Drones aren't yet licensed to carry passengers, but some may already be airlifting wounded personnel off the battlefield and could be employed for smuggling people Still from a promotional video for Skysurfer, a US company that sells "ultralight aircraft" for personal, recreational use The first passenger-carrying drones may already be in use. These aren't sophisticated urban air taxis, but crudely modified cargo drones transporting combat casualties and criminals. Heavy-lift drones are essentially scaled-up versions of the familiar quadcopters. Hair-raising videos of hobbyists carried by home-made drones show that the basic technology is simple enough. But meeting aircraft safety requirements for passenger transport takes years, and drone-makers, including Volocopter, EHang and Eve Air Mobility, are all aiming to get vehicles certified this year or next.

This work presents ARD2, a framework that enables real-time through-wall surveillance using two aerial drones and an augmented reality (AR) device. ARD2 consists of two main steps: target direction estimation and contour reconstruction. In the first stage, ARD2 leverages geometric relationships between the drones, the user, and the target to project the target's direction onto the user's AR display. In the second stage, images from the drones are synthesized to reconstruct the target's contour, allowing the user to visualize the target behind walls. Experimental results demonstrate the system's accuracy in both direction estimation and contour reconstruction.

Near the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, a boxy robot zips along the rocky, cracked road. Snaking from side to side, the robot--a four-wheeled machine, around knee height--carries cargo and ammunition for Russian troops. Hovering above the road, tracking the movements of the robot, is a Ukrainian drone. The attack, which happened in early December and was claimed by the Ukrainian military's 110th Mechanized Brigade, is one of a small, but growing, number of incidents where unsophisticated robots have been used against other robots in Russia's war in Ukraine. Aerial drones have been used to surveil or attack ground robots, soldiers have attached weapons to land-based robots, and other small unmanned bots are being fitted with jamming technology to knock drones from the sky.

On August 28th, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, announced what she called the Replicator initiative--an all-hands-on-deck effort to modernize the American arsenal by adding fleets of artificially intelligent, unmanned, relatively cheap weapons and equipment. She described these machines as "attritable," meaning that they can suffer attrition without compromising a mission. Imagine a swarm of hundreds or even thousands of unmanned aerial drones, communicating with each other as they collect intelligence on enemy-troop movements, and you will begin to understand the Deputy Secretary's vision for Replicator. Even if a sizable number of the drones were shot down, the information they'd gathered would have already been recorded and sent back to human operators on the ground. In one sense, Hicks's announcement, during an address titled "The Urgency to Innovate" at a meeting of National Defense Industrial Association, did not signal a wholly new approach.

Last month, the entire world was abuzz when five über wealthy explorers perished at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the grave of the once "unsinkable ship." Disturbingly, during the same week, hundreds of war-torn refugees drowned in the Mediterranean with little news of their plight. The irony of machine versus nature illustrates how tiny humans are in the universe, and that every soul rich or poor is precious. It is with this attitude that many roboticists have been tackling some of the hardest problems in the galaxy from space exploration to desert mining to oceanography to search & rescue. Following the news of the implosion of the Titan submersible, I reached out to Professor F. Javier Diez of Rutgers University for his comment on the rescue mission and the role of robots.

A Russian soldier was seen surrendering to a Ukrainian drone May 9 in edited video released by Ukraine's 92nd Mechanized Brigade. A Russian soldier whose surrender to Ukrainian forces was captured on drone camera, spoke for the first time about his experience. Ruslan Anitin, a draftee who was cornered alone by the Ukrainian military near the city of Bakhmut, surrendered by communicating via an aerial drone's camera. "It felt like it was never going to involve us at all," Anitin said of the conflict during an interview with the Wall Street Journal about his experience. A Russian soldier was seen surrendering to a Ukrainian drone May 9 in edited video released by Ukraine's 92nd Mechanized Brigade.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has backed a fundraising campaign to help Ukraine build a naval drone fleet to protect cities against Russian missiles launched from warships on the Black Sea. United24, an initiative Zelenskyy launched to raise charitable donations following Russia's invasion in February, said Ukraine needed 100 drones operating from the sea, each of which costs 10 million hryvnias (around $274,000). The fundraising site said that since the invasion began, Russian has launched over 4,500 missiles into Ukraine and "every fifth strike came from the sea". "We must defend the waters of our seas and peaceful cities from Russian missiles launched from ships," Zelenskyy wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Friday. "Naval drones will also help unblock the corridor for civilian ships transporting grain for the world," he said.

In the 36th week of war in Ukraine, Russia backed out of a United Nations-sponsored agreement guaranteeing the safe passage of grain ships through the Black Sea, only to rejoin it three days later. Moscow's withdrawal over the weekend renewed fears of a global food crisis – concerns that have not been completely quelled since it rejoined because its return came with conditions. President Vladimir Putin said he reserved the right to back out again if Kyiv used the humanitarian corridor for attacks, the reason Russia gave for the initial pullout. The Kremlin has also warned that it has not yet decided whether to extend the grain deal, which expires in two weeks. Officials in Moscow had said that grain ships may have acted as a cloak for an attack on its naval base on Saturday at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula.

In June, Amazon announced it was close to being able to offer for package deliveries by drone for its Prime Air service. That same month, Uber said it plans to test food delivery by aerial drone in crowded cities. And drone delivery company Flytrex already touts the ability to deliver drinks via unmanned vehicle on the golf course. Despite such announcements, drones are not crowding the skies over major cities and population centers just yet. But that may be about to change.

Supporters of the bills, which now head to the state Senate, pointed to past instances of drones being used in Michigan for airborne contraband smuggling. They also warned of terrorists using drones to survey possible targets.