Paul Appleby with data analytics firm Kinetica and Dr. Tony Hale with the San Francisco Estuary Institute discuss how drones and artificial intelligence are helping track trash that finds its way into storm runoff.

This week, DARPA shared footage of an experimental new program that uses large drones swarms to locate targets and gather situational intelligence in urban raid missions. Part of DARPA's Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, the test featured a coordinated group of 250 autonomous air and ground vehicles. Those vehicles were sent into to a simulated urban environment, providing live information about sight lines, enemy positioning, environmental hazards, and general layout as part of a simulated military raid. The test was conducted at DARPA's Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, a facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The missions tasked the drone swarm with finding several AprilTags, a kind of QR code, that had been placed inside buildings in the training compound, which was designed to approximate a city block.

The University of Bristol (UoB) has partnered with Bristol Zoological Society (BZS) to develop a trailblazing approach to wildlife conservation, harnessing the power of machine learning and drone technology to transform wildlife conservation around the world. Backed by the Cabot Institute for the Environment, BZS and EPSRC's CASCADE grant, a team of researchers travelled to Cameroon in December last year to test a number of drones, sensor technologies and deployment techniques to monitor the critically endangered Kordofan giraffe populations in Bénoué National Park. "There has been significant and drastic decline recently of larger mammals in the park and it is vital that accurate measurements of populations can be established to guide our conservation actions," said Dr Gráinne McCabe, head of field conservation and science at BZS. "Bénoué National Park is very difficult to patrol on foot and large parts are virtually inaccessible, presenting a huge challenge for wildlife monitoring. What's more, the giraffe are very well camouflaged and often found in small, transient groups," said Dr Caspian Johnson, conservation science lecturer at BZS. Striving to uncover the best method for airborne wildlife monitoring, BZS reached out to Dr Matt Watson from the UoB's School of Earth Sciences, and Dr Tom Richardson from the University's Aerospace Department, as well as a member of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). The team forged successful collaborations using drones to monitor and measure volcanic emissions to create a system for wildlife monitoring.

A team of researchers from the University of La Rochelle in France have converted albatrosses into de facto surveillance drones as part of a project to gather data on illegal fishing boats in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. The team traveled to popular albatross nesting locations at Amsterdam Island and Kerguelen Island in the Indian Ocean north of Antarctica, and attached small sensors to 169 albatrosses in a procedure that took about 10 minutes per bird. The sensors weigh 65 grams, or around a seventh of a pound, and were equipped with a GPS receiver, a radar antenna, and a satellite communications monitor to track various boat communication systems. The devices were each powered by a small lithium battery that maintains a charge through a small solar panel, according to a report from ArsTechnica. The albatrosses covered more than 18 million square miles between East Africa and New Zealand, gathering data from more than 600,000 GPS locations.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Jan. 30 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Joint military operations between coalition and Iraqi forces against the Islamic State group will resume, the Iraqi military said Thursday, after a nearly three-week pause that saw tensions between Washington and Tehran come to a boiling point. The escalations with Iran began after a U.S. drone strike killed one of its top generals in Baghdad earlier this month. Iraqi lawmakers subsequently voted to expel U.S. troops from the country in a non-binding resolution, a move Iraqi military officials said would jeopardize its fight against ISIS, which had overtaken large swaths of the country several years ago and has since been defeated.

The Interior Department is grounding its fleet of drones -- including Chinese-made models such as this specialized "government edition" Mavic Pro, made by DJI. The Interior Department is grounding its fleet of drones -- including Chinese-made models such as this specialized "government edition" Mavic Pro, made by DJI. The Interior Department has grounded its fleet of more than 800 drones, citing potential cybersecurity risks and the need to support U.S. drone production – suggesting the move is aimed at least in part at China, a leading drone producer. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed an order on Wednesday grounding the drones, formalizing a "pause" he ordered nearly three months ago. "We've had only 12 drone flights since that time for emergency operations related to fires and floods," DOI Spokesperson Carol Danko said. In 2018, the Interior Department reported making 10,432 drone flights -- part of a broad expansion of its use of the aircraft under President Trump.

A research team at Ben-Gurion University have created a simple projection system able to trick Tesla's Autopilot into seeing things that aren't actually there. Using commercially available drones and a cheap projector - the kind a person might use to watch television in an apartment of small home - the team projected a series of deceptive images onto the road. The images included false traffic lines, a false speed limit sign, and an image of Elon Musk himself, projected on the road as if her were an endangered pedestrian. The researchers collectively labeled all these different visual phenomena as'phantoms,' according to a report in ArsTechnica. While the Tesla they tested reacted to every phantom in some way, most of its responses were fairly mild.

UPS is bringing dynamic routing to its on-road integrated optimization and navigation (ORION) platform, as the package delivery and logistics giant looks to reduce the number of miles traveled, fuel consumed, and CO2 emitted. For context, UPS delivers some 21 million packages globally each day, with many UPS drivers making well over 100 stops per shift. Figuring out the optimum route that each driver should travel to expedite deliveries (and reduce costs) is a challenge given the sheer number of combinations available. It's generally accepted that avoiding left-turns is a good thing due to the idling involved, which means that maximizing the number of right turns is desirable -- but computing all the possible permutations for this across 100 delivery destinations is a task of herculean proportions. And that is what ORION is essentially about.

Robots are complex machines with lots of components. Each of these components has a precise purpose, and when each component acts as expected, it creates a seamless system that can accomplish intricate tasks. This idea scales to networks of robots working in tandem to accomplish even more complex tasks. In this case, when one machine falters or fails to collaborate with the others, it can cause chaos: Picture a drone flying away from its fleet and failing to photograph its assigned area, or a self-driving car getting too close to another and disrupting carefully designed platoon. Making networks like these smarter, more functional, and more efficient is the subject of two research projects at Lehigh University led by Nader Motee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Florida could turn to the sky to fight Burmese pythons on the ground under a bill a Senate committee unanimously approved Monday to allow two state agencies to use drones in the effort to eradicate invasive plants and animals. The bill would create an exception to a current law that prohibits law enforcement from using drones to gather information and bans state agencies from using drones to gather images on private land. It would allow the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida Forest Service to fly drones to manage and eradicate invasion species on public lands. Sen. Ben Albritton said he has been told that drones equipped with lidar, which stands for "light detection and ranging," might be able to identify pythons. "As you know, chasing those nasty critters down there in the Everglades is a difficult task," Albritton said.