DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – Yemen's Houthi movement launched drone attacks on oil facilities in a remote area of Saudi Arabia, the group's Al Masirah TV said Saturday, but there was no immediate confirmation from Saudi authorities or state oil giant Aramco. A Saudi-led coalition is battling the Iran-aligned Houthis to try to restore Yemen's government, which was ousted from power in the capital, Sanaa, by the group in late 2014. The war has been in military stalemate for years. The Houthis have stepped up cross-border missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent months. "Ten drones targeted Aramco's Shaybah oilfield and refinery in the first Operation: Balance of Deterrence in the east of the kingdom," the Al Masirah channel reported, citing a Houthi military spokesman.

Gather, a company that uses autonomous drones for warehouse inventory, launched out of stealth today. Founded in 2017, the company of about 10 employees is based in Pittsburgh. Gather's founding team is made up of Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University graduates, including cofounder and chief robotics officer Sankalp Arora, whose work with the Office of Naval Research on autonomous helicopters won the 2018 Howard Hughes Award. Earlier this year, Gather closed a $2.5 million funding round to bring its products to market and grow its computer vision and software offerings. Gather supplies software for the autonomous operation of drones that can connect with existing warehouse management systems and IoT devices such as motion sensors.

We all see the headlines nearly every day. Whether primitive (gunpowder) or cutting-edge (unmanned aerial vehicles) in the wrong hands, technology can empower bad actors and put our society at risk, creating a sense of helplessness and frustration. Current approaches to protecting our public venues are not up to the task, and, frankly appear to meet Einstein's definition of insanity: "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." It is time to look past traditional defense technologies and see if newer approaches can tilt the pendulum back in the defender's favor. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a critical role here, helping to identify, classify and promulgate counteractions on potential threats faster than any security personnel.

In this Thursday, July 11, 2019, photograph, United States Department of Agriculture intern Alex Olsen prepares to place down a drone at a research farm northeast of Greeley, Colo. After a brief, snaking flight above the field, the drone landed and the researchers removed a handful of memory cards. Back at their computers, they analyzed the images for signs the corn was stressed from a lack of water. This U.S. Department of Agriculture station outside Greeley and other sites across the Southwest are experimenting with drones, specialized cameras and other technology to squeeze the most out of every drop of water in the Colorado River – a vital but beleaguered waterway that serves an estimated 40 million people. Should they still be able to use it?

A fleet of Amazon'Scout' delivery robots will roam the streets of Southern California as part of the firm's largest trial of automated'last mile' delivery. Last-mile delivery is the last stage of getting a package from a warehouse to your door, traditionally completed by a van or truck. Retailers and courier firms are racing to automate this process through the use of drones, either by land or by air. Amazon's latest roll-out follows a successful trial conducted in a small neighbourhood in Washington state earlier this year. Each Scout robot is a squat, bright blue device that gets around on six wheels.

Search and tracking is the problem of locating a moving target and following it to its destination. In this work, we consider a scenario in which the target moves across a large geographical area by following a road network and the search is performed by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We formulate search and tracking as a combinatorial optimization problem and prove that the objective function is submodular. We exploit this property to devise a greedy algorithm. Although this algorithm does not offer strong theoretical guarantees because of the presence of temporal constraints that limit the feasibility of the solutions, it presents remarkably good performance, especially when several UAVs are available for the mission. As the greedy algorithm suffers when resources are scarce, we investigate two alternative optimization techniques: Constraint Programming (CP) and AI planning. Both approaches struggle to cope with large problems, and so we strengthen them by leveraging the greedy algorithm. We use the greedy solution to warm start the CP model and to devise a domain-dependent heuristic for planning. Our extensive experimental evaluation studies the scalability of the different techniques and identifies the conditions under which one approach becomes preferable to the others.

This undated photo provided by Amazon shows a self-driving delivery robot that Amazon is calling Scout. Amazon is expanding the use of its self-driving delivery robots to a second state. NEW YORK – Amazon's self-driving robots will be roaming the streets of another neighborhood. The online shopping giant said Tuesday that the six-wheeled robots, about the size of a smaller cooler, will begin delivering packages to customers in Irvine, California. It comes after Amazon began testing them in a suburb of Seattle at the beginning of the year.

Amazon's self-driving robots will be roaming the streets of another neighborhood. The online shopping giant said Tuesday that the six-wheeled robots, about the size of a smaller cooler, will begin delivering packages to customers in Irvine, California. It comes after Amazon began testing them in a suburb of Seattle at the beginning of the year. Amazon AMZN, 1.29% said the robots, which are light blue and have the Amazon smile logo stamped on its sides, are able to avoid crashing into trash cans or pedestrians. Still, a worker will accompany the robots at first. Other companies have been testing similar delivery robots on college campuses, delivering burgers or soda to students.

TRIPOLI – A drone airstrike by eastern Libyan forces on the southern Libyan town of Murzuq has killed at least 43 people, a local official said on Monday. The attack is the second major airstrike blamed on the eastern Libyan National Army (LNA) forces loyal to Khalifa Hifter after at least 44 migrants were killed in June when a detention center in a suburb of the capital Tripoli was hit. The LNA confirmed a strike late on Sunday on Murzuq, but denied it had targeted any civilians. The LNA had also denied it had hit the detention center but acknowledged increased air strikes on the capital. The internationally recognized government based in Tripoli opposing Hifter said dozens were killed and wounded in Murzuq. Reached by telephone, Murzuq municipal council member Mohamed Omar told Reuters: "The airstrike resulted in 43 killed and 51 wounded.

Stunning footage has revealed the first evidence that leopard seals share food -- with the marine mammals caught divvying up a penguin as they feast on their kill. The ground-breaking footage was captured by a drone flying off the coast of the island of South Georgia, in the southern Atlantic. Researchers said that leopard seals are normally regarded as being solitary creatures. The Antarctic predators are largely'intolerant' of each other, but can be forced to hunt alongside each another when congregating in areas of plentiful prey, the experts added. The leopard seal is named for its black-spotted coat, whose pattern is similar to that of the big cat, though the seal's coat is grey rather than golden in colour.