The weather is hot, the trees brimming with life … " So begins the baritone voice-over in a video shot in the summer of 2018 by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and posted to YouTube. It chronicles a corporate event in the slightly corny style of a 1960s educational film, starting with aerial drone footage of Huawei's campus--an island of lush greenery surrounded by the high-rise buildings of the city known as China's Silicon Valley. A spirited orchestral version of Beethoven's "Turkish March" plays as a town car wends its way through the campus, pulling up to a stately white structure mixing classical Greek architecture and the wide overhanging rooftops of China's great pagodas. There's a bit of the White House tossed in too. This feature appears in the December 2020/January 2021 issue.

This paper presents a time-efficient scheme for Mars exploration by the cooperation of multiple drones and a rover. To maximize effective coverage of the Mars surface in the long run, a comprehensive framework has been developed with joint consideration for limited energy, sensor model, communication range and safety radius, which we call TIME-SC2 (TIme-efficient Mars Exploration of Simultaneous Coverage and Charging). First, we propose a multi-drone coverage control algorithm by leveraging emerging deep reinforcement learning and design a novel information map to represent dynamic system states. Second, we propose a near-optimal charging scheduling algorithm to navigate each drone to an individual charging slot, and we have proven that there always exists feasible solutions. The attractiveness of this framework not only resides on its ability to maximize exploration efficiency, but also on its high autonomy that has greatly reduced the non-exploring time. Extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the remarkable performance of TIME-SC2 in terms of time-efficiency, adaptivity and flexibility.

Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh weighs in on'America's News HQ.' Conservative activist Candace Owens on Sunday leveled harsh criticism against U.S. intelligence agencies for their supposed inability to root out domestic terrorism while simultaneously being able to "take out" terrorists overseas. "We're supposed to believe that our intelligence agencies can track and take out an Iranian terrorist (Soleimani) overnight but they can't manage to get to the root of ANTIFA and black lives matter-- well-funded domestic terrorist cells that have been operating unchecked for YEARS," she tweeted. Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Forces, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq on Jan. 3. Administration officials said the strike, authorized by President Trump, was conducted to deter imminent attacks on U.S. interests. Owens' comments follow an evening of unrest that came after the president's supporters were purportedly attacked at the so-called Million MAGA March in Washington, D.C. on Saturday. Many were quick to condemn the media's apparent lack of interest in covering the violence directed at supporters of the president.

This work presented a new drone-based face detection dataset Drone LAMS in order to solve issues of low performance of drone-based face detection in scenarios such as large angles which was a predominant working condition when a drone flies high. The proposed dataset captured images from 261 videos with over 43k annotations and 4.0k images with pitch or yaw angle in the range of -90{\deg} to 90{\deg}. Drone LAMS showed significant improvement over currently available drone-based face detection datasets in terms of detection performance, especially with large pitch and yaw angle. Detailed analysis of how key factors, such as duplication rate, annotation method, etc., impact dataset performance was also provided to facilitate further usage of a drone on face detection.

You've seen them over sporting events, music festivals and political rallies; aerial drone displays have lit up night skies since the technology's 2012 debut at Ars Electronica Futurelab. No longer a niche entertainment spectacle, these light shows can feature massive swarms that are often presented right alongside traditional fireworks displays. And as small drone technologies continue to advance, these swarms are sure to grow. Drone swarm technology, in varying applications, has been pursued for years by government agencies like DARPA, where it's being investigated for military stuff, as well as private research institutions, such as University of Colorado Boulder where it's being explored as a search and rescue tool. Getting robots to not only sense the others around them but to actively work in concert, in pursuit of a common goal, enables the group to accomplish tasks that no individual could do on their own.

This letter is concerned with power control for a ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system incorporated with deep neural network (DNN) based channel estimation. Particularly, we formulate the power control problem for the UAV system as an optimization problem to accommodate the URLLC requirement of uplink control and non-payload signal delivery while ensuring the downlink high-speed payload transmission. This problem is challenging to be solved due to the requirement of analytically tractable channel models and the non-convex characteristic as well. To address the challenges, we propose a novel power control algorithm, which constructs analytically tractable channel models based on DNN estimation results and explores a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) scheme to tackle the non-convexity. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the DNN estimation and verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

It's been called'the future of warfare'. Off-the-shelf unmanned aerial systems (UAS), carrying a'payload' of explosives or biological material, flown by terrorists or enemy armed forces into a crowded building or military base. Now the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Sydney ASX-listed defence tech company DroneShield have produced next-generation drone technology to better identify threats from these aggressive UAS. In a partnership funded by the NSW and Australian Governments, UTS and DroneShield – an Australian developer of counter-UAS solutions – have produced an optical system for detection, identification and tracking of fast-moving threats such as nefarious UAS, comprised of a camera and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). UTS and DroneShield began working together in October 2019 – just a month after one of the most recent examples of aggressive use of drones when the oil facilities at Abqaiq–Khurais in Saudi Arabia were attacked by a swarm of UAS.

Sony's latest division, Airpeak, is described as being "in the field of AI robotics" and will focus on next-generation drones. Despite incidents of reckless flying, drones unlock huge opportunities. We regularly see beautiful photography and videography shot using drones--but, of course, they can do so much more. Sony has built a stellar reputation in media capture. The company builds great cameras – both for itself and sensors it supplies to other manufacturers (like its new IMX686) – and its software like Vegas Pro is the defacto choice for many creative professionals.

This Friday the 13th of November at 8pm UTC (3pm EDT/12pm PDT), Robotics Today are hosting an online seminar with Professor Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich. "Robotics Today – A series of technical talks" is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times. The seminars are open to the public. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web and Twitter, followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions.

Drone Defence Services and the University of Nottingham will develop sensor technology to track aircraft. By monitoring all aircraft, Drone Defence aims to prevent drone misuse and enable drones to safely share the sky with other aircraft.