The efficiency and dynamism of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, present substantial application opportunities in several industries in the last years. Notably, the logistic companies gave close attention to these vehicles envisioning reduce delivery time and operational cost. A variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) called Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) was introduced involving drone-assisted parcel delivery. The drone is launched from the truck, proceeds to deliver parcels to a customer and then is recovered by the truck in a third location. While the drone travels through a trip, the truck delivers parcels to other customers as long as the drone has enough battery to hover waiting for the truck. This work proposes a hybrid heuristic that the initial solution is created from the optimal TSP solution reached by a TSP solver. Next, an implementation of the General Variable Neighborhood Search is used to obtain the delivery routes of truck and drone. Computational experiments show the potential of the algorithm to improve the delivery time significantly. Furthermore, we provide a new set of instances based on well-known TSPLIB instances.

File photo - An airplane flies over a drone during the Polar Bear Plunge on Coney Island in the Brooklyn borough of New York Jan. 1, 2015. A video produced by the University of Dayton Research Institute shows in alarming detail what happens when a drone collides with a plane. The test, which mimicked a midair collision at 238 mph, launched a 2.1-pound DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter into the wing of a Mooney M20 aircraft. Experts from UDRI's Impact Physics group note that the drone did not shatter on impact, but tore open the wing's leading edge, damaging its main spar. "While the quadcopter broke apart, its energy and mass hung together to create significant damage to the wing," explained Kevin Poormon, group leader for impact physics at UDRI, in a statement.

Squeezed by the U.S. military, the power of the terror group has shrunk. But, as Lucas Tomlinson reports, the fight is far from over. ISIS has threatened a drone attack on the Eiffel Tower with a chilling new poster. The threat comes just four months after Paris installed a 10ft anti-terror wall around the landmark, using bulletproof glass to protect visitors from potential attacks. The red and black poster shows a drone carrying a sizeable object while flying next to the Eiffel Tower, which is framed in crosshairs.

Robots are coming for our jobs, and the work left over for humans is getting worse and paying less. Changes in technology and culture over the past decade have created jobs your high school guidance counselor could never imagine in their wildest dreams. Meanwhile, the safe, traditional jobs like lawyering and doctoring come with ever-increasing price tags and fewer career prospects. Unless the post-work utopia theorists are raving about comes around soon, picking your career is one of the most important choices of your life. You might as well make it one that's fulfilling and cuts a decent paycheck.

Skydio's highly autonomous R1 drone is already mostly hands-free. Now, however, you might not need something in your hands even when you do take control. It's releasing an Apple Watch app for the R1 that offers basic control in those moments when you'd rather not pull out your phone. You can tell it to follow one of the people it sees by tapping on a thumbnail, switch between cinematic modes and even turn the drone by spinning the crown. You won't be piloting the R1 with the same dexterity as on your phone, but it promises to be a lot faster for those moments when you just want to make a quick tweak to the flight path.

Commercial pilot John Marking tells his story of a small drone taking down his helicopter while working at an off-road desert race in Mexico. A simulation shows what a drone could do to the wing of an airplane upon impact. Even a small drone crashing into an airplane can do major damage, a test video shows. Kevin Poormon, a University of Dayton engineer who has performed numerous bird strike tests on airplanes, mimicked a midair collision between a 2.1-pound DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter and a Mooney M20 airplane. The drone bore into the plane much farther than a similarly weighted gel "bird" and damaged the plane's main spar, which carries the weight of the wing.

Delivery drones are real and they're operating on a national level, but they're not dropping off impulse purchases, and some of the most important applications are not in the United States. Zipline, a Bay Area startup, inked a deal with the government of Rwanda in 2016 and now uses small, autonomous planes to deliver medical supplies, and in particular blood, to rural communities across the African country. "It's a pretty cool paradigm shift for people who think all technological revolution is going on in US, and it'll trickle down to poor countries," says Zipline CEO, Keller Rinaudo, presenting his vision for drone deliveries on stage at the WIRED25 summit in San Francisco on Monday. "This is the opposite of that." Amazon created an internet-wide buzz when it announced it wanted to start delivering online shopping via drone, in a 60 Minutes interview in 2013.

The Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2018 is not the most exciting-sounding piece of legislation in the world. The 1,200-page bill, which funds the FAA through 2023 and covers everything from airplane seat size to airport noise, was signed by President Donald Trump on Oct. 5 with little fanfare--even less than it might have ordinarily received, thanks to the drama of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation. But it could have used the scrutiny: Embedded within it are provisions that give the government new authority to take down civilian drones. The omnibus legislation included the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018, which authorizes the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to "take actions" to "mitigate a credible threat (as defined by the Secretary or the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Transportation) that an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft poses to the safety or security of a covered facility or asset." This "mitigation"--which wouldn't require a warrant, or judicial review or oversight--could include physically disabling the drone, taking it over, intercepting its communications, and seizing the drone itself.

This is where robots come in. Resembling oversize Roombas topped with Ikea shelving, these Kiva robots can carry up to 750 pounds of goods in their 40-odd cubbies. After a customer places an order, a robot carrying the desired item scoots over to a worker, who reads on a screen what item to pick and what cubby it's located in, scans a bar code and places the item in a bright-yellow bin that travels by conveyor belt to a packing station. AI suggests an appropriate box size; a worker places the item in the box, which a robot tapes shut and, after applying a shipping label, sends on its way. Humans are needed mostly for grasping and placing, tasks that robots haven't mastered yet.

Moreover, primarily used by P/C insurers to adjust claims or conduct property inspections, the proliferation of big data and third-party partnerships have made implementation cost-effective for insurers of all sizes. "Unlike machine learning and artificial intelligence initiatives, drones can be implemented in cost-effective ways by insurers of all sizes," said Martina Conlon, Senior Vice President of Research and Consulting, and co-author of Novarica's new report. "While not all carriers have the in-house resources or budget to analyze data collected by drones or telematics sensors, they have the option to partner with third parties. These third-party companies can serve a variety of roles, whether they provide drones, analyze the data collected by drones and generate scores via predictive models, or all of the above." A preview of the brief is available online.