The golden age of drone delivery has begun. Did you know drones and their associated functions are a $50 billion industry by 2023? Industry experts are predicting unprecedented use in previously unimaginable applications with deep-learning now powering these drones. Drone delivery services has become an essential tool in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to create contactless delivery and resilient supply chain services. The retail industry is leading the way in adopting drone delivery services among both consumers and companies.

Drones have already shown that they can reliably deliver vital shipments of blood across Rwanda, drop off prescriptions to senior citizens in Florida, and help quarantining families stay safe with contactless deliveries. Now they're going to be buzzing through the skies of rural North Carolina thanks to a novel delivery service devised by drug-maker Merck and drone-maker Volansi. The plan is simple: use Volansi's 7-foot long "Gemini" quadcopter to ferry packages of cold chain medicines -- such as vaccines, glaucoma treatments, insulin, and asthma inhalers -- from Merck's Wilson, NC drug lab to the nine regional hospitals that make up Vidant Healthplex-Wilson. This medical network serves more than 1.4 million people across 29 counties in eastern North Carolina. "We've seen the world's supply chain strained like never before from the impact of Coronavirus," said Hannan Parvizian, CEO of Volansi, said in a press statement.

Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight important directions for further investigation in future work.

Gabriel Silva/Army). With the addition of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the aim is …

With the addition of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the aim is to make every soldier, regardless of job specialty, capable of identifying and knocking down threatening drones. While much of that mission used to reside mostly in the air defense community, those attacks can strike any infantry squad or tank battalion. The goal is to reduce cognitive burden and operator stress when dealing with an array of aerial threats that now plague units of any size, in any theater. "Everyone is counter-UAS," said Col. Marc Pelini, division chief for capabilities and requirements at the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO. Army units aren't ready to defeat aerial drones, the study shows.

An NHS drone is being used to courier Covid-19 samples, blood tests and personal protective equipment between hospitals in England. It is hoped that the trials, backed by a £1.3m grant from the UK Space Agency, can establish a network of air corridors for electric drones to navigate using GPS. The remote-controlled drone, which will be piloted by an ex-military fast jet or helicopter instructor, will initially fly between Essex's Broomfield hospital, Basildon hospital and the Pathology First laboratory in Basildon. The project is the idea of Apian, a healthcare drone startup founded by Christopher Law and Hammad Jeilani. "Covid-19 has highlighted challenges in NHS supply chain logistics," said Law.

Boston Dynamics has found a way to use robotic dogs without terrifying people. The maker of "Spot" -- a 71.7-pound, 33.1-inch-tall, four-legged robot -- has teamed up with DroneDeploy, a drone software provider, and Brasfield & Gorrie, one of the nation's largest privately held construction firms, to use the robots to automate construction documentation. "It definitely gets a lot of stares, I don't think out of fear but more out of shock and awe," said Jake Lovelace, a Brasfield & Gorrie innovation specialist. Outfitted with a 360-degree camera, Spot allows workers to autonomously capture data from building interiors and take close-up photos to document the progress a project has made for the bid process or inspection. It's built so that it can navigate rough terrain and also has sensors for noise, carbon dioxide and particulate levels, making it unnecessary for humans to risk going into potentially unsafe places, Lovelace said.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. What if an advancing Army armored unit were maneuvering through mountainous terrain to "close with an enemy" when it is suddenly hit and disabled by an incoming artillery attack ... because a small, hovering enemy drone finds its location and transmits an electronic signal back to an enemy firebase? With its location compromised, the unit is paralyzed by enemy fire and denied freedom of maneuver. However, what if the armored unit is able to change its location and obscure itself from enemy fire when an EW (Electronic Warfare) detection system finds the electronic signature emitting from the enemy drone, deconflicts it from friendly electromagnetic emissions and then "jams" the data link connecting the drone to its operators, immediately disrupting the enemies' ability to know the location, speed and direction of the attacking friendly force.

Two menacing men stand next to a white van in a field, holding remote controls. They open the van's back doors, and the whining sound of quadcopter drones crescendos. They flip a switch, and the drones swarm out like bats from a cave. In a few seconds, we cut to a college classroom. The students scream in terror, trapped inside, as the drones attack with deadly force. The lesson that the film, Slaughterbots, is trying to impart is clear: tiny killer robots are either here or a small technological advance away. And existing defences are weak or nonexistent.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Army researchers are working with the University of Illinois Chicago on unmanned technology for recharging drone swarms. The university has been awarded a four-year, $8 million cooperative agreement "to develop foundational science in two critical propulsion and power technology areas for powering future families of unmanned aircraft systems," according to a statement released by the Army Research Laboratory. "This collaborative program will help small battery-powered drones autonomously return from military missions to unmanned ground vehicles for recharging," the Army added.