On the morning of July 10, 2018, a cook at K2 Base Camp in Pakistan was looking through his binoculars toward Broad Peak when he spotted something that looked like a body about 2,000 feet below the summit. The cook shared his discovery with Bartek Bargiel and his brother Andrzrej, members of a Polish expedition hoping to make the first ski descent of K2, the world's second-highest mountain. At first, the Poles thought they were looking at a corpse. But after more careful study they realized that it was a man in distress, clinging to the side of the mountain with an ice axe. There was no communication between the teams in the two separate base camps, so the Poles immediately dispatched one of their teammates, who took off running to the other camp, which was five miles down-glacier.

This paper presents a new algorithm named spherical vector-based particle swarm optimization (SPSO) to deal with the problem of path planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complicated environments subjected to multiple threats. A cost function is first formulated to convert the path planning into an optimization problem that incorporates requirements and constraints for the feasible and safe operation of the UAV. SPSO is then used to find the optimal path that minimizes the cost function by efficiently searching the configuration space of the UAV via the correspondence between the particle position and the speed, turn angle and climb/dive angle of the UAV. To evaluate the performance of SPSO, eight benchmarking scenarios have been generated from real digital elevation model maps. The results show that the proposed SPSO outperforms not only other particle swarm optimization (PSO) variants including the classic PSO, phase angle-encoded PSO and quantum-behave PSO but also other state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimization algorithms including the genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony (ABC), and differential evolution (DE) in most scenarios. In addition, experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the validity of the generated paths for real UAV operations. Source code of the algorithm can be found at https://github.com/duongpm/SPSO.

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter photographed by the Perseverance rover on 5 April The first drone on another world is ready to fly. The Ingenuity helicopter is primed to lift off from the surface of Mars on 12 April, which will be the first powered flight on another planet. NASA's Perseverance rover, which launched in July 2020 and arrived on Mars on 18 February, carried the Ingenuity helicopter folded up in its belly. After the rover landed, it dropped Ingenuity onto the ground and drove off so the drone could ready itself for its first flight. "It has survived launch, it has survived the journey through space, the vacuum and radiation, it has survived the entry and descent and landing onto the surface on the bottom of the Perseverance rover," said Bob Balaram at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Ingenuity's chief engineer, during a 23 March press conference.

Question: A friend of mine who has a connection to the Asheville Citizen Times told me that because of the staff shortage in the newsroom, the paper has purchased a software program using artificial intelligence that researches and then generates the answers to about half of the Answer Man columns. From what I've heard, this is being done to provide the Answer Man more time to work on other writing assignments. Apparently, the only part of the AI questions that are actually addressed by the real Answer Man are the smart aleck answers, because the AI program is not that developed. Could you please provide some additional information on how this is going? My answer: You've got to admit it would be nice to have some intelligence in this column.

Drone shows are quickly becoming the tool of choice for people and companies that want to grab your attention, and Genesis knows that all too well. The Hyundai-owned car brand marked its entrance into China by breaking the Guinness World Record for the most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the air at the same time, using 3,281 drones to display its logo and otherwise advertise over Shanghai on March 29th. The company flew'just' 3,051 drones in September 2020. That, in turn, smashed a record set by a 2,200-drone performance in Russia just days earlier. Intel, which has a reputation for drone light shows, last claimed the record with 2,066 drones flying over Folsom, California in July 2018.

Breathtaking drone video taken in the Arctic Circle captured a spellbinding reindeer'cyclone.' When threatened, reindeer will begin to stampede in a circle, making it hard for a predator to find an individual target. In the clip, the herd's fawns and does are in the middle of the swirl with the bucks running around them in a protective'dance.' The deer stampede was captured by a photographer last week in Murmansk, Russia, right before a veterinarian was about to give the herd its anthrax vaccinations. Such behavior has been observed in dolphins, bison and even elephants, but the aerial view--coupled with the herd's speed and size--makes for a truly hypnotic visual.

A pilot scheme in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) will see drones used to help councils reduce litter. BCP Council is partnering with the environmental charity Hubbub, startup Ellipsis Earth and fast food brand McDonald's – which is funding the trial – to use drone data to inform the placement of bins, street cleaning schedules and behaviour change campaigns around litter. The partners have called the pilot "the most scientifically robust litter survey ever undertaken in the UK". Drone imagery is processed by Ellipsis Earth software to automatically and rapidly detect discarded litter items and quantify them by type and brand to create litter heatmaps. This data, along with expert analysis and recommendations, will be shared with BCP council, Hubbub and McDonald's, to help them better understand and prevent littering.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A former Air Force intelligence analyst pleaded guilty Wednesday to leaking classified documents to a reporter about military drone strikes against al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. The guilty plea from Daniel Hale, 33, of Nashville, Tennessee, comes just days before he was slated to go on trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for violating the World War I-era Espionage Act. Hale admitted leaking roughly a dozen secret and top-secret documents to a reporter in 2014 and 2015, when he was working for a contractor as an analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

The damage to cellular towers during natural and man-made disasters can disturb the communication services for cellular users. One solution to the problem is using unmanned aerial vehicles to augment the desired communication network. The paper demonstrates the design of a UAV-Assisted Imitation Learning (UnVAIL) communication system that relays the cellular users' information to a neighbor base station. Since the user equipment (UEs) are equipped with buffers with limited capacity to hold packets, UnVAIL alternates between different UEs to reduce the chance of buffer overflow, positions itself optimally close to the selected UE to reduce service time, and uncovers a network pathway by acting as a relay node. UnVAIL utilizes Imitation Learning (IL) as a data-driven behavioral cloning approach to accomplish an optimal scheduling solution. Results demonstrate that UnVAIL performs similar to a human expert knowledge-based planning in communication timeliness, position accuracy, and energy consumption with an accuracy of 97.52% when evaluated on a developed simulator to train the UAV.

Snap is no stranger to hardware, having released several versions of its Spectacles smart glasses over the years. The next step could be a pair with built-in displays that support augmented reality effects. The next-gen Spectacles will be able to layer Snapchat lenses (or AR effects) onto the surrounding environment without the need to use a smartphone's camera, according to The Information. At least for now, these smart glasses reportedly aren't intended for everyday users. They're said to be geared towards developers and creators, the folks who make many of Snapchat's most popular lenses. It seems Snap is hoping those people will create new lens-style experiences for the glasses, which it may release more broadly in the future.