The new shipping industry is nearly here. Amazon Inc. just applied for a patent on a new package delivery system capable of shipping consumer goods from the primary delivery vehicle to your door via a mini-sized delivery vehicle robot that ferries shipments to final end-point destinations, according to a filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. But we could still get the flying drone deliveries we secretly crave. In the last decade, Amazon and other delivery services have investigated the possibility of employing new technologies to transport packages from warehouses to consumers. The proposals have ranged from driverless vans housing smaller robots to flying drones that ship directly through the air to customer airspace (and then a parachute drop of packages). Electronic delivery robots were assumed to be a cheaper alternative to hiring and supporting humans to perform hard labor.

Peace activists are zeroing-in on very troubling – and downright scary – developments in high-tech weaponry: artificial intelligence and autonomous weaponized drones. The issue of autonomous weaponized drones, programmed to kill without a human finger pulling the trigger, is getting much more attention in the wake of revelations coming out of Libya. "The world's first recorded case of an autonomous drone attacking humans took place in March 2020, according to a United Nations (UN) security report detailing the ongoing Second Libyan Civil War. Libyan forces used the Turkish-made drones to "hunt down" and jam retreating enemy forces, preventing them from using their own drones." The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true "fire, forget and find" capability, according to an official report.

It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California. A drone crash in June forced an estimated 3,000 of the sleek seabirds with their pointed orange bills to abandon their eggs on Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County. Experts say it's possible that many of the birds set up camp on two commercial barges in nearby Long Beach Harbor. Now droves of the baby birds are falling into the ocean and drowning. "They basically landed on the barge a day or so, and it may have been two or three days, after the incident involving the drones when they left Bolsa Chica," said Tim Daly, spokesman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Dubai police will be able to respond to an incident anywhere in the United Arab Emirates city within a minute, thanks to a network of pre-positioned drone bases. The quadcopters, supplied by Israeli company Airobotics, will operate from base stations during the Expo 2020 event starting in October this year, an exhibition said to be the third largest event in the world after the Olympics and the World Cup. The drones will reduce police response time from 4.4 minutes to 1 minute according to a tweet from Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Each base has a sliding roof that allows the drones to enter and exit. The drones can fly pre-programmed patrols, or be dispatched to a specific location, allowing an operator at police headquarters to inspect the scene, or follow a suspicious individual or vehicle and pass data to other police units.

A distant future involving robotic package deliveries is now very much a reality. Advances in robotics, GPS tracking, automation, and navigation now mean you might not find a delivery person at your door with your package. You might find a delivery robot instead. With semi-autonomous robots beginning to enter the world, here's a look at how delivery robots work. A delivery robot is an automated robot that brings your delivery directly to your door.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. An 18-year-old Ohio man was being praised for saving a mother and her 10-year-old son at a North Carolina beach over the Fourth of July weekend – in a rescue that was caught on video. Travis Shrout of Stow, near Cleveland, said he had swum out pretty far at Topsail Beach where his family was vacationing on July 3 when he noticed the woman and her son struggling in the water, FOX 8 of Cleveland reported. Shrout's family had gotten out of the water but family friend Thad Unkefer wanted to test his drone's tracking features, so Shrout decided to get back in, he told the station.

Researchers have trained a drone to search for asteroids that crash to Earth. The drones autonomously fly in a grid pattern, taking photos of the ground over a large area, and use artificial intelligence to search through the pictures to identify potential meteorites. Every year approximately 500 meteorites fall to the planet's surface, but less than two per cent of these are ever recovered – sometimes because they fall in inaccessible locations, such as the ocean, but in other instances simply because they are not found in time. The drone, developed by the University of California, Davis, has been tested around Walker Lake in Vegada, where a meteorite fell in 2019. "Images can be analyzed using a machine-learning classifier to identify meteorites in the field among many other features," said Robert Citron, a postdoctoral researcher at the university.

It's easy to find large meteorites (or their craters) once they've reached Earth, but the smaller ones often go neglected -- scientists recover fewer than 2 percent of them. Soon, however, it might just be a question of sending a robot to do the job. Universe Today reports that researchers have developed a system that has autonomous drones use machine learning to find the smaller meteorites in impact sites that are either'hidden' (even if observers traced the fall) or simply inaccessible. The technology uses a mix of convolutional neural networks to recognize meteorites based on training images, both from online images as well as staged shots from the team's collection. This helps the AI distinguish between space rocks and ordinary stones, even with a variety of shapes and terrain conditions. While a test drone did correctly spot planted meteorites, there were also some false positives.

This paper studies the traffic monitoring problem in a road network using a team of aerial robots. The problem is challenging due to two main reasons. First, the traffic events are stochastic, both temporally and spatially. Second, the problem has a non-homogeneous structure as the traffic events arrive at different locations of the road network at different rates. Accordingly, some locations require more visits by the robots compared to other locations. To address these issues, we define an uncertainty metric for each location of the road network and formulate a path planning problem for the aerial robots to minimize the network's average uncertainty. We express this problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and propose a distributed and scalable algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning to solve it. We consider two different scenarios depending on the communication mode between the agents (aerial robots) and the traffic management center (TMC). The first scenario assumes that the agents continuously communicate with the TMC to send/receive real-time information about the traffic events. Hence, the agents have global and real-time knowledge of the environment. However, in the second scenario, we consider a challenging setting where the observation of the aerial robots is partial and limited to their sensing ranges. Moreover, in contrast to the first scenario, the information exchange between the aerial robots and the TMC is restricted to specific time instances. We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm in both scenarios for a real road network topology and demonstrate its functionality in a traffic monitoring system.

Robots are to start whirring around Israel's largest hospital, racing drugs from the pharmacy to wards the moment they are needed. From next month, as soon as Sheba Medical Center's oncology department needs chemotherapy drugs, which must be prepared in the pharmacy, small Israeli-produced robots will take them straight to the nurses who ordered them, and help save patients hours of waiting time. They will shuttle the drugs to departments utilizing a network of maintenance tunnels that already exists under the hospital, and also use corridors, walkways and elevators alongside staff and patients. Sheba hopes to eventually expand the system, and have robots constantly making drug-delivery runs to all departments. "This is very exciting as we're moving from needing humans to transport drugs to a solution that uses robots to increase speed and efficiency," Ronen Loebstein, director of clinical pharmacology at Sheba, told The Times of Israel.