness of the proposed method is statistically validated using Monte Carlo simulations.

Iran launched cross-border missile and drone strikes that killed nine people in Iraq's Kurdistan region Wednesday after accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic. The September 16 death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of Iran's morality police has sparked a major wave of protests and a crackdown that has left scores of demonstrators dead over the past 12 nights. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent days accused the Iraq-based Kurdish groups of "attacking and infiltrating Iran from the northwest of the country to sow insecurity and riots and spread unrest". After several earlier Iranian cross-border attacks that caused no casualties, a barrage of missiles and drones on Wednesday claimed nine lives and wounded 32, said the regional health minister in Arbil, Saman al-Barazanji, while visiting some off the wounded in a hospital in the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. "There are civilians among the victims", including one of those killed, a senior official of the Kurdistan region earlier told AFP.

Iran has attacked an Iranian-Kurdish opposition group in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, killing nine people and injuring several others, Kurdish officials said. The missile and drone attacks on Wednesday focused on bases in Koya, some 60km (35 miles) east of Erbil, said Soran Nuri – a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. The group, known by the acronym KDPI, is a left-wing armed opposition force that is banned in Iran. Iran's state-run IRNA news agency and broadcaster said Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps ground forces targeted some bases of a separatist group in the north of Iraq with "precision missiles" and a "suicide drone". "This operation will continue with our full determination until the threat is effectively repelled, terrorist groups' bases are dismantled, and the authorities of the Kurdish region assume their obligations and responsibilities," the IRGC said in a statement read on state television. Nine people were killed and 24 wounded, according to Kurdistan Regional Government's health minister, Saman Barazanchi.

Individuals and companies that suffer harm from drones, robots and other products or services equipped with artificial intelligence software will find it easier to sue for compensation under EU draft rules seen by Reuters. The AI Liability Directive, which the European Commission will announce on Wednesday, aims to address the increasing proliferation of AI-enabled products and services and the patchwork of national rules across the 27-country European Union. Victims can sue for compensation for harm to their life, property, health and privacy due to the fault or omission of a provider, developer or user of AI technology or was discriminated in a recruitment process using AI, the draft rules said. The rules seek to lighten the burden of proof on victims by introducing a "presumption of causality," which means victims only need to show that a manufacturer or user's failure to comply with certain requirements caused the harm and then link this to the AI technology in their lawsuit. Under a "right of access to evidence," victims can ask a court to order companies and suppliers to provide information about high-risk AI systems so that they can identify the liable person and find out what went wrong.

In Ukraine's port city of Odessa, residents have recently found themselves hiding not from the thunder of rocket attacks but from the whir of buzzing Iranian drones in the sky. The machines have been playing an important role since Russia invaded seven months ago -- forming part of reconnaissance operations, missile firings or bomb drops. Awakened with a start on Saturday morning by a roar from the sky, Maryna Kondratieva ran to hide in the cellar with her two young children, fearing the worst. "I understand now that everything can change in five minutes," Kondratieva, who lives in a well-to-do part of the city and whose terrace overlooks the Black Sea, told AFP. Odessa -- the'capital' of the southwest and Ukraine's main port -- had seemed largely safe from Moscow, whose troops failed to take it at the beginning of the war.

The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the world's leading trade association for uncrewed vehicle systems, has announced a collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to further commercial cyber methodologies to build a shared standard--like the one used to develop the DIU's Blue UAS "Cleared List." AUVSI's effort is designed to expand the number of vetted Uncrewed Aircraft Systems, or UAS, that meet Congressional and federal agency drone security requirements. "The goal of this new pilot initiative is to extend relevant cyber credentialing across the U.S. industrial base, proactively, streamlining and accelerating capabilities available to the Department of Defense (DoD) and the rest of the U.S. government," said Brian Wynne, AUVSI President and CEO. "We are grateful for DIU's partnership and look forward to working with them to make the US drone industry more resilient and secure." AUVSI efforts will streamline the vetting process and further expand the potential small UAS entrants to the government through its Trusted Cyber Program.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles grow more popular by the day and applications for them are crossing boundaries of science and industry, with everything from aerial photography to package delivery to disaster management benefiting from the technology. But before they become commonplace, there are challenges to be solved to make them reliable and safe. The following paper discusses the challenges associated with the precision landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, including methods for sensing and control and their merits and shortcomings for various applications.