Traditional Fourth of July fireworks displays are being replaced by large swarms of small drones with colored lights. It reduces wildfire risk, pollution and loud noises.

AI's little guys are getting into the Washington influence game. Tech giants and defense contractors have long dominated AI lobbying, seeking both money and favorable rules. And while the largest companies still dominate the debate, pending legislation in Congress aimed at getting ahead of China on innovation, along with proposed bills on data privacy, have caused a spike in lobbying by smaller AI players. A number of companies focused on robotics, drones and self-driving cars are all setting up their own Washington influence machines, positioning them to shape the future of AI policy to their liking. A lot of it is spurred by one major piece of legislation: The Bipartisan Innovation Act, commonly referred to as USICA -- an acronym for its previous title, and its goal to out-innovate China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has waged "economic terrorism" in Ukraine by stocking its farmlands and Black Sea ports full of explosive mines, an official working to de-mine Kyiv told Fox News. "There's 20 plus years of mining work already in Ukraine and for every day of war there's an additional 30 days of mining work that will be required," Cameron Chill, CEO of drone company Draganfly Inc. (DPRO), explained to Fox News upon his return from Kyiv. Chill has been working with Ukraine's emergency management services to deploy drones to efficiently detect buried mines left behind by Russian forces after they withdrew from areas surrounding Kyiv in late March. Draganfly officials help Ukrainians detect landmines after Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv. However, the drone expert said where Russian troops left the explosive devices says a lot about the war Putin is raging against its former Soviet neighbor.

When it launched last year, the DJI Mavic 3 grabbed a lot of headlines with features like a big Four Thirds sensor and a second 7X telephoto camera. But it also drew some criticism for going on sale with key features like ActiveTrack and QuickShots still not available. That meant that I and others couldn't assess those features in our early Mavic 3 reviews. And because of that, potential buyers couldn't get a full picture of the drone before paying up to $5,000 for one. Following three major firmware updates in December, January and May, all the promised functions and more are finally here. Now, I'm going to test them out using the same exact drone to see how well they work.

After the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, an all-too-familiar question emerged: how do we prevent such horror from happening again? A handful of companies have said they have tech solutions that could help. They included Drone firm Axon, which promoted a remotely-operated Taser device to be deployed in schools. EdTech companies, including Impero Software, said their student surveillance services could flag warning signs and help prevent the next attack. The companies are part of a thriving school security industry, one that has grown to $3.1bn in 2021 from just $2.7m in 2017, according to market research firm Omdia.

The Ukrainian army's astute use of drones has been a cornerstone of its defence against the powerful Russian invader, but experts say their role is beginning to fade as heavy artillery takes over. In the early phase of the war, Ukraine's sky seemed filled with the remote-controlled aircraft deployed by President Volodymyr Zelensky's army to spy on the enemy, or go on the attack. During Moscow's early advance on Kyiv "it would have been extremely challenging for Ukraine to block (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's army without drones", said Paul Lushenko, a US Army Lieutenant Colonel and PhD student at Cornell University. "They could compound or exacerbate Putin's strategic and logistical challenges," he told AFP. The Turkish-made Bayraktar drone, known as TB-2, already famous worldwide, added to its stellar reputation during the defence of Ukraine's capital. On top of providing intelligence on Russian movements, drones also helped Ukraine offset much of its air force's weakness compared to that of Russia.

A US drone strike in northwestern Syria killed a Yemeni leader of a local jihadist group affiliated to Al-Qaeda, the US military and a Syrian war monitor said. The strike, carried out on Monday just before midnight (2100 GMT) on the eastern edge of the city of Idlib, took out a man described as a leader of the Hurras al-Deen group. "Abu Hamzah al Yemeni was travelling alone on a motorcycle at the time of the strike," US Central Command said in a statement, adding that an "initial review indicates no civilian casualties". The US is "highly confident" that the strike, carried out from a drone, killed Abu Hamzah al-Yemeni, a US official with knowledge of the operation told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria, confirmed on Tuesday that Yemeni was killed in the attack, saying it was the second such attempt to neutralise him after a similar strike last year.

Precision agriculture is rapidly attracting research to efficiently introduce automation and robotics solutions to support agricultural activities. Robotic navigation in vineyards and orchards offers competitive advantages in autonomously monitoring and easily accessing crops for harvesting, spraying and performing time-consuming necessary tasks. Nowadays, autonomous navigation algorithms exploit expensive sensors which also require heavy computational cost for data processing. Nonetheless, vineyard rows represent a challenging outdoor scenario where GPS and Visual Odometry techniques often struggle to provide reliable positioning information. In this work, we combine Edge AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning to propose a cutting-edge lightweight solution to tackle the problem of autonomous vineyard navigation without exploiting precise localization data and overcoming task-tailored algorithms with a flexible learning-based approach. We train an end-to-end sensorimotor agent which directly maps noisy depth images and position-agnostic robot state information to velocity commands and guides the robot to the end of a row, continuously adjusting its heading for a collision-free central trajectory. Our extensive experimentation in realistic simulated vineyards demonstrates the effectiveness of our solution and the generalization capabilities of our agent.

Flying robots are usually rather delicate and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision, while high complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-resilient flying robots. Inspired by arthropods' exoskeletons, we design a simple, open source, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with soft joints that can withstand high-velocity impacts. With an exoskeleton, the protective shell becomes part of the main robot structure, thereby minimizing its loss in payload capacity. Our design is simple to build and customize using cheap components (e.g. bamboo skewers) and consumer-grade 3D printers. The result is CogniFly, a sub-250g autonomous quadcopter that survives multiple collisions at speeds up to 7m/s. In addition to its collision-resiliency, CogniFly is easy to program using Python or Buzz, carries sensors that allow it to fly for approx. 17min without the need of GPS or an external motion capture system, has enough computing power to run deep neural network models on-board and was designed to facilitate integration with an automated battery swapping system. This structure becomes an ideal platform for high-risk activities (such as flying in a cluttered environment or reinforcement learning training) by dramatically reducing the risks of damaging its own hardware or the environment. Source code, 3D files, instructions and videos are available through the project's website (https://thecognifly.github.io).

Sierra Wireless, a world leading IoT solutions provider, announced that EarthCam, a leading provider of webcam content, technology and services, has selected Sierra Wireless' AirLink XR80 5G router for their world-first multi-network 5G camera system, the StreamCam 5G. Harvard MedTech, a disruptive and innovative company pioneering the use of virtual reality paired with behavioral counseling in the treatment of trauma, has been selected to participate in a study initiated by Johns Hopkins Medicine on the efficacy of using virtual reality technology rather than general anesthesia for procedural sedation. Under the leadership of Dr. Steven Cohen, Johns Hopkins will lead the multi-center investigation during the 12-month study. AdQuick.com, the top out-of-home (OOH) advertising platform in the world, announces its latest service, AdQuick Analytics Cloud, a first-ever "analytics as a service" for OOH marketers, agencies and media owners to measure the effectiveness of OOH advertising campaigns with near real-time data, no matter how or with whom the OOH media was booked. UScellular and Ericsson announced that they have begun 5G testing at altitude using drone technology.