DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - A Yemen rebel drone strike this week on a critical Saudi oil pipeline shows that the otherwise-peaceful sandy reaches of the Arabian Peninsula now are at risk of similar assault, including an under-construction nuclear power plant and Dubai International Airport, among the world's busiest. U.N. investigators said the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500 km (930 miles). That puts the far reaches of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two main opponents of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen, within reach of drones difficult to detect and track. Their relatively simple design, coupled with readily available information online, makes targeting even easier, analysts say. "These installations are easily findable, like on Google Earth," said Tim Michetti, an expert on illicit weapons technology with experience in Yemen.

SANAA - The Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen carried out several airstrikes on the Houthi-held capital Sanaa on Thursday after the Iranian-aligned movement claimed responsibility for drone attacks on Saudi oil installations. The Sanaa strikes targeted nine military sites in and around the city, residents said, with humanitarian agencies reporting a number of casualties. Rubble filled a populated street lined by mud-brick houses, a Reuters journalist on the scene said. A crowd of men lifted the body of a women, wrapped in a white shroud, into an ambulance. Houthi-run Masirah television quoted the Houthi health ministry as saying six civilians, including four children, had been killed and 60 wounded, including two Russian women working in the health sector.

DJI is treading on GoPro's turf with their new Osmo Action camera featuring their "rock steady" stabilization. How does it compare with the Hero 7? Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY And it acts like it as well, with a caveat: The company that makes it, Chinese drone-maker DJI, says video footage on its Osmo Action camera is smoother than on the GoPro. We tried the camera in a back-to-back shootout with the GoPro Hero 7 Black, and the "RockSteady" footage isn't steadier and is, in fact, barely as smooth as the GoPro. But it is less wild and saturated, meaning that if you use an action camera to shoot footage of human beings, as opposed to surfing, cycling, hiking and the like, your subjects are going to look better. My guess is, though, that you want the camera for action, not portraits.

The FAA plans to release its remote identification ruling for UAS in July, UAS Integration Office Executive Director Jay Merkle said in front of Congress last week. The remote ID rules -- often compared to license plates for drones -- would allow the FAA, police officers and other public officials to look up a UAS by a broadcast unique identifier and find out information about the operator. This would go hand-in-hand with registration rules to prevent uncooperative flights around airports or other illegal uses from going unpunished. "We are working currently to ensure that we keep the policy component along with standards and remote id infrastructure all developed and harmonized," Merkle said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about integrating new entrants into the National Airspace System. Remote ID has its detractors, who say it exposes too much private information of operators, but the FAA determined that it is necessary since, unlike with a car, the operator is not present, and there needs to be some accountability attached to that anonymity.

One of nature's most remarkable creations is the hummingbird, which flaps its wings up to 80 times per second and which can hover in place and fly in any direction. Now scientists have used machine learning algorithms to study the way these birds fly in order to replicate their abilities in drones. The robot, developed by researchers at Purdue University, has artificial intelligence (A.I.) which learns from hummingbird simulations and applies its findings to the movements of its flexible flapping wings. This is useful because of limitations on how small a drone can be made. When drones are shrunk to very small sizes, they cannot generate enough lift to move their weight.

At the same time, my relaxed post-vacation disposition was quickly rocked by the news of the day and recent discussions regarding the extent of AI bias within New York's financial system. These unrelated incidents are very much connected in representing the paradox of the acceleration of today's inventions. Last Friday, The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) became the first hospital system to safely transport, via drone, a live organ to a waiting transplant patient with kidney failure. The demonstration illustrates the huge opportunity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to significantly reduce the time, costs, and outcome of organ transplants by removing human-piloted helicopters from the equation. As Dr. Joseph Scalea, UMMC project lead, explains "There remains a woeful disparity between the number of recipients on the organ transplant waiting list and the total number of transplantable organs. This new technology has the potential to help widen the donor organ pool and access to transplantation."

Imagine you're hiking through the woods near a border. Suddenly, you hear a mechanical buzzing, like a gigantic bee. Two quadcopters have spotted you and swoop in for a closer look. They send the signals to a central server, which triangulates your exact location and feeds it back to the drones. Cameras and other sensors on the machines recognize you as human and try to ascertain your intentions.

This paper investigates the autonomous control of massive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for mission-critical applications (e.g., dispatching many UAVs from a source to a destination for firefighting). Achieving their fast travel and low motion energy without inter-UAV collision under wind perturbation is a daunting control task, which incurs huge communication energy for exchanging UAV states in real time. We tackle this problem by exploiting a mean-field game (MFG) theoretic control method that requires the UAV state exchanges only once at the initial source. Afterwards, each UAV can control its acceleration by locally solving two partial differential equations (PDEs), known as the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov (FPK) equations. This approach, however, brings about huge computation energy for solving the PDEs, particularly under multi-dimensional UAV states. We address this issue by utilizing a machine learning (ML) method where two separate ML models approximate the solutions of the HJB and FPK equations. These ML models are trained and exploited using an online gradient descent method with low computational complexity. Numerical evaluations validate that the proposed ML aided MFG theoretic algorithm, referred to as MFG learning control, is effective in collision avoidance with low communication energy and acceptable computation energy.

A report from the Wall Street Journal has revealed the US is using a new type of dive-bombing'missile' that kills targets without exploding. The weapon called the R9X, or the'flying Ginsu,' is designed to crush targets by dropping through buildings and cars with the help of a six large blades that deploy seconds before impact. According to the report, the goal of the weapon is to reduce unintended casualties caused by other more standard missiles that typically detonate and engulf both targets and their surroundings. Hellfire missiles may be effective, but they often endanger innocent bystanders. The R9X or'flying Ginsu' is a weapon developed by the US military to precision-target individuals.

One of the most radioactive places on Earth has been mapped in unprecedented detail, thanks to a team of British scientists equipped with the latest in drone technology. Chernobyl's Red Forest remains highly irradiated 33 years on from the catastrophic accident at the number-4 nuclear reactor. Experts led by the UK's National Centre for Nuclear Robotics and the University of Bristol used drones fitted with custom-built radiation detectors to create 3D maps of the area, some of which lies just 1,600ft (500m) from the power plant. Their efforts revealed previously undetected radiation'hotspots', where radioactive material from the fallout has gathered over the years. Around 70,000 tourists visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone last year, which stretches over 1,000 square miles (2,600 sq km).