MOSCOW - The Russian Defense Ministry has deployed a surveillance drone with an artillery division to a group of islands controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan, a Russian newspaper reported on Monday. The drone will be used for patrolling coastal areas and surrounding waters, as well as for rescue operations, according to the newspaper, Izvestia. The artillery unit is stationed on two of the four Russian-controlled islands off the coast of Hokkaido, known in Japan as Etorofu and Kunashiri. The Orlan-10 drone, the same type as those sent by Russia to Syria, is able to operate within a 120-kilometer radius for up to 14 hours while transmitting images from a mounted camera, the Russian paper said.

In this paper, multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled mobile edge computing (MEC), i.e., UAVE is studied, where several UAVs are deployed as flying MEC platform to provide computing resource to ground user equipments (UEs). Compared to the traditional fixed location MEC, UAV enabled MEC (i.e., UAVE) is particular useful in case of temporary events, emergency situations and on-demand services, due to its high flexibility, low cost and easy deployment features. However, operation of UAVE faces several challenges, two of which are how to achieve both 1) the association between multiple UEs and UAVs and 2) the resource allocation from UAVs to UEs, while minimizing the energy consumption for all the UEs. To address this, we formulate the above problem into a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), which is difficult to be solved in general, especially in the large-scale scenario. We then propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based user Association and resource Allocation (RLAA) algorithm to tackle this problem efficiently and effectively. Numerical results show that the proposed RLAA can achieve the optimal performance with comparison to the exhaustive search in small scale, and have considerable performance gain over other typical algorithms in large-scale cases.

Hundreds of the drones could be ready for action in just a couple of years, the firm behind the project says. The two-seater drone has been comprehensively tested and is ready for mass production, boasted Derrick Xiong, co-founder of Chinese drone firm EHang. However, the machine is not yet allowed to fly in Austrian airspace, so was restricted to "hops" inside the stadium.

In the 1970s, faced with the USSR's overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Department of Defense decided to compensate by focusing on high technology platforms. This led to the highly successful F-15, F-16, F-18, Abrams tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles. Since then, the United States has continued to pursue cutting edge technology that has resulted in the highly capable F-22 and, when the testing and software development is complete, perhaps a highly capable F-35. Unfortunately, cost has accelerated faster than capabilities. And thus numbers have declined precipitously. The U.S. Air Force initially planned to buy 750 F-22s, but the high cost led Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to cap the program at 187. Nor has the Air Force been alone in pursuing top end systems. The Navy attempted an entirely new concept with "Streetfighter." Meant to be a low-cost, highly capable ship to replace the Navy's frigates and minesweepers for operations in brown water, it evolved into the Littoral Combat Ship.

Google has caved to pressure from its staff and abandoned a new AI ethics panel after hundreds demanded conservative members of the board were sacked for their views. The search giant announced last week that it was setting up a new board to tackle moral issues surrounding its use of the technology. It hoped to avoid controversies by using a broad spectrum of expertise to inform its future decisions, but the move has ironically stirred up a debacle of its own. Eight experts from outside the company were recruited and employees at the traditionally liberal leaning firm took issue with two of the appointees. More than 1,000 of its protest-prone workers signed an open letter objecting to specific board members, who they say are'anti-trans' and pro-military drones.

Defense and security organizations depend upon science and technology to meet operational needs, predict and counter threats, and meet increasingly complex demands of modern warfare. Artificial intelligence and robotics could provide solutions to a wide range of military gaps and deficiencies. At the same time, the unique and rapidly evolving nature of AI and robotics challenges existing polices, regulations, and values, and introduces complex ethical issues that might impede their development, evaluation, and use by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Early consideration of potential ethical issues raised by military use of emerging AI and robotics technologies in development is critical to their effective implementation. This article presents an ethics assessment framework for emerging AI and robotics technologies. It is designed to help technology developers, policymakers, decision makers, and other stakeholders identify and broadly consider potential ethical issues that might arise with the military use and integration of emerging AI and robotics technologies of interest. We also provide a contextual environment for our framework, as well as an example of how our framework can be applied to a specific technology. Finally, we briefly identify and address several pervasive issues that arose during our research.

Aerial filming is becoming more and more popular thanks to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose an intelligent agent which supervises motion planning of a filming drone based on aesthetical values of video shots using deep reinforcement learning. Unlike the current state-of-the-art approaches which mostly require explicit guidance by a human expert, our drone learns how to make favorable shot type selections by experience. We propose a learning scheme which exploits aesthetical features of retrospective shots in order to extract a desirable policy for better prospective shots. We train our agent in realistic AirSim simulations using both hand-crafted and human reward functions. We deploy the same agent on a real DJI M210 drone in order to test generalization capability of our approach to real world conditions. To evaluate the success of our approach in the end, we conduct a comprehensive user study in which participants rate the shots taken using our method and write comments about them.

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke: A Russian defense contractor has patented a drone that uses a shotgun to blast other drones out of the sky. It comes from Almaz Antey, a Russian defense contractor that manufactures the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile that caused a rift between Turkey and the US. The tail-sitting drone takes off on the spot but flies like an airplane for greater efficiency, giving it a 40-minute range while packing a fully-automatic Vepr-12 shotgun with a 10-round magazine. The drone was built by the "Student Design Bureau of Aviation Modeling" at the Moscow Aviation Institute for Almaz Antey. It's of a similar type used by mining companies, farmers and others to survey pipelines and other installations. A visor-wearing operator uses a live video link to fly the drone and aim the weapon, which is tucked into the nose of the aircraft.

If you're inclined to puns, you might say medical samples are the lifeblood of hospital systems. But if you actually work with them, you know they're more of a headache. Because the same road traffic that keeps you from getting home keeps the couriers charged with moving these tissue and blood samples, collected by the millions daily and often in urgent need of analysis, from completing their missions. So it makes a lot of sense that when the FAA decided to sanction the first revenue-generating drone delivery scheme in the US, it went with one that promises to speed up that process, run by UPS and autonomous drone technology firm Matternet. It makes sense from the tech perspective, too: The cargo is extremely lightweight and compact, allowing the companies involved to focus on the delivery processes and mechanisms rather than trying to manage unwieldy payloads.

An ingenious idea implemented in the West Zone of GHMC for eradication of mosquitoes and larvae from lake, with the help of drones, is all set to be replicated along the Musi River. On an experimental basis, GHMC Commissioner M. Dana Kishore has asked the Entomology wing to use drones to spray anti-larval chemicals in the mosquito-breeding points inside the river in the coming days. Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Dana Kishore said a total of 11 breeding points have been identified on the 5-km stretch of the river between Nagole and Attapur, where the spraying will be done on pilot basis. If successful, the same will be replicated in other parts of the river. "It is difficult for the entomology staff to reach some inaccessible regions in the river to spray the anti-larval chemical. Using drones will address this problem," Mr. Dana Kishore said, even while acknowledging the limitation caused by flowing water, which necessitates continual spraying.