As the United States wildfire season continues to lengthen, electric utilities could find new value from drones backed by advanced analytics to help prevent disasters. Also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones can deliver literal birds-eye views of potential problems – encroaching vegetation, damaged equipment, nearby hazards – when there is still plenty of time to fix things. This year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, drones can also help keep people safe, going into the field to gather data while human experts stay safely inside and receive high-quality data for better business decisions. "Drones can quickly and efficiently gather information from power poles across vast expanses of the landscape," said Ron Gray, a senior solution engineer at SAP. "With analytical insights on where the biggest potential hazards are, electric companies can develop a prioritized schedule of inspections and maintenance plans, including outage management timeframes. This would also help utilities correct missing or inaccurate information on equipment with fact-based mapping data and prove compliance with regulatory reporting mandates."

Getting an Amazon package delivered from the sky is closer to becoming a reality. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it had granted Amazon approval to deliver packages by drones. Amazon said that the approval is an "important step," but added that it is still testing and flying the drones. It did not say when it expected drones to make deliveries to shoppers. "This certification is an important step forward for Prime Air and indicates the FAA's confidence in Amazon's operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver packages to our customers around the world," said David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air.

Routine drone deliveries to U.S. consumers are still years away, partly because the FAA needs to complete rules for remote identification of more than 400,000 drones currently registered for commercial operations, and issue separate rules permitting drones to fly regularly over populated areas. Despite the investments and interest in potential drone deliveries by startups as well as deep-pocketed early adapters such as Amazon, package deliveries won't proceed beyond limited trials in the U.S. until new federal regulations go into effect. Amazon has now joined United Parcel Service Inc. UPS 0.78% and Wing, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., GOOG -0.62% in gaining approval to operate unmanned air fleets in the U.S. for tests involving customer deliveries. Amazon has sought regulatory approval for a broader range of drones and over a larger geographic area than its competitors. The company said Monday that the approval from the FAA isn't tied to a specific drone model but operations of a fleet.

David Carbon, the vice president of Prime Air, said in a statement that the certification "indicates the F.A.A.'s confidence in Amazon's operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver around the world." He added that the company would "continue to develop and refine our technology to fully integrate delivery drones into the airspace, and work closely with the F.A.A. and other regulators around the world to realize our vision of 30-minute delivery." At a conference in Las Vegas last year, Amazon revealed a fully electric hexagonal drone that could carry up to five pounds. The drone had advanced spatial awareness technology that allowed it to avoid contact with other objects, the company said. Amazon already offers one-day delivery in many places, but shortening delivery times has long been a goal of the company's chief executive, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon has received Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to operate its fleet of Prime Air drones in the US. The company can now use unmanned aircraft systems to deliver goods'beyond the visual line of sight of the operator' under a trial basis, CNBC reports. Amazon began testing its delivery drones in 2013, but has stumbled getting the service off the ground due to hardware and safety issues. The firm notes that it has since conducted a number of training deliveries and submitted evidence showing operations are safe to the public. Drone deliveries will first rollout in low populated areas and will only drop-off packages weighing five pounds or less.

Amazon customers in the U.S. could soon have their deliveries completed by an unmanned drone. The Federal Aviation Administration has approved Amazon's Prime Air service, which will use drones to deliver packages. The FAA issued a "Part 135 air carrier certificate using unmanned aircraft systems" to Amazon on Saturday, the agency confirmed in a statement to USA TODAY. Similar certificates have been issued to Wing Aviation, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, and UPS Flight Forward. In a statement, David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air said the company will continue working on their technology to integrate delivery drones into the airspace.

Amazon has been testing drones for delivering some small packages. Amazon Prime Air has cleared a regulatory hurdle, moving the online retail giant one step closer to dropping packages off at your doorstep with drones. The US Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued Amazon Prime Air a "Part 135 air carrier certificate," allowing it to begin commercial drone deliveries in the US. "Amazon Prime Air's concept uses autonomous UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) to safely and efficiently deliver packages to customers," said a spokesperson for the FAA on Monday. "The FAA supports innovation that is beneficial to the public, especially during a health or weather-related crisis."

Eight people have now been fined up to £10,000 after an illegal rave that attracted 3,000 people, with arrests also made for public order offences and driving under the influence of drugs. The unlicensed event at Banwen, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, started Saturday night. There were still 400 people at the site on Monday morning. South Wales Police Assistant Chief Constable Dave Thorne said drone footage would help identify organisers. A student who attended the rave admitted being taken aback by the scale of the event and likened it to a festival.

As of today, Amazon is officially an "air carrier." The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted Amazon Prime Air the designation, which allows Amazon to begin its first commercial delivery trials in the US, Bloomberg reports. The company will use the hexagon-shaped next-gen hybrid drone it showed off last year. Amazon has not revealed when or where it will begin its commercial delivery trials, but as Bloomberg points out, it does have test sites in the Northwest and in the nearby Vancouver area. Amazon has also tested drones in the UK.

Detection of military assets on the ground can be performed by applying deep learning-based object detectors on drone surveillance footage. The traditional way of hiding military assets from sight is camouflage, for example by using camouflage nets. However, large assets like planes or vessels are difficult to conceal by means of traditional camouflage nets. An alternative type of camouflage is the direct misleading of automatic object detectors. Recently, it has been observed that small adversarial changes applied to images of the object can produce erroneous output by deep learning-based detectors. In particular, adversarial attacks have been successfully demonstrated to prohibit person detections in images, requiring a patch with a specific pattern held up in front of the person, thereby essentially camouflaging the person for the detector. Research into this type of patch attacks is still limited and several questions related to the optimal patch configuration remain open. This work makes two contributions. First, we apply patch-based adversarial attacks for the use case of unmanned aerial surveillance, where the patch is laid on top of large military assets, camouflaging them from automatic detectors running over the imagery. The patch can prevent automatic detection of the whole object while only covering a small part of it. Second, we perform several experiments with different patch configurations, varying their size, position, number and saliency. Our results show that adversarial patch attacks form a realistic alternative to traditional camouflage activities, and should therefore be considered in the automated analysis of aerial surveillance imagery.