The great promises of neuromorphic sensing and processing for robotics have led researchers and engineers to investigate novel models for robust and reliable control of autonomous robots (navigation, obstacle detection and avoidance, etc.), especially for quadrotors in challenging contexts such as drone racing and aggressive maneuvers. Using spiking neural networks, these models can be run on neuromorphic hardware to benefit from outstanding update rates and high energy efficiency. Yet, low-level controllers are often neglected and remain outside of the neuromorphic loop. Designing low-level neuromorphic controllers is crucial to remove the standard PID, and therefore benefit from all the advantages of closing the neuromorphic loop. In this paper, we propose a parsimonious and adjustable neuromorphic PID controller, endowed with a minimal number of 93 neurons sparsely connected to achieve autonomous, onboard altitude control of a quadrotor equipped with Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chip. We successfully demonstrate the robustness of our proposed network in a set of experiments where the quadrotor is requested to reach a target altitude from take-off. Our results confirm the suitability of such low-level neuromorphic controllers, ultimately with a very high update frequency.

Lara Logan joined Lt. Gen. William Boykin on'Fox News Primetime' to discuss the U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. Logan said the U.S. betrayal of Afghan allies caused a scarcity in intelligence. A 39-year-old doctor in Seattle, Wash., Do remembers hearing how her parents sought to leave Saigon after Vietnam fell to communist rule in 1975 and the American military airlifted out allies in the final hours. It took years for her family to finally get out of the country, after several failed attempts, and make their way to the United States, carrying two sets of clothes a piece and a combined $300. When they finally arrived, she was 9 years old.

Lara Logan joined Lt. Gen. William Boykin on'Fox News Primetime' to discuss the U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. Logan said the U.S. betrayal of Afghan allies caused a scarcity in intelligence. ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for a number of bomings in Jalalabad that it says specifically targeted the Taliban as tensions between the two groups continue to intensify. The Islamic State claimed responsibility through its Amaq News Agency for six explosions caused by improvised explosive devices (IED) on Saturday and Sunday. The explosions killed or injured over 35 Taliban members.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. President Joe Biden supports an investigation into the August drone strike that killed 10 civilians and up to seven children in Afghanistan, the White House said Monday. Explaining during the White House press briefing that Biden was briefed Friday morning regarding the Pentagon's report about the strike, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, "I would say, first, the president's view – and all of our view – is that the loss of any civilian life is a tragedy." Psaki went on to reiterate comments from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie that the drone strike was "done in error," and affirmed that "clearly, the investigation that will continue is something the president broadly supports."

'Outnumbered' panel discusses the multiple crises including the Afghanistan drone strike and border surge that could define Biden's presidency After yet another weekend out of sight, Americans should be wondering if our president even wants the job. Joe Biden's campaign was famous for calling early "lids," that is sending his traveling press home for the day before the day was even half over. Campaigns are normally furiously busy events known for crushing schedules and exhausting programming. His was a mellow affair, mostly done on a video feed from his home. The official excuse was COVID-19 and while it certainly made sense that a then-77 year old man might be concerned about catching the virus and would therefore limit his in-person exposure, it didn't make sense that even his remote events were extremely limited and rare.

'Fox & Friends Weekend' co-host Pete Hegseth reacts to the U.S. drone strike that killed civilians instead of ISIS-K members in Afghanistan. Fox News host Pete Hegseth ripped the Biden administration's failed "over-the-horizon" counterterrorism strategy on "The Faulkner Focus" Monday after the Pentagon admitted August's U.S. drone strike targeting ISIS-K members in Afghanistan killed civilians instead. PETE HEGSETH: I'll give a lot of deference to our military in almost every situation, meaning the intentions of that drone operator, the intentions of those attempting to find ISIS bombers based on whatever intelligence we had, those were righteous intentions, they were attempting to keep Americans there safe. And I don't think there was ever an intent to kill civilians. And I don't put that on Joe Biden or General McKenzie or General Milley.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo weighs in on the Biden administration's handling of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the botched Kabul drone strike. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the "failed" drone strike in Kabul that was aimed at ISIS-K terrorists, after the Pentagon admitted on Friday that the attack instead killed an aid worker and members of his family including seven children. Speaking with Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Pompeo noted that "it's obviously a tragedy that civilians were killed" and argued that the botched strike "is just another piece of an evacuation that was driven by politics" and not driven by "putting America first." SANDERS CHARGES U.S. DRONE STRIKE THAT KILLED AFGHAN CHILDREN WAS'UNACCEPTABLE' Head of the U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. announced Friday that it is unlikely any ISIS-K members were killed in the Kabul drone strike on August 29, which led to multiple civilian casualties. According to U.S. officials, the strike on the vehicle, formerly believed to have been a threat that included bombs and that was operated by ISIS-K militants, took place after a suicide bombing at Kabul airport in Afghanistan killed 13 U.S. service members and civilians.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier offers analysis on that and other breaking news stories, on'Your World'. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is calling the U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan that mistakenly killed seven children "unacceptable." The comments by Sanders, the progressive champion and runner up to now-President Biden in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, comes in the wake of an acknowledgment by the Pentagon that the attack was a "tragic mistake." At the time of the August 29 attack, the Pentagon said the strike had targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber amid the U.S. led evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies at Kabul's international airport, during the final days of the U.S. withdrawal from the warn torn Central Asian nation. The head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, the head of the U.S. Central Command, said that at the time he was confident the drone strike took out averted an imminent threat to U.S. forces at the airport. But reports of civilian causalities quickly emerged and U.S. military leaders later concluded that the strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. President Biden took major hits this week, from the Pentagon confirming that a "tragic mistake" led to 10 civilians in Afghanistan dying in a drone strike, to the Food and Drug Administration rejecting his vaccine booster proposal, with much of the news breaking as the president headed to the beach for vacation. "So the U.S. drone strike did NOT kill any ISIS-K but did kill 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children. The Biden administration is a sad, tragic mess and an utter embarrassment on the world stage!,"

In this letter, we propose an integrated autonomous flight and semantic SLAM system that can perform long-range missions and real-time semantic mapping in highly cluttered, unstructured, and GPS-denied under-canopy environments. First, tree trunks and ground planes are detected from LIDAR scans. We use a neural network and an instance extraction algorithm to enable semantic segmentation in real time onboard the UAV. Second, detected tree trunk instances are modeled as cylinders and associated across the whole LIDAR sequence. This semantic data association constraints both robot poses as well as trunk landmark models. The output of semantic SLAM is used in state estimation, planning, and control algorithms in real time. The global planner relies on a sparse map to plan the shortest path to the global goal, and the local trajectory planner uses a small but finely discretized robot-centric map to plan a dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectory to the local goal. Both the global path and local trajectory lead to drift-corrected goals, thus helping the UAV execute its mission accurately and safely.