It's also the first aircraft "to be designed, engineered and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years," Boeing said in a statement. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the drones will protect the country's pricier combat aircraft like F-35 stealth fighters and their pilots in the future, and drone production will help with a current crisis, fighting the effects of the coronavirus. "The Loyal Wingman program has helped support around 100 high-tech jobs in Australia. Such projects will be critical to bolster growth and support jobs as the economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic," Morrison said in a statement. The Australian government says it has invested about $40 million into the project.

Hong Kong (CNN)Australia has its first "loyal wingman." Boeing Australia presented the country's Air Force on Tuesday with a prototype of a jet-powered drone that they hope will one day fly alongside manned warplanes while bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield. The Loyal Wingman, at 38-foot-long (11.5 meters) and with a range of 2,000 miles (3,218.6 kilometers), will "use artificial intelligence to fly independently, or in support of manned aircraft, while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft," according to Boeing's website on the project. The drones will be able to engage in electronic warfare as well as intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance missions and swap quickly between those roles, according to Boeing. The aircraft delivered in Sydney on Tuesday is the first of three prototypes Boeing is producing.

Up Your Game: The Mavic Air 2 camera drone takes power and portability to the next level. It combines a powerful camera with intelligent shooting modes for stunning results. Push your imagination to its limits because aerial photography has never been this easy. Next-Level Content: Capture impressive 48MP photos with a 1/2-inch CMOS sensor while the 3-axis gimbal provides 4K/60fps video. The secret to incredible HDR video is a high-performance Quad Bayer image sensor.

If anyone knows the name "Draganfly," it may be from an unfortunate news story from last week. The Canadian company's plan to test a coronavirus-monitoring "pandemic drone" in Westport, Connecticut, came to a halt when anxious citizens and civil rights advocates got wind of it. But that was just one town. The company says it has many other takers, and that the pandemic drone is far from dead. News site VentureBeat has a great in-depth look at the drone company's COVID-19 work that is well worth a thorough read.

Six Army soldiers who were injured in a ballistic missile attack in Iraq in January have been awarded Purple Hearts, and 23 others have been approved for the award and will get them later this week, U.S. Central Command said Monday. Bill Urban said the awards were approved by Lt. Gen. Pat White, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, following a review. About 110 U.S. service members were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries after the Iranian ballistic missile attack at al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on Jan. 8. More than a dozen missiles struck the base in an attack that Iran carried out as retaliation for a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed Tehran's most powerful general, Qassem Soleimani, on Jan. 3. Troops at al-Asad were warned of an incoming attack, and most were in bunkers scattered around the base. Initially, commanders and President Donald Trump said there were no injuries during the attack.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a Jedi-like mind control system that allows you to control a drone by just twisting and lifting your forearm. A video uploaded by the CSAIL team shows off the system. The drone pilot is able to maneuver a small drone through a series of rings easily just by twisting, raising, and lowering his forearm thanks to a device strapped around his arm. The goal is to make controlling the drone -- and potentially other pieces of technology -- as natural as possible by harnessing human intuition. A paper published last month details the such a "plug-and-play gesture control" that relies on muscle and motion sensors.

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, is pressuring the Justice Department to halt the use of Chinese-made drones. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. House Judiciary Committee member Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is pressuring the Justice Department to halt the use of Chinese-made drones by state and local governments, telling "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Monday they may be giving hostile forces important law enforcement information. "China is massively expanding a Trojan horse spying operation in our country and your local police department may be unknowingly helping them," Gaetz. "The United States Army, the Department of Interior, they've banned their use of these DJI drones, citing vulnerability and potential value for other countries. "The Department of Homeland Security wrote a scathing report that said that China specifically goes after local law enforcement," Gaetz continued. "They did so even before the coronavirus so that they can get key information transmitted to the Chinese government.

In this paper, we study a joint detection, mapping and navigation problem for a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a low complexity radar and flying in an unknown environment. The goal is to optimize its trajectory with the purpose of maximizing the mapping accuracy and, at the same time, to avoid areas where measurements might not be sufficiently informative from the perspective of a target detection. This problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) where the UAV is an agent that runs either a state estimator for target detection and for environment mapping, and a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to infer its own policy of navigation (i.e., the control law). Numerical results show the feasibility of the proposed idea, highlighting the UAV's capability of autonomously exploring areas with high probability of target detection while reconstructing the surrounding environment.

About 110 U.S. service members were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries after the Iranian ballistic missile attack at al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on Jan. 8. More than a dozen missiles struck the base in an attack that Iran carried out as retaliation for a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed Tehran's most powerful general, Qassem Soleimani, on Jan. 3. Troops at al-Asad were warned of an incoming attack, and most were in bunkers scattered around the base.

As consumers demand more convenient fulfillment while technology improves and costs fall, the prospect for autonomous delivery is growing. The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic could create a perfect storm of factors that finally make things like drones and delivery robots ripe for adoption. "The pandemic has increased the viability of autonomous delivery," says Michael Ramsey, vice president and analyst who covers the automotive industry and smart mobility at Gartner. "It's one more box that they can check for in saying'this makes sense.'" No one is certain what the "new normal" will look like, but many agree that greater social distancing could be a part of our future.