In that case, the Navy said it spotted an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval support ship towing a Saildrone Explorer. The American seamen told the Iranians that the drone was U.S. government property and asked for it back. With a U.S. Fifth Fleet MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter hovering above, the Iranians disconnected the towing line they had attached to that drone and eventually departed the area, according to a U.S. Navy release at the time. The Navy resumed operations "without incident," the release said. The United States and Iran often tangle in the Persian Gulf -- which the United States calls the Arabian Gulf -- and in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

Iran's navy has released two American surface drones hours after seizing them in the Red Sea, accusing the unmanned vessels of jeopardising maritime safety, Iranian state television reports, in the second such incident this week. "The [Iranian navy] frigate Jamaran seized the two vessels on Thursday to prevent any possible accident after issuing warnings to the US fleet. After international shipping lanes were secured, the two vessels were released in a safe area," the state TV reported on Friday. Footage appeared to show more than a dozen Iranian navy personnel pushing two drones into the sea from the deck of their vessel – the latest maritime incident involving the United States Navy's new drone fleet in the Middle East as negotiations over Tehran's nuclear deal with the world powers hang in the balance. The state TV said an Iranian naval flotilla found "several unmanned spying vessels abandoned in the international maritime routes" and "after warning an American destroyer twice, seized the two drone vessels to prevent possible accidents".

Whatever I called it, it was going to be big. It was the pitch for my new startup, a company that promised to deliver one of the world's most popular resources in the most high-tech way imaginable: an on-demand drone delivery service for bottled water. In my mind I was already picking out my Gulfstream private jet, bumping fists with Apple's Tim Cook, and staging hostile takeovers of Twitter. I just needed to convince a panel of venture capitalists that I (and they) were onto a good thing. There were three VCs in total.

Taiwan's decision to shoot down a drone off the Chinese coast that flew over a Taiwanese-controlled island was the most "appropriate" action to take after repeated warnings, Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang said. On Thursday, Taiwan's military shot down the first unidentified civilian drone that entered its airspace near the outlying Kinmen islands that sit next door to China's Xiamen city. The drone was shot down after entering restricted airspace near the tiny Shiyu (Lion) islet, and crashed into the sea, according to Taiwan's military. Speaking to reporters on Friday, Su said Taiwan had repeatedly issued warnings and "asked them not to encroach on our doorstep". "They repeatedly ignored our warnings to leave and we had no choice but to exercise self-defence and shoot. This is the most appropriate reaction after repeated restraint and warnings," he said.

TAIPEI – Taiwan's shooting down of a drone that buzzed a Taiwanese-controlled island off the Chinese coast was the most "appropriate" thing to do after repeated warnings, and China should exercise restraint, Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang said Friday. Taiwan's military for the first time shot down an unidentified civilian drone that entered its airspace near an islet close to the Chinese city of Xiamen on Thursday, after the government vowed to take tough measures to deal with an increase in such intrusions. 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 support page.

Taipei, Taiwan – Taiwan's military has said it shot down an unidentified civilian drone over the outlying island of Kinmen amid a continuing increase in Chinese military activity around the island since last month's controversial visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The drone, which was shot down on Thursday, is the first to be hit following a warning from Taiwan that it would use live ammunition against drones. The threat came after a video of Taiwanese soldiers throwing rocks at a Chinese drone went viral. Drone flights have reportedly escalated near Kinmen, which is located a few kilometres off the coast of China, and around the Matsu Islands in the East China Sea. The decision to fire on Chinese drones is a departure for Taiwan's military, said Yen-Chi Hsu, an assistant researcher at Taiwan's Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies.

Fox News host Bret Baier analyzes China's ambitions for agriculture dominance as it competes with the U.S. on Wednesday's'Special Report.' An unidentified civilian drone was shot down by the Taiwanese military Thursday after its entered its airspace by flying over one of Taipei's smallest islands which sits just a couple miles from mainland China. The drone reportedly flew over the waters of Shiyu Islet, also referred to as Lion Islet, which houses a small contingent of stationed Taiwanese military personnel. The incident comes as tensions between Taiwan and China continue to mount following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei last month. Shiyu, or Lion Islet, which is part of Kinmen county, one of Taiwan's offshore islands, is seen in front of China's Xiamen, on Lieyu island, Kinmen county, Taiwan Aug. 20, 2018.

Taiwan downed a civilian drone after weeks of complaints about incursions by unmanned aerial vehicles from China, a sign Taipei is pushing back against Beijing's efforts to encroach on its territory. Taiwanese troops shot the drone down near Kinmen Island around noon Thursday after attempts to repel it failed, according to a statement from the garrison on the Taipei-held outpost just off China. 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 support page.

In this work, we propose a framework for energy-efficient trajectory design of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based portable access point (PAP) deployed to serve a set of ground nodes (GNs). In addition to the PAP and GNs, the system consists of a set of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) mounted on man-made structures to increase the number of bits transmitted per Joule of energy consumed measured as the global energy efficiency (GEE). The GEE trajectory for the PAP is designed by considering the UAV propulsion energy consumption and the Peukert effect of the PAP battery, which represents an accurate battery discharge profile as a non-linear function of the UAV power consumption profile. The GEE trajectory design problem is solved in two phases: in the first, a path for the PAP and feasible positions for the IRS modules are found using a multi-tier circle packing method, and the required IRS phase shift values are calculated using an alternate optimization method that considers the interdependence between the amplitude and phase responses of an IRS element; in the second phase, the PAP flying velocity and user scheduling are calculated using a novel multilap trajectory design algorithm. Numerical evaluations show that: neglecting the Peukert effect overestimates the available flight time of the PAP; after a certain threshold, increasing the battery size reduces the available flight time of the PAP; the presence of IRS modules improves the GEE of the system compared to other baseline scenarios; the multi-lap trajectory saves more energy compared to a single-lap trajectory developed using a combination of sequential convex programming and Dinkelbach algorithm.

Planning a time-optimal trajectory for aerial robots is critical in many drone applications, such as rescue missions and package delivery, which have been widely researched in recent years. However, it still involves several challenges, particularly when it comes to incorporating special task requirements into the planning as well as the aerial robot's dynamics. In this work, we study a case where an aerial manipulator shall hand over a parcel from a moving mobile robot in a time-optimal manner. Rather than setting up the approach trajectory manually, which makes it difficult to determine the optimal total travel time to accomplish the desired task within dynamic limits, we propose an optimization framework, which combines discrete mechanics and complementarity constraints (DMCC) together. In the proposed framework, the system dynamics is constrained with the discrete variational Lagrangian mechanics that provides reliable estimation results also according to our experiments. The handover opportunities are automatically determined and arranged based on the desired complementarity constraints. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is verified with numerical simulations and hardware experiments with our self-designed aerial manipulators.