JERUSALEM – The Israeli military said Tuesday the militant group Hezbollah and Iran have built a precision-missile factory in neighboring Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The army issued a statement saying that "in fear of strikes" by Israel, Hezbollah had moved key equipment from the site to "civilian locations in Beirut." It didn't specify when this happened. The military said the factory was of "superior importance" to Hezbollah. An official, speaking anonymously under military rules, said the factory is operational but missing major components.

Michael Niedermayer used to fly drones for the U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency, gathering real-time, life-and-death intelligence on battlefields in Iraq. Now he pilots delivery robots for a San Francisco Bay Area startup that wants to disrupt burrito delivery. Postmates, which in mid-August received a permit to operate its Serve delivery robot in San Francisco and is already testing it for food delivery in Los Angeles, employs a growing team of "pilots" to remotely oversee, and at times steer, these four-wheeled food ferries. "We will probably see a drastic increase in our workforce over the next five years," says Postmates Chief Executive Bastian Lehmann. Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones.

NEW DELHI: A team of students at IIT Madras has developed a drone technology that can help in rescue and relief operations, especially after natural disasters. "The solution is beta-ready and can be deployed. It is currently being tested and would reach the commercialisation phase within six months," said Ayush Parasbhai Maniar, student member, UAVs for Disaster Management, Centre for Innovation (CFI) -- Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. "The iterations to improve every feature would continue. The team's artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution is used in combination with drones that use swarm intelligence to collect data and analyse it in real-time. The project is being executed with data inputs from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). The drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), will have a software that will be compatible with standard drones available in the market. "Thus, for the physical drone we would be partnering with a drone company," Maniar said. This IIT team has also won. 10 lakh in funding from the Indian Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP 2.0) University Challenge, a programme conducted by the department of science and technology along with global defence manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation and Tata Trusts. "This solution is based on innovation based on futuristic disruptive technologies.

Researchers launch and retrieve drones from a boat to photograph humpback and minke whales in the Western Antarctic Peninsula. BEAUFORT -- The swift pace of technological development has given researchers tools that can collect more data in less time and with fewer resources than a decade ago. Lightweight tags with long-lasting batteries can track animals as small as insects and measure the conditions around them. DNA sequencing technologies have decoded the genomes of thousands of organisms from the loblolly pine to the black bear. Drones can quickly photograph landscapes and animals in locations that may be inaccessible or unsafe for people.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously navigate in disaster struck environments and land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as pre-existing maps cannot be leveraged for navigation due to structural changes that may have occurred. Furthermore, existing landing site detection algorithms are not suitable to identify safe landing regions on debris piles. In this work, we present a computationally efficient system for autonomous UAV navigation and landing that does not require any prior knowledge about the environment. We propose a novel landing site detection algorithm that computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy, and energy consumption information. We also introduce a first-of-a-kind synthetic dataset of over 1.2 million images of collapsed buildings with groundtruth depth, surface normals, semantics and camera pose information. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.

The US, China, Russia and the UK are among a growing number of countries that are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as they look to develop a new generation of advanced weapons system. The Pentagon, in the US, has made a commitment to spend $2 billion over the next five years through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its OFFSET programme, for example, is looking to develop drone swarms comprising of up to 250 unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or unmanned ground systems (UGSs) for deployment across a number of diverse and complex environments. In China, there are a growing number of collaborations between defence and academic institutions in the development of AI and machine learning and Tsinghua University has launched the Military-Civil Fusion National Defense Peak Technologies Laboratory to create "a platform for the pursuit of dual-use applications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence." Russia has gone one step further and is creating a new city named Era, which is devoted entirely to military innovation.

Before such flying vehicles can take off, however, there are a number of challenges, from needing new infrastructure to regulatory concerns, to convincing passengers that the technology is safe. For a start, Ehang will be working with the authorities in Guangzhou to build up infrastructure like landing and take off pads, according to Xiong. The company was recently picked by the Civil Aviation Administration of China as the country's first company to start a pilot program for the development of autonomous passenger drones. The startup is also working with Chinese regulators to develop an updated set of regulations to account for this new technology, as existing laws are lacking on this front. "We are seeing so much positive changes in the past several years," Xiong said. "When we started from … year 2016 ... nobody even know what is this all about.

A new, huge cargo drone, the APT 70, had the video of its first flight recorded and uploaded by pioneering aerospace manufacturer Bell. Built for delivery and disaster relief, the APT 70 can travel up to 18 miles on a single charge. The video shows off the impressive capabilities of cargo drones and how they could be used as an efficient future delivery system. The Autonomous Pod Transport 70 - or APT 70 for short - is 180 centimeters tall. The Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft comes with a range of 18 miles on a single charge.

We have no chance of escaping the coming robot revolution, nor should we want to. Our modern lives are already full of robots -- they're in our phones, our cars, hospitals and boardrooms, assisting everyone from factory workers to astrophysicists. They make our lives overwhelmingly better -- that is, until one gets between a hungover human and their morning jolt of java. In Talking to Robots, journalist and author David Ewing Duncan -- with help from some of today's leading scientific researchers -- presents 24 visions of the future and what our personal and professional interactions might look like once robots finish taking over. Need my hit of caffeine.

The energy sector was the largest industry in 2018 and will continue to be so in 2024. However, the Transportation & Warehousing industry will continue to be the fastest growing. This is partly because, as defined by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), this vertical includes industries providing transportation of passengers (although air taxis won't sell for some time still) and cargo, warehousing and storage for goods, and support activities related to modes of transportation like inspection and maintenance of infrastructure. While agriculture and construction currently follow energy as the top industries in the drone market, the growth of the transport sector will mean that in 2024 transport will be the 2nd largest industry on the market.