With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as "autonomous weapons systems," include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level -- by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems. Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency.

It turns out humans are not the only creatures that use food as foreplay. Researchers in southwestern Mexico have recorded a group of rough-toothed dolphins sharing a meal and getting frisky. A drone camera caught two dolphins passing a piece of fish back and forth in what may be the first video of the conduct. The repast seemed to inspire some amorous behavior, as well, with two males initiating sexual encounters with another member of the pod. Rough-toothed dolphins spend up to 80 percent of their time in the ocean depths, making them extremely difficult to study.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Under heavy enemy fire, a dismounted squad of soldiers encounters incoming sniper fire from a building and rapid movements behind certain windows, when a nearby drone is instantly and automatically tasked with quickly surveilling the area before aggregating data and propagating live-saving, combat-sensitive information directly back to commanders and soldiers. How could it be possible, in a nearly instantaneous fashion, to circumvent or avoid otherwise time-consuming communications channels and procedural impediments to the immediate tasking of an attack drone? One answer, now being explored in cutting edge research by scientists with the Army Research Laboratory, is to measure, process, analyze and transmit electrochemical signals from the human brain.

In February, a lobbyist friend urged Erik Sartorius, the executive director of the Kansas League of Municipalities, to look at a newly introduced bill that would affect cities. The legislation involved "personal delivery devices"--robots that, as if in a sci-fi movie, might deliver a bag of groceries, a toolbox, or a prescription to your doorstep. It would have limited their weight to 150 pounds, not including the cargo inside. And it would have allowed them to operate on any sidewalk or crosswalk in Kansas at speeds up to 6 miles per hour, the pace of a quick human jog. Lawmakers and lobbyists say the bill was drafted with help from Amazon.

The biobot developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign couples engineered skeletal muscle tissue to a 3D printed flexible skeleton. Although robotic humanoids now perform backflips and autonomous drones fly in formation, even the most advanced robots are relatively primitive when compared with living machines. The running, jumping, swimming, and flying creatures that cover our planet's surface have long inspired engineers. Yet a subset of researchers are not just taking tips from living creatures. These roboticists, computer scientists, and bioengineers are combining artificial materials with living tissue, or making machines entirely from living cells.

Drones, robots and self-driving cars could dodge accidents in future thanks to a new sensor inspired by the collision avoidance neurons of swarming locusts. Flying locusts travel in swarms of millions at 2–3 miles an hour -- but are capable of making evasive manoeuvres within just hundreds of milliseconds to avoid collisions. Researchers from the US have developed an electronic version of a special neuron, unique to locusts, that allows them to react rapidly without using much energy. Unlike current collision sensors for self-driving cars -- which tend to be bulky and heavy -- the insect-inspired detector is tiny and can respond in just two seconds. 'We are always looking for animals with unusual abilities, ones that do something better than humans,' said paper author and engineer Saptarshi Das of the Pennsylvania State University.

Drones, a type of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV), is basically a flying version of a robot. While they have made quite a reputation of how resourceful they are outdoors, now, drones are set to expand their usability in the indoors too. For, e.g., Corvus Robotics, a St. Louis startup is providing drone solutions for warehouse inventory and facilities inspection to logistics and manufacturing facilities. Another Swiss startup Flyability too, offers aerial inspection indoor drones to inspect confined spaces. Indoor Drones are generally smaller in size as compared to their outdoor version.

The U.S. Department of Defense is getting rid of Chinese-manufactured drones over cybersecurity concerns. The U.S. Pacific Command announced on Thursday that the Defense Department and the entire federal government will have access to secure, trusted, and American-made commercial drones on the General Service Administration schedule. This new DIU initiative, dubbed Blue small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), is the culmination of 18 months of work by the Army and DIU to tailor the best technology from U.S. and allied companies to develop small unmanned aircraft systems that can be safely adopted by men and women in uniform, Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Kratsios announced at a virtual event hosted by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). During the Aug. 18 DIU event, Kratsios said it also has important impacts for the nation's broader economic and national security. "UAS technologies have incredible promise and potential to not only provide great economic benefit for the American people, but also to enhance safety and security for our nation. We need a strong, secure domestic UAS manufacturing base to ensure American leadership in this critical field," he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will soon be evaluating several drone detecting systems for airports, the agency has announced. It will be testing at least 10 technologies and systems developed not just to detect unmanned aerial systems, but also to mitigate the potential safety risks they pose. The tests are part of the agency's Airport Unmanned Aircraft Systems Detection and Mitigation Research Program and are expected to begin later this year. The first tests will be conducted at FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center, which is right next to the Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey. After that, the agency expects to expand its tests to four additional airports in the US.

To prolong the lifetime of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the UAVs need to fulfill their missions in the shortest possible time. In addition to this requirement, in many applications, the UAVs require a reliable internet connection during their flights. In this paper, we minimize the travel time of the UAVs, ensuring that a probabilistic connectivity constraint is satisfied. To solve this problem, we need a global model of the outage probability in the environment. Since the UAVs have different missions and fly over different areas, their collected data carry local information on the network's connectivity. As a result, the UAVs can not rely on their own experiences to build the global model. This issue affects the path planning of the UAVs. To address this concern, we utilize a two-step approach. In the first step, by using Federated Learning (FL), the UAVs collaboratively build a global model of the outage probability in the environment. In the second step, by using the global model obtained in the first step and rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs), we propose an algorithm to optimize UAVs' paths. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this two-step approach for UAV networks.