Scientists can now weigh wild whales using remote-controlled drones hovering above them. In the past it has only been possible to measure the weight of free-living whales if they were dead and out of the water or stranded on a beach. But researchers have released aerial footage of them flying a drone over a mother and baby southern right whale, near Argentina, to work out how much they weigh. They can do this by taking photographs to work out the length, width and height of the animal. This can then be compared to past measurements of the density of that particular species of whale's body, to estimate its volume and weight.

I reviewed the company's first drone, the R1, and my jaw's still on the floor. Most drones fall into the "remote control vehicle" category, the R1 and Skydio 2 are better described as robots. They rely on computer vision to effectively see in every direction. And both use a proprietary AI system to avoid crashing, perform aerial cinematography maneuvers, and follow people and vehicles. The Skydio 2 features six 4K cameras and flies at up to 38MPH.

Missile could strike U.S. withing 30 minutes; retired Army Gen. Anthony Tata reacts. China's Communist Party marked 70 years in power Tuesday with a military parade showcasing the country's global ambitions and advancements in weapons technology. Trucks carrying nuclear missiles designed to evade U.S. defenses, a supersonic attack drone and other products of a two-decade-old weapons development effort rolled through Beijing as soldiers marched past President Xi Jinping and other leaders on Tiananmen Square. Fighter jets flew over spectators who waved Chinese flags. The display highlighted Beijing's ambition for strategic influence to match its status as the second-largest global economy, even as Xi's government suppresses dissent that illustrates the tensions between a closed, one-party dictatorship and a rapidly evolving society.

The European Robotics League (ERL) presents the SciRoc Challenge, a new robotics competition on smart cities that occurs every two years in a European city. Funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 framework programme, the first SciRoc challenge takes place in the city of Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. They update stock lists, take customers' orders or find out the location of a person in need. On the third day of the competition, teams continued competing in the five different episodes and the public could see the first trials in the emergency category. The aerial teams were ready to start delivering autonomously the first-aid kit to the mannequin placed inside the flying arena!

Posting the landscapes of drone strikes to Instagram: Follow Dronestagram (also on Tumblr and Twitter). These are the names of places. They are towns, villages, junctions and roads. They are the names of places where people live and work, where there are families and schools. They are the names of places in Afghanistan and Yemen, which are linked by one thing: they have each been the location of drone strikes in the past couple of months.

A massive $16.28 million microwave weapon system designed to'disrupt' and'damage' drones is set to be tested overseas for operational evaluations. Called PHASER, this military owned devices uses electromagnetic pulse to take down swarms of enemy drones. The news of the high-powered device's deployment comes just weeks after a fleet of 10 drones attacked a refinery and oil field in Saudi Arabia. The weapon is mounted on a 20-ft. The device's parameters can be set to'disrupt' or'damage'.

This paper demonstrates a reinforcement learning approach to the optimization of power consumption in a UAV system in a simplified data collection task. Here, the architecture consists of two common reinforcement learning algorithms, Q-learning and Sarsa, which are implemented through a combination of robot operating system (ROS) and Gazebo. The effect of wind as an influential factor was simulated. The implemented algorithm resulted in reasonable adjustment of UAV actions to the wind field in order to minimize its power consumption during task completion over the domain.

We consider the problem of controlling a large fleet of drones to deliver packages simultaneously across broad urban areas. To conserve their limited flight range, drones can seamlessly hop between and ride on top of public transit vehicles (e.g., buses and trams). We design a novel comprehensive algorithmic framework that strives to minimize the maximum time to complete any delivery. We address the multifaceted complexity of the problem through a two-layer approach. First, the upper layer assigns drones to package delivery sequences with a provably near-optimal polynomial-time task allocation algorithm. Then, the lower layer executes the allocation by periodically routing the fleet over the transit network while employing efficient bounded-suboptimal multi-agent pathfinding techniques tailored to our setting. We present extensive experiments supporting the efficiency of our approach on settings with up to $200$ drones, $5000$ packages, and large transit networks of up to $8000$ stops in San Francisco and the Washington DC area. Our results show that the framework can compute solutions within a few seconds (up to $2$ minutes for the largest settings) on commodity hardware, and that drones travel up to $450 \%$ of their flight range by using public transit.

Drones are all the rage today. Not a day goes by that we don't read about someone using a drone for something (good or bad) somewhere on Earth. AI or Artificial Intelligence has also made a resurgence. I say that because there was a time, not too long ago (about 7 years ago) when AI was also very popular and a number of movies featuring AI were produced by Hollywood. Now if we combine the two, what do we get?

Fifty years ago, Mike Sanders watched with awe and anticipation as the crew of Apollo 11--Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins--splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Landing men on the moon and returning them safely to the earth was a seminal moment in the history of flight, and it had a profound effect on then 7-year-old Sanders, who now heads the Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence & Innovation at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Looking back, Sanders says he never expected the day to come when he would be working with NASA on anything, let alone another chapter in the history of flight. But this year, he landed in the middle of one of the most important aeronautical projects of this generation: an effort to build a safe and effective unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) platform. In August, Texas A&M–Corpus Christi's Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence and its partners' workers stood alongside NASA scientists and engineers as they flew 22 small physical and digital drones above and between tall buildings in five areas of Corpus Christi. The low-altitude test culminated a five-year effort to learn what it would take to build a nationwide system for managing low-altitude drone traffic.