Shanghai has formed a RMB 500 million ($70 million) fund to boost its drone industry and lure drone makers to the city with subsidies and preferential policies. Why it matters: Shanghai aims to become a global tech powerhouse. The city has already laid out plans to become an artificial intelligence hub and has set its sights on becoming a world "e-sports capital." Details: Shanghai's Jinshan District has implemented 18 policies to attract businesses to the city, including covering up to 20% of a firm's budget to build research and development centers in the city. Context: Jinshan hopes to attract up to 100 domestic and international drone makers by 2021.

Burleigh County Sheriff's Department receives federal waiver to fly drones over people

JERUSALEM – The long shadow war between Israel and Iran has burst into the open in recent days, with Israel allegedly striking Iran-linked targets as far away as Iraq and crash-landing two drones in Hezbollah-dominated southern Beirut. These incidents, along with an air raid in Syria that Israel says thwarted an imminent Iranian drone attack, have raised tensions at a particularly fraught time. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking to project strength three weeks before national elections, while Iran has taken a series of provocative actions in recent months aimed at pressuring European nations to provide relief from crippling U.S. sanctions. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah, vowed to retaliate after a drone crashed on the militant group's Beirut media office and another exploded midair early Sunday. Israeli forces along the border with Lebanon are on high alert, raising fears of a repeat of the 2006 war.

JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday warned Iran and its Lebanese Shiite proxy, the militant Hezbollah group, that Israel "knows how to defend itself and how to pay back its enemies." Netanyahu's remarks came in response to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's threats to retaliate against an Israeli airstrike in Syria that killed two Hezbollah members. Netanyahu said he heard the threats saying: "I suggest that Nasrallah relax." He also sent a message to Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom Israel accuses of masterminding a drone attack from Syria that it thwarted with its airstrike. "Be careful with your words and even more so be careful with your actions," Netanyahu said.

An international drone race will be held in November as one of events of the Tokyo Motor Show, which will start in late October, the organizing committee said Monday. The event will be the first drone race in Japan officially approved by the World Air Sports Federation, the international body for sky sports, according to the committee. The drone racing will be held on Nov. 1-2 at a venue of the Tokyo Motor Show, among 60 professional and licensed racers. A meeting to discuss the air traffic control systems necessary for drones will also be held, in a bid to promote the use of drones in society.

From driver-assisted vehicles on our city streets to self-driving vehicles on our factory floors, robotic and autonomous systems are becoming commonplace. You may even have one in your home, vacuuming the floors for you while you stay busy with more meaningful work. The truth is, these hands-off systems are just about everywhere anymore. In a sign of the growing adoption of robotic systems, the market-advisory firm ABI Research predicts that, by 2025, more than 4 million commercial robots will be on the job in over 50,000 warehouses, up from just under 4,000 robotic warehouses in 2018.1 And that's just warehouses -- that's not the "everywhere else" where these worker bees are found.

Planning for multi-robot coverage seeks to determine collision-free paths for a fleet of robots, enabling them to collectively observe points of interest in an environment. Persistent coverage is a variant of traditional coverage where coverage-levels in the environment decay over time. Thus, robots have to continuously revisit parts of the environment to maintain a desired coverage-level. Facilitating this in the real world demands we tackle numerous subproblems. While there exist standard solutions to these subproblems, there is no complete framework that addresses all of their individual challenges as a whole in a practical setting. We adapt and combine these solutions to present a planning framework for persistent coverage with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Specifically, we run a continuous loop of goal assignment and globally deconflicting, kinodynamic path planning for multiple UAVs. We evaluate our framework in simulation as well as the real world. In particular, we demonstrate that (i) our framework exhibits graceful coverage given sufficient resources, we maintain persistent coverage; if resources are insufficient (e.g., having too few UAVs for a given size of the enviornment), coverage-levels decay slowly and (ii) planning with global deconfliction in our framework incurs a negligibly higher price compared to other weaker, more local collision-checking schemes. (Video: https://youtu.be/aqDs6Wymp5Q)

Early Tuesday, Hezbollah changed its description of the first drone, saying that it had been carrying 12 pounds of explosives. The group's officials had previously said the first drone was for surveillance while the second was laden with explosives. Hezbollah is a political party represented in the Lebanese government as well as the country's most formidable military force. It fought a devastating war against Israel in 2006 and has more recently sent fighters to help President Bashar al-Assad of Syria fight rebels seeking to overthrow him. Israel and Iran have long been staunch enemies, but the conflict has heated up recently as Israel has increasingly attacked armed groups that Iran backs to extend its influence in the Arab world.

BEIRUT – Israeli drones bombed a Palestinian base in eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria early Monday amid rising tensions in the Middle East, the Lebanese state-run National News Agency and a Palestinian official said. The strike came a day after an alleged Israeli drone crashed in a stronghold of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in southern Beirut while another exploded and crashed nearby. Lebanese President Michel Aoun told the U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jan Kubis, that the attacks violate a U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. "What happened is equal to a declaration of war and gives us the right to defend our sovereignty, independence, and the safety of our land," Aoun said in comments released by his office Monday. "We are people who seek peace and not war, and we don't accept that anyone to threatens us though any means."

BAGHDAD – A powerful bloc in Iraq's parliament called on Monday for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, following a series of airstrikes targeting Iran-backed Shiite militias in the country that have been blamed on Israel. The Fatah Coalition said it holds the United States fully responsible for the alleged Israeli aggression, "which we consider to be a declaration of war on Iraq and its people." The coalition is a parliament bloc representing Iran-backed paramilitary militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. The coalition's statement came a day after a drone strike in the western Iraqi town of Qaim killed a commander with the forces -- the latest in strikes apparently conducted by Israel against the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. It added that U.S. troops are no longer needed in Iraq.