New Yorkers got their first glimpse of FedEx's delivery robot last week, when a prototype named'Roxo' was given a day out in Manhattan. But far from being welcomed by residents, the six-wheeled droid was promptly presented with a cease-and-desist order by the city. A long-standing ambition for many tech firms, delivery robots is finally getting close to becoming a reality. FedEx has trialled the bots in several U.S. cities including Memphis, Manchester and New Hampshire, before bringing one to New York City. Although the robot's trip out in New York was just a marketing stunt, rather than an actual trial, it has already attracted feedback from some residents - namely mayor Bill de Blasio.

--With the rapid evolution of wireless mobile devices, it emerges stronger incentive to design proper collaboration mechanisms among the intelligent agents. Following their individual observations, multiple intelligent agents could cooperate and gradually approach the final collective objective through continuously learning from the environment. In that regard, independent reinforcement learning (IRL) is often deployed within the multi-agent collaboration to alleviate the dilemma of non-stationary learning environment. However, behavioral strategies of the intelligent agents in IRL could only be formulated upon their local individual observations of the global environment, and appropriate communication mechanisms must be introduced to reduce their behavioral localities. In this paper, we tackle the communication problem among the intelligent agents in IRL by jointly adopting two mechanisms with different scales. For the large scale, we introduce the stigmergy mechanism as an indirect communication bridge among the independent learning agents and carefully design a mathematical representation to indicate the impact of digital pheromone. For the small scale, we propose a conflict-avoidance mechanism between adjacent agents by implementing an additionally embedded neural network to provide more opportunities for participants with higher action priorities. Besides, we also present a federal training method to effectively optimize the neural networks within each agent in a decentralized manner . Finally, we establish a simulation scenario where a number of mobile agents in a certain area move automatically to form a specified target shape, and demonstrate the superiorities of our proposed methods through extensive simulations. I NTRODUCTION With the rapid development of mobile wireless communication and IoTs (Internet of Things) technologies, many scenarios gradually arise where the collaboration among the involved intelligent agents is highly required, such as the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) [1]-[3], the distributed control in the field of industry automation [4]-[6], and mobile crowd sensing and computing (MCSC) [7], [8]. In these scenarios, traditional centralized control methods are usually impracticable because of the restriction from limited computing resources as well as the demand for ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability. As an alternative, multi-agent collaboration can be introduced into these scenarios to reduce the pressure at the central controller side. As one of the primary goals in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), assisting autonomous agents to act optimally through the "trial-and-error" interaction process with the expected environment is regarded as an important target of reinforcement learning (RL) [9]-[11].

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to deliver significant social and economic benefits, including reducing accidental deaths and injuries, making new scientific discoveries, and increasing productivity.[1] However, an increasing number of activists, scholars, and pundits see AI as inherently risky, creating substantial negative impacts such as eliminating jobs, eroding personal liberties, and reducing human intelligence.[2] Some even see AI as dehumanizing, dystopian, and a threat to humanity.[3] As such, the world is dividing into two camps regarding AI: those who support the technology and those who oppose it. Unfortunately, the latter camp is increasingly dominating AI discussions, not just in the United States, but in many nations around the world. There should be no doubt that nations that tilt toward fear rather than optimism are more likely to put in place policies and practices that limit AI development and adoption, which will hurt their economic growth, social ...

In'The Terminator' series of action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a cybernetic organism (cyborg) is programmed from the future to go back in time and kill the mother of the scientist who leads the fight against Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will cause a nuclear holocaust. Terrifying and at times comical ("I'll be back", "Make my day") The Terminator cyborg was among the first presentations of artificial intelligence (AI) to a global audience. While numerous facets of AI have been developed over the past couple of decades, all with positive outcomes, the fear of AI being programmed to do something devastating to the human race, of computers "going rogue", continues to persist. On the other hand, AI holds tremendous potential for benefiting humanity in ways we are only just starting to recognize. This article gives an overview of artificial intelligence including some of its most interesting manifestations. The first step is defining what we mean by artificial intelligence. One definition of AI is "the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computers." Such processes include learning by acquiring information, understanding the rules around using that information, employing reasoning to reach conclusions, and self-correcting.

This paper studies the problem of spectrum shortage in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network during critical missions such as wildfire monitoring, search and rescue, and disaster monitoring. Such applications involve a high demand for high-throughput data transmissions such as real-time video-, image-, and voice- streaming where the assigned spectrum to the UAV network may not be adequate to provide the desired Quality of Service (QoS). In these scenarios, the aerial network can borrow an additional spectrum from the available terrestrial networks in the trade of a relaying service for them. We propose a spectrum sharing model in which the UAVs are grouped into two classes of relaying UAVs that service the spectrum owner and the sensing UAVs that perform the disaster relief mission using the obtained spectrum. The operation of the UAV network is managed by a hierarchical mechanism in which a central controller assigns the tasks of the UAVs based on their resources and determine their operation region based on the level of priority of impacted areas and then the UAVs autonomously fine-tune their position using a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to maximize the individual throughput and prolong their lifetime. We analyze the performance and the convergence for the proposed method analytically and with extensive simulations in different scenarios.

The first cargo-carrying robot marketed directly to consumers is now on sale just in time for the holiday season. Its makers believe it's the future, but with a $3,250 price tag, who is ready to ditch their second car for this two-wheeled rover?

The bot relies on machine–learning algorithms to map the best routes, as well as navigate and avoid obstacles -- but it's connected to a remote tower …

Route planning for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a series of translation and rotational steps from a given start location to the destination goal location. The goal of the route planning problem is to determine the most optimal route avoiding any collisions with the obstacles present in the environment. Route planning is an NP-hard optimization problem. In this paper, a newly proposed Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is used, and its performance is compared with deterministic and other Nature-Inspired Algorithms (NIAs). The results illustrate that SSA outperforms all the other meta-heuristic algorithms in route planning for multiple UAVs in a 3D environment. The proposed approach improves the average cost and overall time by 1.25% and 6.035% respectively when compared to recently reported data. Route planning is involved in many real-life applications like robot navigation, self-driving car, autonomous UAV for search and rescue operations in dangerous ground-zero situations, civilian surveillance, military combat and even commercial services like package delivery by drones.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Nov. 23 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com The U.S. military announced Friday it lost an unarmed drone over Tripoli, the Libyan capital -- the site of a months-long battle between the Libyan National Army and militias allied with the United Nations-supported government. The U.S. Africa Command said the remotely piloted aircraft was part of an operation conducted in Libya to assess the area's security and monitor for violent extremist activity. They didn't give a reason for the drone loss on Thursday, but the command will be investigating.

According to Business Insider, more than 50% of the total costs for delivering goods is attributable to what is known as "last mile delivery" – the point at which the package finally arrives at the buyer's door. In a recent study by Global Industry Analysts, the last mile delivery market worldwide is expected to reach over $35 Billion by 2025. Last mile delivery is the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process, either due to lack of density and long distances in rural areas or traffic congestion in urban ones. The idea of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – or drones – for last mile delivery is gaining popularity. The use of drones to deliver parcels has the potential to significantly decrease delivery costs – no driver, truck or congestion – and expand coverage areas.