Scientists have recorded the first documented evidence of a great white shark attacking and killing an enormous humpback whale. Video taken from a drone off the coast of South Africa shows the 13-foot long shark hunting the whale which was around 33ft long and in ill health. Ryan Johnson, a marine biologist who observed the massacre, says the ordeal lasted about 50 minutes before the whale eventually died. Mr Johnson says the great white was very strategic in taking down the behemoth, and targeted its most vulnerable area, on the tail, before drowning the ailing whale. The great white is believed to be a shark called Helen which was named and tagged as part of a 2013 study by Mr Johnson.

Skydio, a startup that makes autonomous drones that fly themselves with little human intervention, is entering the commercial drone market with its new X2 model. The X2 is Skydio's first non-consumer device and it's marketed toward government agencies, the military, and other organizations that require aerial surveillance or surveying, with its own built-in infrared thermal camera. The X2 announcement coincides with Skydio's new round of $100 million in funding, led by German multinational company Siemens' Next47 firm. Skydio first entered the market a little more than two years ago with the Skydio R1. The R1 was an autonomous drone that sported impressive artificial intelligence-powered obstacle avoidance and other sensors and software features that let it seamlessly fly itself through complex outdoor environments like wooded trails while following subjects.

These being pandemic times, a recent visit to the Silicon Valley offices of drone startup Skydio involved slipping past dumpsters into the deserted yard behind the company's loading dock. Moments later, a black quadcopter eased out of the large open door sounding like a large and determined wasp. Skydio is best known for its "selfie drones," which use onboard artificial intelligence to automatically follow and film a person, whether they're running through a forest or backcountry skiing. The most recent model, released last fall, costs $999. The larger and more severe-looking machine that greeted WIRED has similar autonomous flying skills but aims to expand the startup's technology beyond selfies into business and government work, including the military.

The United Nations's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary killings presented a new report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Agnes Callamard's investigation focused on the legality of armed drones including one that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani near Baghdad's airport on January 3. It concluded the United States acted unlawfully in carrying out the attack. The US, meanwhile, denounced her findings. Callamard spoke to Al Jazeera about her probe and the future of drone warfare.

Earth observation resources are becoming increasingly indispensable in disaster relief, damage assessment and related domains. Many unpredicted factors, such as the change of observation task requirements, to the occurring of bad weather and resource failures, may cause the scheduled observation scheme to become infeasible. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to promptly and maybe frequently develop high-quality replanned observation schemes that minimize the effects on the scheduled tasks. A bottom-up distributed coordinated framework together with an improved contract net are proposed to facilitate the dynamic task replanning for heterogeneous Earth observation resources. This hierarchical framework consists of three levels, namely, neighboring resource coordination, single planning center coordination, and multiple planning center coordination. Observation tasks affected by unpredicted factors are assigned and treated along with a bottom-up route from resources to planning centers. This bottom-up distributed coordinated framework transfers part of the computing load to various nodes of the observation systems to allocate tasks more efficiently and robustly. To support the prompt assignment of large-scale tasks to proper Earth observation resources in dynamic environments, we propose a multiround combinatorial allocation (MCA) method. Moreover, a new float interval-based local search algorithm is proposed to obtain the promising planning scheme more quickly. The experiments demonstrate that the MCA method can achieve a better task completion rate for large-scale tasks with satisfactory time efficiency. It also demonstrates that this method can help to efficiently obtain replanning schemes based on original scheme in dynamic environments.

In a move that caused a ripple effect across the Middle East, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad's international airport on January 3. On that day, the Pentagon announced the attack was carried out "at the direction of the president". In a new report examining the legality of armed drones and the Soleimani killing in particular, Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial and arbitrary killings, said the US raid that killed Soleimani was "unlawful". Callamard presented her report at the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday. The United States, which is not a member after quitting the council in 2018, rejected the report saying it gave "a pass to terrorists". In Callamard's view, the consequences of targeted killings by armed drones have been neglected by states.

Multi-function swarms are swarms that solve multiple tasks at once. For example, a quadcopter swarm could be tasked with exploring an area of interest while simultaneously functioning as ad-hoc relays. With this type of multi-function comes the challenge of handling potentially conflicting requirements simultaneously. Using the Quality-Diversity algorithm MAP-elites in combination with a suitable controller structure, a framework for automatic behavior generation in multi-function swarms is proposed. The framework is tested on a scenario with three simultaneous tasks: exploration, communication network creation and geolocation of RF emitters. A repertoire is evolved, consisting of a wide range of controllers, or behavior primitives, with different characteristics and trade-offs in the different tasks. This repertoire would enable the swarm to transition between behavior trade-offs online, according to the situational requirements. Furthermore, the effect of noise on the behavior characteristics in MAP-elites is investigated. A moderate number of re-evaluations is found to increase the robustness while keeping the computational requirements relatively low. A few selected controllers are examined, and the dynamics of transitioning between these controllers are explored. Finally, the study develops a methodology for analyzing the makeup of the resulting controllers. This is done through a parameter variation study where the importance of individual inputs to the swarm controllers is assessed and analyzed.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. What if a U.S. drone was closely tracking an armed enemy vehicle as it transits rough terrain, enters urban areas and comes closer to vulnerable target areas when, all of a sudden, the target leaves a sensor's field of view, becoming seemingly un-trackable? Not so fast, according to emerging AI-enabled tracking technology now being developed by CACI, a technology firm supporting the U.S. military. Fast-maturing algorithms are now able to analyze a host of variables at one time, at lightning speed, to discern a target's trajectory and continue tracking an object even after it has left a sensor's field of view.

By 2020, people thought the autonomous car would whisk you to the office while you read the paper and tackle your emails, then taking you home from the bar on a Friday evening. That remains lodged somewhere in the pipeline for now. But another slice of science fiction is on the way – robots that deliver your food -- and it's already knocking at the door. Robotic food delivery (or, increasingly, the delivery of anything that fits into a robot) is being tackled by a wide range of companies, from garage startups to retail giants. Many use six-wheeled robots designed to drive themselves along the sidewalk and the pathways of business parks and college campuses.

The UK's new Space Agency funding will be used to support drones that deliver coronavirus testing kits to a Scottish island. Skyports, the company behind the drones, started a two-week trial in May with NHS Highland, which serves a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland. The technology was able to cut delivery times between Oban and the Isle of Mull to around 15 minutes, instead of going via road and taking a 45-minute ferry crossing. An initial £2.6 million was made available by the UK Space Agency and European Space Agency (ESA) to find and support space-enabled technologies and services that can support the NHS response to coronavirus. Skyports along with two other initiatives have been awarded a share of £1.1 million in funding, while the rest is open to bids until the end of September.