Skydio has been making headlines lately for being the first U.S.-based drone manufacturer to be valued at more than $1 billion in fundraising. The company has found a willing customer base in police forces across the United States, too, according to a report from Forbes. Nothing to be concerned about, surely, just flying artificial intelligence controlled by a group known for its abuses of power. At least 20 police agencies across the country own drones from Skydio, based on information Forbes obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and Skydio's own public announcements. Those agencies include major cities like Boston and Austin, according to the report.

General Jack Keane, Fox News senior strategic analyst, reacts to the decision on'Fox & amp; Friends.' The Biden administration has ordered temporary limits on drone strikes outside war zones, rolling back a Trump-era policy, as President Biden reviews "legal and policy frameworks governing these matters," the National Security Council told Fox News. National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne, in a statement to Fox News, said that at the beginning of the Biden administration the president "established new interim guidance concerning the United States' use of military force and related national security operations." "The purpose of the interim guidance is to ensure the President has full visibility on proposed significant actions into these areas while the National Security Council staff lead a thorough interagency review of the extant authorizations and delegations of Presidential authority with respect to these matters," Horne said. Horne told Fox News that Biden's review "is now underway and will include an examination of the legal and policy frameworks governing these matters."

Jen Copestake looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week.

Such early and continuous connections were key. Leveraging commercial technology must be strategic. During this critical early period, core technologies are developed, standards are created, and rollout plans are shaped. When the right experts can connect early in the process, the right technologies can be applied to the right mission needs. Bringing two partners together isn't guaranteed to lead to innovation.

Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. The reason it's so hard to kill a mosquito is that they move really well. Scientists are trying to build a robot with that kind of agility. And these tiny but mighty flying robots could be used in life-and-death situations, such as finding people in a collapsed building.

The Biden administration has quietly imposed temporary limits on counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefield zones like Afghanistan and Syria, and it has begun a broad review of whether to tighten Trump-era rules for such operations, according to officials. The military and the C.I.A. must now obtain White House permission to attack terrorism suspects in poorly governed places where there are scant American ground troops, like Somalia and Yemen. Under the Trump administration, they had been allowed to decide for themselves whether circumstances on the ground met certain conditions and an attack was justified. Officials characterized the tighter controls as a stopgap while the Biden administration reviewed how targeting worked -- both on paper and in practice -- under former President Donald J. Trump and developed its own policy and procedures for counterterrorism kill-or-capture operations outside war zones, including how to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. The Biden administration did not announce the new limits.

Three years ago, Customs and Border Protection placed an order for self-flying aircraft that could launch on their own, rendezvous, locate and monitor multiple targets on the ground without any human intervention. In its reasoning for the order, CBP said the level of monitoring required to secure America's long land borders from the sky was too cumbersome for people alone. To research and build the drones, CBP handed $500,000 to Mitre Corp., a trusted nonprofit Skunk Works that was already furnishing border police with prototype rapid DNA testing and smartwatch hacking technology. They were "tested but not fielded operationally" as "the gap from simulation to reality turned out to be much larger than the research team originally envisioned," a CBP spokesperson says. This year, America's border police will test automated drones from Skydio, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that on Monday announced it had raised an additional $170 million in venture funding at a valuation of $1 billion. That brings the total raised for Skydio to $340 million.

Three years ago, Customs and Border Protection placed an order for self-flying aircraft that could launch on their own, rendezvous, locate and monitor multiple targets on the ground without any human intervention. In its reasoning for the order, CBP said the level of monitoring required to secure America's long land borders from the sky was too cumbersome for people alone. To research and build the drones, CBP handed $500,000 to Mitre Corp., a trusted nonprofit Skunk Works that was already furnishing border police with prototype rapid DNA testing and smartwatch hacking technology. They were "tested but not fielded operationally" as "the gap from simulation to reality turned out to be much larger than the research team originally envisioned," a CBP spokesperson says. This year, America's border police will test automated drones from Skydio, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that on Monday announced it had raised an additional $170 million in venture funding at a valuation of $1 billion.

The New York police department has acquired a robotic police dog, known as Digidog, and has deployed it on the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and, most recently, the Bronx. At a time that activists in New York, and beyond, are calling for the defunding of police departments – for the sake of funding more vital services that address the root causes of crime and poverty – the NYPD's decision to pour money into a robot dog seems tone-deaf if not an outright provocation. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, put it on Twitter: "Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead. Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with underresourced schools." There is more than enough evidence that law enforcement is lethally racially biased, and adding an intimidating non-human layer to it seems cruel.

Advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design have opened up applications as varied as surveillance, firefighting, cellular networks, and delivery applications. Additionally, due to decreases in cost, systems employing fleets of UAVs have become popular. The uniqueness of UAVs in systems creates a novel set of trajectory or path planning and coordination problems. Environments include many more points of interest (POIs) than UAVs, with obstacles and no-fly zones. This system revolves around an economic theory, in particular an auction mechanism where UAVs trade assigned POIs. We formulate the path planning problem as a multi-agent economic game, where agents can cooperate and compete for resources. We then translate the problem into a Partially Observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is solved using a reinforcement learning (RL) model deployed on each agent. As the system computes task distributions via UAV cooperation, it is highly resilient to any change in the swarm size. Our proposed network and economic game architecture can effectively coordinate the swarm as an emergent phenomenon while maintaining the swarm's operation. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are applicable to a wide-ranging set of problems such as fire fighting, security monitoring, agriculture, edge computing, 3D mapping, and network support [1]. Fire fighting problems center around tracking and finding fires, whereas security applications focus on monitoring and finding targets. On the other hand, agricultural problems center around field monitoring and data harvesting, while edge computing and network support are focused on data harvesting and load reaction. All of these problems can be abstracted to a set of partially observed points and must be traveled to in the shortest amount of time possible, and then some task must be carried out in the vicinity of this point. Swarm surveillance missions are essential in both civilian and military contexts, where solutions must be secure, reliable, and efficient.