This podcast series sets out to seek interesting profiles within the drone industry and discover unique viewpoints on industry developments and contributions!

The latest delivery robot designed by Pudu, BellaBot inherits the outstanding characteristics of the previous generation, while being endowed with superior human-Robot interaction capabilities. Featuring an innovative bionic design language, cute modeling, AI voice functionality, multi-modal interaction and many other new functions, BellaBot provides users with an unprecedented food delivery robot experience. BellaBot supports both Laser SLAM and Visual SLAM positioning and navigation solutions in order to adapt to more scenarios. Both of which are accurate and easy to use. Both positioning solutions which BellaBot offers provides the same excellent user experience.

A team of researchers working at Johannes Kepler University has developed an autonomous drone with a new type of technology to improve search-and-rescue efforts. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their drone modifications. Andreas Birk with Jacobs University Bremen has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the team in Austria. Finding people lost (or hiding) in the forest is difficult because of the tree cover. People in planes and helicopters have difficulty seeing through the canopy to the ground below, where people might be walking or even laying down.

U.S. troops in eastern Syria came under rocket attack Monday, with no reported casualties, one day after U.S. Air Force planes carried out airstrikes near the Iraq-Syria border against what the Pentagon said were facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups to support drone strikes inside Iraq. Iraq's military condemned the U.S. airstrikes, and the militia groups called for revenge against the United States. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the militias were using the facilities to launch unmanned aerial vehicle attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. It was the second time the administration has taken military action in the region since Biden took over earlier this year. There was no indication that Sunday's attacks were meant as the start of a wider, sustained U.S. air campaign in the border region.

U.S. fighter jets dropped bombs on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. The strike was in response to Iranian-backed militias firing armed drones against U.S. troops in Iraq, which was a response to a U.S. attack in February, which was a response to a militia attack days earlier. A Pentagon spokesman justified the most recent U.S. airstrikes as "necessary, appropriate, and deliberate action designed to limit the risk of escalation--but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message." This may be true, but similar statements have followed similar strikes for years, even decades; yet counter-attacks nonetheless follow (the "deterrent message" doesn't get through), and so it's possible that we are heightening the "risk of escalation," not limiting it. President Joe Biden finds himself in a jam.

The U.S. military, under the direction of President Joe Biden, carried out airstrikes against what it said were "facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups" near the border between Iraq and Syria, drawing condemnation from Iraq's military and calls for revenge by the militias. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the militias were using the facilities to launch unmanned aerial vehicle attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. It was the second time the Biden administration has taken military action in the region since he took over earlier this year. Kirby said the U.S. military targeted three operational and weapons storage facilities on Sunday night -- two in Syria and one in Iraq. He described the airstrikes as "defensive," saying they were launched in response to the attacks by militias.

The rapid rise of accessibility of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones pose a threat to general security and confidentiality. Most of the commercially available or custom-built drones are multi-rotors and are comprised of multiple propellers. Since these propellers rotate at a high-speed, they are generally the fastest moving parts of an image and cannot be directly "seen" by a classical camera without severe motion blur. We utilize a class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios called event cameras, which have a high temporal resolution, low-latency, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we model the geometry of a propeller and use it to generate simulated events which are used to train a deep neural network called EVPropNet to detect propellers from the data of an event camera. EVPropNet directly transfers to the real world without any fine-tuning or retraining. We present two applications of our network: (a) tracking and following an unmarked drone and (b) landing on a near-hover drone. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with different propeller shapes and sizes. Our network can detect propellers at a rate of 85.1% even when 60% of the propeller is occluded and can run at upto 35Hz on a 2W power budget. To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based solution for detecting propellers (to detect drones). Finally, our applications also show an impressive success rate of 92% and 90% for the tracking and landing tasks respectively.

Interruptions in the supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic and problems in logistics that caused constant deviations from forecasts created significant problems for production-based economies. Production and logistics problems experienced at factories in China prompted Europe to turn to Turkey. When China and the U.S. moved containers to their own countries, Turkey started transporting them to Europe with trucks. At this stage, uninterrupted production necessitated technology-oriented transformation. This week, a Ventures60 event under the title "The Age of Uninterrupted Production" addressed a series of topics – from corporate intelligence solutions in the production of unmanned aerial vehicles used in Turkey's largest refinery, Tüpraş, to corporate investors investing in production-oriented artificial intelligence (AI) and cyberattack threats.

After decades of uninterrupted progress and growth, information technology has so evolved that it can be said we are entering the age of autonomous machines, but there exist many roadblocks in the way of making this a reality. In this article, we make a preliminary attempt at recognizing and categorizing the technical and non-technical challenges of autonomous machines; for each of the ten areas we have identified, we review current status, roadblocks, and potential research directions. It is hoped that this will help the community define clear, effective, and more formal development goalposts for the future.

The U.S. military has launched two drone strikes against Taliban positions in northern Afghanistan, a U.S. defense official told Fox News on Friday. The strikes came hours before Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is set to meet President Biden at the White House Friday afternoon. An unknown number of Taliban fighters were killed in Baghlan and Kunduz provinces, where the strikes took place. Taliban fighters react to a speech by their senior leader in the Shindand district of Herat province, Afghanistan, in 2016. Three more districts fell to the Taliban overnight.