Hatem and Mohammed are obsessed with drones and robots. Determined to stop the desert from swallowing up their country, the two Sudanese inventors decide to take part in a television competition for inventors to raise awareness and investment in their dream - Sudan's first and only agricultural drone company. Although isolated by international sanctions and frustrated by a failing economy, the pair succeed in building Sudan's first flying robot farmer. Their drone can plant trees, increase harvests and reduce crop damage. And they are bound by their shared belief that Africa can change its destiny with technology.

The company will initially operate out of a facility near Tinker Air Force Base and focus on engineering and production planning. In six months, the company wants to move into a 75,000 square-foot facility.

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. ANYmal was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where it got cold feet. Robot arm maintenance in space is much more difficult than robot arm maintenance on Earth, but you get quite the view.

Global spending on robotics and drones is expected to grow 22.1%, year-on-year, to reach $103 billion by the end of 2018, an International Data Corporation report said. The report also said that the spending will more than double to $218.4 billion by 2021, with a compounded annual growth rate of 25.4%. According to the market research firm, robotics spending, which is expected to touch $94 billion in 2018, will account for over 90% of all spending between 2017 and 2021. Industrial robotic solutions will account for the largest share of robotics spending, with over 70% of the total amount, followed by service and consumer robots. "Industrial robots are becoming more intelligent, human-friendly and easier to work with," said Jing Bing Zhang, research director, robotics at IDC. "This has accelerated their rapid expansion in the manufacturing industry, beyond automotive, especially in high-tech manufacturing, which requires light-weight robots with higher precision, flexibility, mobility and collaborative capability."

All today's commercial drones use GPS, which works fine above building roofs and in high altitudes. But what, when the drones have to navigate autonomously at low altitude among tall buildings or in the dense, unstructured city streets with cars, cyclists or pedestrians suddenly crossing their way? Until now, commercial drones are not able to quickly react to such unforeseen events. Researchers of the University of Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research NCCR Robotics developed DroNet, an algorithm that can safely drive a drone through the streets of a city. Designed as a fast 8-layers residual network, it produces two outputs for each single input image: a steering angle to keep the drone navigating while avoiding obstacles, and a collision probability to let the drone recognise dangerous situations and promptly react to them.

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan's claim that the U.S. hit an Afghan refugee camp in a drone strike is "false," a U.S. spokesman said Thursday, as tensions between the uneasy allies ratchet higher over Islamabad's alleged support for militants. The apparent strike took place roughly 50 km (30 miles) inside Pakistani territory on Wednesday, according to local authorities. It killed a midlevel commander from the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, officials and a source close to the Islamist group have told AFP. The incident comes just weeks after Washington froze nearly $2 billion in aid to Pakistan over its alleged support for militants, a move that had sparked speculation that the U.S. could resume drone strikes or launch operations along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Local officials have told AFP that the predawn strike took place more than 50 km (30 miles) from the Afghan border, in the village of Mamuzai in Kurram agency, one of the districts in the country's semi-autonomous tribal region.

Two years ago, roboticists from Davide Scaramuzza's lab at the University of Zurich used a set of pictures taken by cameras mounted on a hiker's head to train a deep neural network, which was then able to fly an inexpensive drone along forest paths without running into anything. This is cool, for two reasons: The first is that you can use this technique to make drones with minimal on-board sensing and computing fully autonomous, and the second is that you can do so without collecting dedicated drone-centric training datasets first. In a new paper appearing in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Scaramuzza and one of his Ph.D. students, Antonio Loquercio, along with collaborators Ana I. Maqueda and Carlos R. del-Blanco from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, in Spain, present some new work in which they've trained a drone to autonomously fly through the streets of a city, and they've done it with data collected by cars and bicycles. Most autonomous drones (and most autonomous robots in general) that don't navigate using a pre-existing map rely on some flavor of simultaneous localization and mapping, or (as the researchers put it), "map-localize-plan." Building a map, localizing yourself on that map, and then planning safe motion is certainly a reliable way to move around, but it requires big, complex, and of course very expensive, power-hungry sensors and computers.

One day after an American drone strike killed a leader of the militant Haqqani network in northwestern Pakistan, United States officials on Thursday rejected a claim by Pakistan that the strike had targeted an Afghan refugee camp. There were also conflicting accounts of the location of the drone strike and the number of people killed. A statement by Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday condemned the strike and maintained that it had "targeted an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency" -- an assertion that the United States rejected on Thursday. "The claim in an M.F.A. statement yesterday that U.S. forces struck an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency yesterday is false," said Richard W. Snelsire, the United States Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. American officials said that there were no Afghan refugee camps in Kurram, a remote tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan, where they said Wednesday's drone strike had taken place.

The bill, adopted 78-18 on Thursday, would establish a misdemeanor for operators of unmanned aircraft to knowingly view or take pictures or videos of people on private property "in a manner that would invade the individual's reasonable expectation of privacy."

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Wednesday condemned what it said was a U.S. military drone strike inside its territory, adding to already tense relations between the allies.