The USGS said a 6.9-magnitude earthquake hit Hawaii's Big Island on Friday. A 6.9-magnitude earthquake rattled the Big Island of Hawaii on Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, following a recent volcanic eruption. The quake hit 16km southwest of Leilani Estates, Hawaii, the USGS reported. It was centered near the south flank of Kilauea volcano, which erupted on Thursday and continued to spew lava into Friday. This is in almost exactly the same location at the deadly 1975 M 7.1 earthquake.

AirMap, the world's leading drone operations platform is poised to expand all over the world and David Hose, the CEO of AirMap is in a great position to lead them forward. "The growth here is really interesting- growth is outpacing the forecasts," says Hose. Plus, the world is a lot more attached to the technology and people are well aware that drones will soon become a part of our daily lives. To make it a reality may require some time, but its happening. "By and large this industry started as an outgrowth of the hobby," says Hose. Still, rules and regulations are needed to reach the potential and have the safe and legal flights.

A criminal gang used a swarm of drones to disarm and prevent law enforcement agents from carrying out a hostage rescue, an FBI official has revealed. A group of tiny drones amassed on the FBI agents outside an unidentified US city, making a series of'high-speed, low passes at agents in the observation post' in an attempt'to flush them' from their position, according to Defense One. 'We were then blind,' said Joe Mazel, head of the FBI's Operational Technology Law unit, at the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver. 'It definitely presented some challenges'. The disconcerting incident casts a light on the growing ways that criminals, hackers and others are using drones to carry out a number of illicit activities.

About 1,700 residents have been ordered to evacuate their homes after an eruption of Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. Residents of Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens were issued a mandatory evacuation order after an eruption on Thursday sent lava shooting up from a crack in a street. "It sounded like if you were to put a bunch of rocks into a dryer and turn it on as high as you could. You could just smell sulphur and burning trees and underbrush and stuff," Jeremiah Osuna, a resident who captured drone footage of the scene, told Honolulu television station KHON. On Friday morning, the Hawaii Country Civil Defence Agency said the volcanic activity still continued and another vent had opened up overnight.

Surefly, a division of Workhorse, has successfully sent its flying taxi into the air with a person inside it for the first time. The Surefly drone completed a successful manned and untethered test hover outside of Cincinnati. Workhorse is the only company with the necessary FAA experimental certification to test this type of vehicle in the United States, according to the company. Workhorse's flying taxi has taken off with a person inside it for the first time. The Surefly drone was first unveiled at the Paris Air Show in June last year.

There is a general tendency among counterterrorism analysts to understate rather than hyperbolize terrorists' technological adaptations. In 2011 and 2012, most believed that the "Arab Spring" revolutions would marginalize jihadist movements. But within four years, jihadists had attracted a record number of foreign fighters to the Syrian battlefield, in part by using the same social media mobilization techniques that protesters had employed to challenge dictators like Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar Qaddafi. Militant groups later combined easy accessibility to operatives via social media with new advances in encryption to create the "virtual planner" model of terrorism. This model allows online operatives to provide the same offerings that were once the domain of physical networks, including recruitment, coordinating the target and timing of attacks, and even providing technical assistance on topics like bomb-making.

Flying a drone is not easy as it seems. A lot of practice, patience, experience and concentration are all what required to fly a drone safely. EPFL has developed a system for drone control, taking away the sticks and replacing them with intuitive and comfortable movements of your entire body. Basically, it's an upper-body soft exoskeleton called FlyJacket. Developed by EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, led by Professor Dario Floreano, FlyJacket is designed to be portable and affordable.

Drones are what you make of them. One person's wedding videographer is another person's drug mule. And while hobbyist drones were first used for simple jobs like sneaking contraband into prisons, over the years they've become the criminal's Swiss Army knife of gizmos. The FBI's Joe Mazel told a crowd at the AUVSI Xponential conference this week about a particularly organized gang that used drones to interfere with a hostage situation last winter. As Defense One reports, a swarm of small drones descended on an FBI hostage team, performing "high-speed low passes" in an effort "to flush them" from their position.

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted Thursday, May 3, 2018, prompting nearby residents to evacuate from their homes. Nearly 1,500 residents were ordered to evacuate from their volcano-side homes after Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano erupted Thursday, sending red molten lava to chew its way through forest land and bubble up on paved streets. Volcano officials couldn't predict how long the eruption could last, prompting Hawaii's Gov. David Ige to activate the National Guard to help with evacuations and provide security to about 770 structures left empty when residents sought shelter. Drone video from above the lava outbreak in Leilani Estates on Hawaii Island shows roads, homes near the path of destruction. Footage shown on local television showed lava spurting into the sky from a crack in a road.

Flying in dynamic, urban, highly-populated environments represents an open problem in robotics. State-of-the-art (SoA) autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) employ advanced computer vision techniques based on computationally expensive algorithms, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to navigate in such environments. In the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era, nano-size UAVs capable of autonomous navigation would be extremely desirable as self-aware mobile IoT nodes. However, autonomous flight is considered unaffordable in the context of nano-scale UAVs, where the ultra-constrained power envelopes of tiny rotor-crafts limit the on-board computational capabilities to low-power microcontrollers. In this work, we present the first vertically integrated system for fully autonomous deep neural network-based navigation on nano-size UAVs. Our system is based on GAP8, a novel parallel ultra-low-power computing platform, and deployed on a 27 g commercial, open-source CrazyFlie 2.0 nano-quadrotor. We discuss a methodology and software mapping tools that enable the SoA CNN presented in [1] to be fully executed on-board within a strict 12 fps real-time constraint with no compromise in terms of flight results, while all processing is done with only 94 mW on average - 1% of the power envelope of the deployed nano-aircraft.