Japan wants to commercialize flying vehicles as early as the 2020s through a government- backed campaign that already has recruited the likes of Subaru, Uber and Boeing. The country's powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry launched the project last month with a meeting that pulled together public agencies and private industry. The flight of fancy comes amid Japan's concern that its auto industry was caught flat-footed in other emerging global technology trends such as autonomous driving and ride-hailing. The government wants Japan to have a leading role when it comes to personal flying vehicles. "Globally, there is a growing interest in what is called'flying cars' that will enable such transportation services in the sky," the trade ministry said in a statement after the first meeting.

The CIA is reportedly expanding its armed drone programme in Africa and will start using a military base in the Nigerien desert to carry out raids on areas where ISIL and al-Qaeda are believed to operate. The New York Times reported on Monday that a secret military base in Dirkou, about 250km south of the Libyan border, will soon begin deploying armed drones in an apparent loosening of Obama-era limits on US raids outside conventional warzones. According to the Times, the Pentagon has already carried out five drone raids in Libya this year, including one two weeks ago. While the drones are currently being flown out of bases in Sicily and Niamey, Niger's capital, armed drones "would almost certainly" be deployed from Dirkou "in the near future". The Times added that one of its journalists said he saw "gray aircraft - about the size of Predator drones, which are 27 feet long - flying at least three times over six days in early August".

This eccentric inventor has found a way to avoid traffic jams - with his own flying drone. Kyxz Mendoza from Quezon City, Philippines, started work six years ago on his incredible flying car. Earlier this month he completed the first successful test flight - soaring some 25ft above the ground. Kyxz calles his flying car the'Ultralight Aircraft' and he now plans to mass produce it with a two-seater version added to to the range. Incredible footage shows Filipino inventor Kyxz Mendoza undertaking the car's first successful test flight earlier this month He said: 'We've been having bad weather so it took as a while after our deadline before we can finally show it to our followers.

Drones could soon be flown by autonomous AI pilots if Lockheed Martin has any say. The aerospace giant is partnering with the Drone Racing League to pit humans and AI against one another to see which can navigate a drone through a high-flying course the fastest. Called the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge, teams must craft AI system based around Nvidia's Jetson deep learning technology and fly the drone without any pre-programming or human intervention. Lockheed Martin is partnering with ESPN's Drone Racing League to pit humans and AI against one another to see which can navigate a drone through a high-flying course the fastest The first team that can outrun a human DRL pilot wins a $250,000 reward, while the grand prize winner can claim up to $1 million. The winning AI system could spell the future of autonomous drone operations, according to Lockheed Martin.

Here's what to do when a drone gets too close for comfort. Sam Sargent uses a DJI drone to get aerial photographs of a home for sale in the Crocker Highlands neighborhood of Oakland. Users here of the local social network Nextdoor for months have been stewing about these small, flying vehicles, which often carry cameras, accusing them of snooping or maybe casing the joint. They wonder if it's legal to fight back, say by lassoing the pesky vehicle flying outside their window – or even shooting it down with a potato gun. Oakland resident Katy O'Neill goes as far as blaming it for shattering her dining room window.

Jefferson Graham runs down the ten rules you need to know before taking your new drone out for a spin on Talking Tech. Drones are one of the most popular tech products, but they're not as simple as opening the box, charging the batteries and then letting the new gadget soar into the skies. There are several rules that need to be obeyed. The Federal Aviation Administration first insists that all owners must register their unit with the agency or face fines of up to $250,000. From there, many cities have rules about drone use in their municipalities, some hard and fast, others gray.

Skydio blew our minds when they announced the R1 back in February--it's by far the smartest, most autonomous consumer camera drone we've ever seen. The company promised that they'd keep on making the R1 even more capable, and today they're announcing a slew of upgrades, including a new software development kit (SDK) that lets you leverage the R1's obstacle-dodging cleverness in any custom application you can dream up. The Skydio R1 is amazing, and you should read our February article about it, but in a nutshell, it's a drone that uses an array of 12 cameras to dynamically detect and avoid obstacles while it tracks you and films what you're doing. This means that it can follow someone riding a mountain bike through a forest, dodging trees and branches and keeping them in frame the whole time. It's basically the kind of capability that every single company working on drone delivery has implicitly promised and so far failed to deliver, and now you can spend some cash (okay, kind of a lot of cash) and play with it yourself.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Built by Engineered Arts, 2 Mesmer Heads perform a synchronised sequence. One is complete with lifelike skin and hair, the other is showing it's mechanical workings.

We present the Limited-range Online Routing Problem (LORP), which involves a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited communication range that must autonomously coordinate to service task requests. We first show a general approach to cast this dynamic problem as a sequence of decentralized task allocation problems. Then we present two solutions both based on modeling the allocation task as a Markov Random Field to subsequently assess decisions by means of the decentralized Max-Sum algorithm. Our first solution assumes independence between requests, whereas our second solution also considers the UAVs' workloads. A thorough empirical evaluation shows that our workloadbased solution consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of scenarios, lowering the average service time up to 16%. In the bestcase scenario there is no gap between our decentralized solution and centralized techniques. In the worst-case scenario we manage to reduce by 25% the gap between current decentralized and centralized techniques. Thus, our solution becomes the method of choice for our problem. Keywords: task allocation, unmanned aerial vehicles, max-sum, decentralized 1. Introduction Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an attractive technology for largearea surveillance [1]. Today, there are readily available UAVs that are reasonably cheap, have many sensing abilities, exhibit a long endurance and can communicate using radios. UAVs have traditionally been controlled either remotely or by following externally-designed flight plans. Requiring human operators for each UAV implies a large, specialized and expensive human workforce. Likewise, letting UAVs follow externally prepared plans introduces a single point of failure (the planner) and requires UAVs with expensive (satellite) radios to maintain continuous communication with a central station. These constraints are acceptable in some application domains, other applications require more flexible techniques. For instance, consider a force of park rangers tasked with the surveillance of a large natural park. Upon reception of an emergency notification, the rangers must assess the situation as quickly as possible.

Abstract--Using a game engine, we have developed a virtual environment which models important aspects of critical incident scenarios. We focused on modelling phenomena relating to the identification and gathering of key forensic evidence, in order to develop and test a system which can handle chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) events autonomously. This allows us to build and validate AIbased technologies, which can be trained and tested in our custom virtual environment before being deployed in real-world scenarios. We have used our virtual scenario to rapidly prototype a system which can use simulated Remote Aerial Vehicles (RAVs) to gather images from the environment for the purpose of mapping. Our environment provides us with an effective medium through which we can develop and test various AI methodologies for critical incident scene assessment, in a safe and controlled manner.