US Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned during a speech on artificial intelligence at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence public conference Tuesday (Nov. "Beijing has made it abundantly clear that it intends to be the world leader in AI by 2030," Esper said. "While the US faces a mighty task in transitioning the world's most advanced military to new AI-enabled systems, China believes it can leapfrog our current technology and go straight to the next generation." Middle East countries banned from purchasing advanced US drones due to a weapons embargo are increasingly gravitating towards Chinese defense manufacturers. The drone sales are supporting China's expansion across the Middle East, which is home to many strategic US military bases, as well as, future and current routes for Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative.

Ayatollah Khamenei doubles down on Iran's commitment not to engage in talks with the United States; Trey Yingst reports. The drone was reportedly hit in the early morning at the port city of Mahshahr, which is in the oil-rich Khuzestan province and lies on the Persian Gulf. "The downed droned definitely belonged to a foreign country. Its wreckage has been recovered and is being investigated," the governor of Khuzestan, Gholamreza Shariati, said, according to the official IRNA news agency. He said the drone violated Iran's airspace but did not provide any additional information, including whether it was a military or civilian drone.

The UK government has approved £2 million ($2.57 million) worth of funding for 18 projects that will develop anti-drone and drone detection technologies. The funding comes part of a competition held by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) program under the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD). MOD officials approved funding earlier this year, in April, after a series of amateur drone incursions froze air travel at several airports across the UK. Infamous is a three-day incident at the Gatwick Airport in London just before Christmas last year, and another day of flight cancellations in January, at Heathrow, London, one of the world's largest airports. In April, MOD, through DASA, asked the private sector for solutions to detect and neutralize "small UAS (unmanned aerial system) threats."

Showcasing the broad adoption of its Jetson platform, Nvidia says there are over 400,000 registered developers using Jetson, and over 3,000 customers using them for applications. Some of the examples the company provided included PostMates Delivery Robot, Skydio's new drone, and an AI Microscope developed by Stanford University. Speaking from personal experience developing on and for a Jetson Nano and a JetBot, the tools, platform, and support are excellent, so there is every reason to believe that Xavier NX will be a big hit with those looking to push AI at the Edge to the next level.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. We spoke to security experts to figure out how drones could be stopped from flying around airports and disrupting the air traffic. The answers: ultrasound, radio noise - or find a way to connect to them.

This week researchers from the University of Florida published findings from an archaeological project that sheds new light on what life was like in North America before Christopher Columbus arrived. Using drones to scan the coastline of northwestern Florida, researchers discovered evidence of a settlement dated between 900 to 1200 AD. They discovered evidence of a settlement that could have supported between 200 and 300 people, who they believe worked to create one beads and decorative ornaments from shells that played an important role in Mississippian culture at the time. The settlement was discovered on Raleigh Island, halfway between Tampa and Tallahassee on Florida's northwestern coast, just outside the Cedar Keys Wildlife Refuge. The drone that discovered the settlement was equipped with a LiDAR system, according to a report by ArsTechnica. LiDAR sends out light rays and then measures the differences in how those rays are reflected back from the environment to create a three-dimensional image of the terrain.

Incredible drone footage of a pod of Orcas has been captured off the coast of British Colombia, Canada, by scientists monitoring the endangered population. Heart warming scenes show the moment a baby is nuzzled by its protective mother before playfully slapping her on the head with its tail. Touchingly the footage revealed to the scientists how the loving animals made physical contact with each other far more than expected. Researchers at Hakai Institute took the videos to study the feeding behaviours of endangered resident killer whales, fearing that the Killer whales' days on the coast might be numbered. They captured the serene beasts in their undisturbed habitat, and observed the day-to-day life of an orca as they had never seen it before, including hunting habits and communication between the animals - captured with an underwater microphone.

The package company and its partner, CVS, have completed the first commercial medical drone delivery in the US. Using a M2 drone, the prescriptions were lowered down to two separate destinations via a cable while the unmanned aerial vehicle hovered 20 feet above each home. UPS and CVS, have completed the first commercial medical drone delivery in the US. The milestone is a result of UPS becoming the first drone delivery service to receive full approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. UPS and CVS carried out two flights on Friday, November 1st – both dropped off prescriptions to paying customers in Cary, North Carolina.

Drone users in the UK must now sit an online test and pay a £9 annual fee or face a £1,000 fine after the launch of a mandatory national registration scheme on Tuesday. Owners are obliged to identify and label all drones by 30 November, and operators must pass a test about legal and safe usage before they can fly them. The Civil Aviation Authority estimates that about 130,000 people will have to pay and register by the end of the month. All drones weighing more than 250g, which encompasses virtually all but the smallest toys, must be registered and labelled with a unique licence number. This means they will have to be grounded to identify their owners, but in future it could be done remotely or while drones are in the air.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method of navigation for robots that could be very useful for the range of companies working on autonomous last-mile delivery. In short, the team has worked out how a robot can figure out the location of a front door, without being provided a specific map in advance. Most last-mile autonomous delivery robots today, including the "wheeled cooler"-style variety that was pioneered by Starship and has since been adopted by a number of other companies, including Postmates, basically meet customers at the curb. Mapping isn't the only barrier to having future delivery bots go all the way to the door, just like the humans who make those deliveries today. MIT News points out that mapping an entire neighborhood with the level of specificity required to do true front-door delivery would be incredibly difficult -- particularly at national (let alone global) scale.