Today drones can maneuver indoors, around difficult to reach nooks, bends and even dense forests too. Well, recently drones again hit the headlines, owing to their new ability to help people, hikers lost in woods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers, David Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, from Johannes Kepler University, share how artificial intelligence to improve thermal imaging camera searches for people lost in woods. When hikers, trekkers or commoners are lost in woods, rescue team rely on binoculars, and thermal imagers installed on camera and in chopper sensors, to find the missing. Generally, the thermal imaging devices highlight differences in body temperature of people on the ground versus their surroundings, making them easier to spot.

Panasonic Corp. said Monday it will start trials in February of home deliveries by a self-driving robot in a residential area in Kanagawa Prefecture as the coronavirus pandemic has raised demand for services with reduced or no human-to-human contact. Panasonic plans to test the feasibility of the delivery service using an autonomous robot that can travel at a maximum speed of 4 kilometers per hour with items for delivery loaded inside. Developed by the Osaka-based firm, the small robot will be used in an area designed to showcase advanced technologies under a joint project with local authorities and other firms. Self-driving robots have gained renewed attention amid the global coronavirus pandemic, which has raised the need for some people to avoid human-to-human contact and stay at home. The virus outbreak has led more people to shop online and have food and other items delivered to their homes, but a labor shortage in a range of industries including parcel delivery has been an issue in Japan.

This paper proposes a multi-sensor based approach to detect, track, and localize a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Specifically, a pipeline is developed to process monocular RGB and thermal video (captured from a fixed platform) to detect and track the UAV in our FoV. Subsequently, a 2D planar lidar is used to allow conversion of pixel data to actual distance measurements, and thereby enable localization of the UAV in global coordinates. The monocular data is processed through a deep learning-based object detection method that computes an initial bounding box for the UAV. The thermal data is processed through a thresholding and Kalman filter approach to detect and track the bounding box. Training and testing data are prepared by combining a set of original experiments conducted in a motion capture environment and publicly available UAV image data. The new pipeline compares favorably to existing methods and demonstrates promising tracking and localization capacity of sample experiments.

The Indian Air Force has taken a big step towards developing indigenous'Swarm Drone' technology which uses artificial intelligence to enhance its combat capability. On Saturday, the IAF shared pictures of swarm drone tests on its official Twitter handle, with the caption: "IAF is leading the way in using Artificial Intelligence to add to its combat potential. Swarm drones is a prime example." Swarm drones is a prime example. Testing of Swarm Drone technology is a major achievement for India.

Estimates of koala populations have historically varied wildly. In 2016, scientists estimated there were over 300,000 koalas in Australia. In mid-2019, the Australian Koala Foundation estimated that fewer than 80,000 remained in the country, and said the number could be as low as 43,000. Concern and confusion over the koalas' numbers intensified during Australia's devastating bushfires last year, leading to news articles that the animals were "functionally extinct." But scientists challenged the accuracy of that narrative.

"Communities should ask hard questions about these programs. As the power and scope of this technology expands, so does the need for privacy protection," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology. "Drones can be used to investigate known crimes. But they are also sensors that can generate offenses." With the pandemic still worsening, drones are a way of policing at a distance, said Rahul Sidhu, an officer in Redondo Beach, near Los Angeles, which started a program similar to the one in Chula Vista just after the virus reached the United States.

Walmart has found a new way to celebrate the holidays in the era of lockdowns and social distancing: high-flying drone shows put on at physical locations and streamed for online viewing. The shows will use almost 1,000 Intel drones to form complex shapes in the night sky, moving in time to Christmas songs like "Frosty the Snowman" by Bing Crosby and "Run Run Rudolph" by Kelly Clarkson. "After a particularly tough year, we want customers and communities to enjoy a moment of rest, peace and hope," said William White, Walmart's chief marketing officer in a press release. "We've been finding ways to help families enjoy seasonal traditions in a year when they thought it might not be possible." Never one to miss a merchandising opportunity, Walmart will also be airing a holiday shortly before the show, "DreamWorks Trolls Holiday."

However, in this more recent test, General Atomics did develop additional algorithms for CODE to support "behavioral functions for a coordinated air-to-air search." During the demonstration, a human operator then instructed the Avenger and its five virtual wingmen to carry out the aerial search mission, which they then performed autonomously. The CODE "engine" flew the physical Avenger drone for more than two hours, according to the company's press release. It's interesting to note that the instructions from the human operator were sent to the drone using a Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT) radio via the well-established Link16 waveform. The Navy developed TTNT first for the EA-18G Growler and it is now a key component of the service's Block III upgrade package for its F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.

The world's first satellite launching drone, developed by a US-based space startup, will will be able to carry a new payload into orbit every 180 minutes, the firm claims. Aevum says the massive 80ft long drone, named the Ravn X, is fully autonomous, 70 per cent reusable, and can take off and land on runways as short as a mile long. Working in partnership with the US Space Force, the firm says it is'completely reimagining access to space' by focusing on autonomy and better logistics. The drone can take off from any runway to reach high altitude where it deploys a second stage that takes a small payload the rest of the way to space. After it has launched the second stage rocket into low Earth orbit, the drone flies itself back to its home runway, lands and then parks up in its hanger.

New footage of Arecibo Observatory collapsing in the jungle of Puerto Rico shows the moment its main cables snapped and sent a massive platform hurling to the ground - triggering a reaction that led to its destruction. Drones were investigating cables around the telescope when the restraints failed and dropped the 900-ton platform onto to the reflector dish 400 feet below. In one of the videos, the platform begins swaying in the air before letting out a loud roar as it dislodged from the supporting cable and snapping into pieces as it dropped. The second part of the clip is a view of the cables at the top of a support tower, which shows a group of frayed wires and an empty spot where cables were that had previously failed this year. One of the cables begins to strain and then violently flies out of its support, creating a cloud of smoke and debris.