An Amazon drone sparked an acres-wide fire last summer when it crashed in eastern Oregon during a test flight, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report. The drone's motors failed during the flight in June, the report said, causing it to plummet 160 feet to the ground. A video referenced in the report shows the drone "tumbling in uncontrolled free fall until it contacted the ground," the report said. An "intense lithium battery fire quickly consumed the aircraft," and the fire soon spread to the field where the drone had crash-landed, the report added. "Several acres of wheat stubble field were soon on fire," it said.

The idea of a drone superhighway may sound like a concept from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But it could soon become a reality in England, with the submission of plans to build a network across the Midlands and the Southeast. A consortium led by software provider Altitude Angel has submitted plans for a 165-mile-long superhighway network dubbed Project Skyway, connecting airspace above cities including Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby. If approved, the network could potentially then be extended to Southampton on the south coast and Ipswich on the east coast. The group hopes the superhighway will'unlock the huge potential offered by unmanned aerial vehicles,' with a decision from the government on whether to green light the project expected in the coming weeks.

A team of researchers at the University of South Australia has reverse engineered the visual systems of hoverflies to detect drones from nearly four kilometers away. The autonomous systems experts at the university worked alongside others at Flinders University and defense company Midspar Systems.

John Herbst expresses offense at American reluctance to provide MiGs to Ukraine on'Your World.' This is a rush transcript from "Your World," March 18, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: All right, Vladimir Putin defending his invasion of Ukraine and maybe wincing at all the global notoriety the Ukrainian president is getting, when he never leaves Ukraine, talking to one major legislative body after another of the greatest powers on Earth, as Vladimir Putin tries to explain to a packed crowd in a Moscow stadium that he means no harm, that he is doing good, that he is fighting the good fight, even as that good fight is turning awfully deadly and getting awfully close to a NATO country. In Lviv today, in the western part of the country, a mere 40 miles from the Polish border, the missiles were flying and people were dying. MIKE TOBIN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Neil, as you mentioned, for the first time, the -- first time in several days, the relative peace of the western part of the country was shattered, as cruise missiles rained down here perilously close to NATO's eastern flank. What they were after was the Lviv state aircraft repair. What that facility does is customize MiG-29s, so they can be used by the Ukrainian air force. Maxim Kozytskyy, the regional administrator of Lviv says the airstrikes were launched from long-range bombers over the Black Sea. Six of the missiles were launched. Four of them got through. Two of them were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses. The Ukrainian air force says one of the reasons the cruisers was way able to get through is because they flew so low. They are the Russian X-55s, with a price tag of about a million apiece. South of here, the town of Mariupol, the situation is quite desperate. You know that theater that was being used as a bomb shelter took a direct hit from a Russian aircraft.

Anticipate massive issues to come back out of this newest operation from telecom big Verizon. A Verizon lengthy vary drone challenge is ready to advance ongoing testing -- this time on the Pendleton Unmanned Aerial Methods Vary. The drone vary in Pendleton, Oregon, is certainly one of only a small handful of Federal Aviation Administration-designated check ranges, and is positioned within the northeast nook of the state of Oregon. Verizon's drone arm, Skyward, relies in Portland, Oregon, which is a roughly 3-hour drive from Pendleton. On the Pendleton drone vary, Verizon Robotics (which is a division of the corporate most famously recognized for offering you with cell service) will check numerous proof-of-concept capabilities primarily round lengthy vary robotics.

You might soon see DJI's drones flying in particularly rough conditions. DJI has unveiled the Matrice 30 (aka M30), an enterprise-class drone with IP55 dust and water resistance that lets it fly in heavy rain, strong wind and even icy situations. It can fly to altitudes as high as 22,965ft above sea level (with the right propellers) and survive temperatures between -4F and 122F, too. Even the included RC Plus controller can handle a downpour thanks to an IP54-rated body. The M30 can also fold with a button press.

Energy giant Saudi Aramco says its 2021 net profit soared by more than 120 percent due to higher crude oil prices, as global economic growth recovered from a pandemic induced downturn. The announcement came on Sunday hours after Yemen's Houthi rebels – against whom Saudi Arabia leads a military coalition – targeted several locations, including Aramco facilities, in cross-border armed drone attacks. Aramco, Saudi Arabia's cash cow, did not say if the attacks caused any damage. "Aramco's net income increased by 124 percent to $110bn in 2021, compared to $49bn in 2020," the company said in a statement. Aramco achieved a net income of $88.2bn in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic hit global markets, resulting in huge losses for the oil and aviation sectors, among others.

WASHINGTON – In the first weeks of the first major European land war of the 21st century, the United States has sent tank-killing weapons to Ukrainian forces, but not fighter jets. It is equipping embattled Ukrainian troops with lightweight "kamikaze" attack drones, but not, at least in an obvious way, conducting an aggressive cyberwar to degrade Russia's technological advantage. The White House will commit no U.S. or NATO planes to the skies above Ukraine, a move U.S. officials fear could risk turning a regional war into a global conflagration, but it is providing Ukraine with missiles that could accomplish the same task of destroying Russian aircraft. Such is the tenuous balance the Biden administration has tried to maintain as it seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation. Navigating this path has led to a tangle of decisions and sometimes tortured distinctions when it comes to what kinds of assistance Washington should provide, even as the situation on the ground evolves, pictures of dead civilians circulate around the globe, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine pleads with Congress and President Joe Biden to do more to help.

This paper presents a new reward function that can be used for deep reinforcement learning in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control and navigation problems. The reward function is based on the construction and estimation of the time of simplified trajectories to the target, which are third-order Bezier curves. This reward function can be applied unchanged to solve problems in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional virtual environments. The effectiveness of the reward function was tested in a newly developed virtual environment, namely, a simplified two-dimensional environment describing the dynamics of UAV control and flight, taking into account the forces of thrust, inertia, gravity, and aerodynamic drag. In this formulation, three tasks of UAV control and navigation were successfully solved: UAV flight to a given point in space, avoidance of interception by another UAV, and organization of interception of one UAV by another. The three most relevant modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms, Soft actor-critic, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient were used. All three algorithms performed well, indicating the effectiveness of the selected reward function.

Video shows destroyed blocks of flats and a shopping mall in the besieged Ukrainian port city.