An "unidentified flying object" that crashed in the Croatian capital Zagreb on Thursday may have been a malfunctioned reconnaissance drone that flew off course from Ukraine, said reports. Images of the wreckage, which appeared to be aircraft parts, lying inside a crater have been making the rounds on social media. Analysis of the wreckage suggests the craft may be a Tu-141 "Strizh" reconnaissance drone from Ukraine, The Drive reported. The drone may have gone haywire before crossing Hungary and crashing in Croatia, which is 350 miles away from Ukraine. However, International Business Times could not independently verify the information.

As the weather gets warmer and spring approaches, many of us will be spending more time outside. If you're looking for a new gadget that you can bring with you on family outings, DJI's Mavic Air 2 could be a good option -- especially now that it's on sale at Amazon. The online retailer has knocked 20 percent off the Fly More combo pack, which includes a bunch of extra things in addition to the drone, bringing the whole thing down to $789. The discount is only good for today, but it allows you to get a plethora of handy accessories essentially for free, since the drone on its own costs $799. Ultimately, you're getting everything you'd need to take the drone with you on your next trip and, if you plan correctly, enough battery power to keep it in the sky for a long time. DJI came out with the Mavic Air 2 in 2020 as a follow-up to the original Mavic Air of 2018.

The war in Ukraine has highlighted two things to Russia and the outside world: that Russia's much-vaunted military revolution has been exaggerated and that Ukraine's resistance to the invasion is total. Russia's military capabilities have been built up in Western eyes, particularly after its modernisation programme in the wake of the 2008 Georgian conflict. New equipment was ordered and training focused on realism as Russia's armed forces were put on a more professional footing. A new doctrine, designed to give the military greater flexibility in responding to a variety of scenarios, was also developed. Russia's new "hybrid" military tactics were highlighted by the relatively bloodless takeover of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, when "grey" operations – those below the threshold of actual conflict – were seen.

Over the past decade, camera technology has made gradual, and significant improvements thanks to the mobile phone industry. This has accelerated multiple industries, including Robotics. Today, Davide Scaramuzza discusses a step-change in camera innovation that has the potential to dramatically accelerate vision-based robotics applications. Davide Scaramuzza deep dives on Event Cameras, which operate fundamentally different from traditional cameras. Instead of sampling every pixel on an imaging sensor at a fixed frequency, the "pixels" on an event camera all operate independently, and each responds to changes in illumination. This technology unlocks a multitude of benefits, including extremely highspeed imaging, removal of the concept of "framerate", removal of data corruption due to having the sun in the sensor, reduced data throughput, and low power consumption. Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile, navigation of micro drones in search-and-rescue applications. Davide Scaramuzza: Hi, thank you. Abate De Mey: So firstly, I'd like to give a little bit of background about why I reached out and invited you to the show today. So over the past few months, I've been working a lot with my team at fluid dev, where we've been building a platform, helping robotics companies scale. And while we were working with one of the companies on that platform, we were digging into a lot of open source VSLAM algorithms. Um, and we just kept running into your name as we were doing research and reading up on this. So I'm super excited to have you on today and I'd love to learn just a little bit more about yourself and what your team is doing.

While these companies take different tacks, both have the potential to catalyze tomorrow's advances in drug discovery, new materials, remedies to climate change, closer analysis of military-drone footage and more. And they are hardly the only ones: Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Oracle Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and others are also in the AI marathon. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Consumers and investors, more focused on spasms in the stock market, may not be paying attention to projects not directly connected to lines of business or quarterly results. But research and development often hatch products that vault beyond a lab's original aims.

Germany-based urban air mobility (UAM) startup Volocopter, which plans to launch fully-electric passenger air taxis and cargo drones around the world in coming years, says it has picked up $170 million as the first tranche of Series E funding to kick off services in "cities like Singapore, Rome, and Paris." With its latest round led by South Korean investor WP Investment, Volocopter has raised $579 million to date. The startup is developing a variety of sustainable mobility solutions – VoloCity, VoloConnect, and VoloDrone – for a commercial launch aimed as soon as 2024. As the only electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) company to have received Design Organization Approval (DOA) from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), Volocopter finds itself in a leading position in a highly attractive emerging market. Volocopter has spectacular investors from around the globe, which puts us in an excellent position to focus on our first-to-certification and first-to-market strategies before we embark on the path to public listing. Notably, the company's new backer, WP Investment, is also entering into a strategic partnership with Volocopter to create a joint venture that will soon bring passenger air taxis to South Korea's cities.

Inventing what the world needs- that is now Edison described the crux of innovation in technology. Big problems represent even bigger opportunities. To quote famous Canadian ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky, who scored many hits in his time, the trick is not to "skate where the puck is," but to "skate where the puck is going." It has come up with the most scalable solutions which can impact business across the world. Whether it is clean energy, robotics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, telemedicine, AI, or cloud education and NUI software, it can solve all the biggest problems confronting mankind. Creating value means coming up with something people will pay for in the real world. Virtual technologies can open up a window of possibilities, given their widespread application.

GIS and Drone Technologies are both powerful tools for assisting people in analyzing the world we inhabit. Whether you are someone with GIS skills looking to add drones to your toolbelt, or a drone pilot who wants to level up their deliverable products, you are in the right place. Both these skills require very similar mindsets, such as an attention to detail, focus and accuracy. If you can do one, you can do the other, so why not do both! This course is best for those who have some familiarity with either GIS concepts or drone mapping, or those that are comfortable in learning new software packages.

Australian drone-based logistics firm Swoop Aero has succeeded in transporting crucial Pfizer vaccines in Malawi. The air supply of the vaccines, which require ultra-cold chain situations, marks a milestone for Malawi, in addition to for Swoop Aero and medical air deliveries usually, showcasing the potential the know-how has to help public well being. Over 17,280 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been efficiently delivered throughout the Southern districts of Malawi thus far, with producers corresponding to AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson making use of the prevailing Swoop Aero drone community to shortly distribute crucial vaccines to distant communities. Swoop Aero intends to ship hundreds extra vaccines as they develop into out there. "The supply of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines underscores the novel worth of bi-directional drone networks in Malawi," mentioned Swoop Aero CEO Eric Peck.

Prepare your drone flight, analyze the resulting data, and prepare professional reports using QGIS. GIS and Drone Technologies are both powerful tools for assisting people in analyzing the world we inhabit. Whether you are someone with GIS skills looking to add drones to your toolbelt, or a drone pilot who wants to level up their deliverable products, you are in the right place. Both these skills require very similar mindsets, such as an attention to detail, focus and accuracy. If you can do one, you can do the other, so why not do both!