The CEO of Turkey's Baykar, which makes the drones being widely used by Ukraine against Russian forces, has ruled out supplying the Bayraktar TB2 to Moscow. In an interview with CNN on Monday, Haluk Bayraktar said Ukraine is "under very heavy aggression and disproportionate attacks". When pressed by CNN presenter Julia Chatterley, who repeatedly asked, "Would you supply Russia?", Bayraktar responded: "We have not delivered or supplied them with anything, [and] we will as well never do such a thing because we support Ukraine, support its sovereignty, its resistance for its independence." Bayraktar said he is proud that Bayraktar TB2 has become one of the symbols of the Ukrainian resistance against Russia. "It's very touching," he said, hailing "years of cooperation" and "strong bonds" with Ukraine.

Due to the current COVID-19 virus, which has already been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), we are witnessing the greatest pandemic of the decade. Millions of people are being infected, resulting in thousands of deaths every day across the globe. Even it was difficult for the best healthcare-providing countries could not handle the pandemic because of the strain of treating thousands of patients at a time. The count of infections and deaths is increasing at an alarming rate because of the spread of the virus. We believe that innovative technologies could help reduce pandemics to a certain extent until we find a definite solution from the medical field to handle and treat such pandemic situations. Technology innovation has the potential to introduce new technologies that could support people and society during these difficult times. Therefore, this paper proposes the idea of using drones as a companion to tackle current and future pandemics. Our COROID drone is based on the principle of crowdsourcing sensors data of the public's smart devices, which can correlate the reading of the infrared cameras equipped on the COROID drones. To the best of our knowledge, this concept has yet to be investigated either as a concept or as a product. Therefore, we believe that the COROID drone is innovative and has a huge potential to tackle COVID-19 and future pandemics.

This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight environment presentation method and an efficient cooperative exploration strategy. For lower bandwidth, each robot utilizes specific polytopes to maintains free space and super frontier information (SFI) as the source for exploration decision-making. To reduce repeated exploration, we develop a mission-based protocol that drives robots to share collected information in stable rendezvous. We also design a complete path planning scheme for both centralized and decentralized cases. To validate that our framework is practical and generic, we present an extensive benchmark and deploy our system into multi-UGV and multi-UAV platforms.

Speaking from the Farnborough Airshow, Annabel Flores, Raytheon's president of electronic warfare systems, told the BBC some of the additional interest and demand for the technology was as a result of how drones had been used in the conflict.

Iran has supplied drone technology to Hezbollah in Lebanon; to Houthi rebels in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and to Shiite militias in Iraq, which have carried out strikes against Iraqi and American troops. "Russia is turning to an ally that has flown drones in complex environments in large numbers," said Samuel Bendett, a specialist on Russian drones and other weapons at CNA, a research and analysis organization in Arlington, Va. "While the Russians still have drones, they don't have all the types they need." Russia's deal with Iran underscores the ever-growing importance of drones to modern warfare, not just in insurgencies or counterterrorism operations but also in classic conventional-style conflicts. In a contested battlefield like Ukraine where dueling artillery barrages are the deciding factors if an offensive fails or succeeds, drones play a pivotal role.

While a'drone superhighway' may sound like the stuff of science fiction, the green light has been given for one to be developed in the UK. The 165 mile (265 km) long superhighway network, dubbed Project Skyway, has today been given the go-ahead from the government. It will involve a number of ground-based sensors being installed which will guide the connected drones safely through'corridors' to their destinations. The network will connect airspace above cities including Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby. The plans were proposed by a consortium led by software provider Altitude Angel alongside BT.

As you may have noticed, I'm pretty obsessed with covering the best A.I. startups. Check out my posts on Prospectus. On this Newsletter I've taken special care to talk about A.I. being used in war and national security and will continue to do so. Recently, I was alarmed about a startup that wants to use Drones equipped with Tasers to help monitor for school shootings. Curiously most of his ethics board resigned in protest.

In this paper, we address the vision-based detection and tracking problems of multiple aerial vehicles using a single camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as well as the corresponding perception consensus problem (i.e., uniqueness and identical IDs across all observing agents). We design several vision-based decentralized Bayesian multi-tracking filtering strategies to resolve the association between the incoming unsorted measurements obtained by a visual detector algorithm and the tracked agents. We compare their accuracy in different operating conditions as well as their scalability according to the number of agents in the team. This analysis provides useful insights about the most appropriate design choice for the given task. We further show that the proposed perception and inference pipeline which includes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) as visual target detector is lightweight and capable of concurrently running control and planning with Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constrained robots on-board. Experimental results show the effective tracking of multiple drones in various challenging scenarios such as heavy occlusions.

Russian officials have recently visited Iran twice to assess combat drones, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Saturday, as Moscow looks to bolster its arsenal for the war in Ukraine. Iran's military hosted two showcases for Russian delegations at the Kashan airfield, on June 8 and again on July 5, Sullivan said in a statement. Satellite imagery released by the White House shows Shahed-191 and Shahed-129 drones at or flying near the site. The White House said earlier this week that it believes Moscow is looking to acquire hundreds of the drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) -- and that Tehran is set to train Russian forces to use them as soon as this month. "We assess an official Russian delegation recently received a showcase of Iranian attack-capable UAVs," Sullivan said Saturday.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. says Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield multiple times in recent weeks to view attack-capable drones it is looking to obtain for its attack against Ukraine. Iran showed the drones to Russian officials at Kashan Airfield on June 8 and July 15, the White House said. The Biden administration has published satellite imagery showing Shahed-191 and Shahed-129 drones flying at the airfield at the same time a Russian delegation transport plane was on the ground.