The rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing demand for timely, cost-effective last-mile delivery have increased interest in collaborative logistics. This research introduces a novel collaborative synchronized multi-platform vehicle routing problem with drones and robots (VRP-DR), where a fleet of $\mathcal{M}$ trucks, $\mathcal{N}$ drones and $\mathcal{K}$ robots, cooperatively delivers parcels. Trucks serve as mobile platforms, enabling the launching, retrieving, and en-route charging of drones and robots, thereby addressing critical limitations such as restricted payload capacities, limited range, and battery constraints. The VRP-DR incorporates five realistic features: (1) multi-visit service per trip, (2) multi-trip operations, (3) flexible docking, allowing returns to the same or different trucks (4) cyclic and acyclic operations, enabling return to the same or different nodes; and (5) en-route charging, enabling drones and robots to recharge while being transported on the truck, maximizing operational efficiency by utilizing idle transit time. The VRP-DR is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to minimize both operational costs and makespan. To overcome the computational challenges of solving large-scale instances, a scalable heuristic algorithm, FINDER (Flexible INtegrated Delivery with Energy Recharge), is developed, to provide efficient, near-optimal solutions. Numerical experiments across various instance sizes evaluate the performance of the MILP and heuristic approaches in terms of solution quality and computation time. The results demonstrate significant time savings of the combined delivery mode over the truck-only mode and substantial cost reductions from enabling multi-visits. The study also provides insights into the effects of en-route charging, docking flexibility, drone count, speed, and payload capacity on system performance.

Despite a recent COVID-19 outbreak in the NFL that resulted in cancelled games, some teams are planning to welcome back fans over the next few weeks. The Atlanta Falcons are one of those, and to reduce the risks, Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium (MBS) will be among the first sports venues to sanitize key areas using drones (via CNN). MBS will use Lucid Drone Technologies' D1 disinfecting drones to disinfect the seating bowl, handrails, and glass partitions at the stadium. "This stadium is incredibly large and as we begin to slowly welcome fans back, these drones allow us to maximize the time between games and private events to thoroughly sanitize," said building operations manager Jackie Poulakos. The use of drones reduces seating bowl cleaning times by 95 percent and is 14 times more efficient than regular backpack foggers, according to MBS.

For scale, consider the Statue of Liberty, standing 305 feet tall. At 466 feet, the average wind turbine in the U.S. dwarfs Lady Liberty by more than half. And when GE's next-generation monster wind turbine, the Haliade-X, hits the market in 2021, it will nearly double that size to 877 feet, just shy of the Eiffel Tower. A single Haliade-X rotor blade will stretch 315 feet, longer than a football field. As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to energy and energy exploration, bigger is better: the larger the machinery, the deeper the dig, the greater the production yield.

Uavia, a Drone Monitoring Technology Company completed its first round of financing from Airbus Ventures, Sofimac Innovation, Bpifrance, and a pool of entrepreneurs and business stakeholders. "The financing round allows us to reinforce our capabilities and our technical teams to further develop our technological advance. We're also scaling our commercial operations to serve industrial sectors on which we observe a global traction," says Clement Christomanos, CEO and co-founder of Uavia. Its robotic platform allows the users to connect their drones and robots to the cloud through any mobile-IP network available. This platform will also allow the multiple users to control the fleets of drones and robots while having their data processed, analyzed and shared in real time.

Flying drones and robots now patrol distribution warehouses - they've become workhorses of the e-commerce era online that retailers can't do without. It is driving down costs but it is also putting people out of work: what price progress? It could be a scene from Blade Runner 2049; the flying drone hovers in the warehouse aisle, its spinning rotors filling the cavernous space with a buzzing whine. It edges close to the packages stacked on the shelf and scans them using onboard optical sensors, before whizzing off to its next assignment. But this is no sci-fi film, it's a warehouse in the US - one of around 250,000 throughout the country, many gargantuan in size: retail giant Walmart's smallest warehouse, for example, is larger than 17 football fields put together.

Avitas Systems, a GE subsidiary based in Boston, is now using drones and robots to automate the inspection of infrastructure such as pipelines, power lines, and transportation systems. The company is using off-the-shelf machine-learning technology from Nvidia (50 Smartest Companies 2017) to guide the checkups, and to automatically identify anomalies in the data collected. The effort shows how low-cost drones and robotic systems--combined with rapid advances in machine learning--are making it possible to automate whole sectors of low-skill work. While there is plenty of worry about the automation of jobs in manufacturing and offices, routine security and safety inspections may be one of the first big areas to be undermined by advances in AI. Drones have been used on some industrial sites for a while (see "New Boss on Construction Sites Is a Drone"), and various companies, such as Kespry, Flyability, and CyPhy, offer aerial systems for monitoring mines, inspecting wind turbines, and assessing building insurance claims.

There's no doubt that artificial intelligence is being used by more and more industries. As Information Age points out, Enhancing E-commerce, calculating valuations, inventory management and of course enabling driverless cars are among the many uses of artificial intelligence. With this in mind, which tech stocks should investors buy to cash in on this trend? Although Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) now appears to be the prime beneficiary of the machine learning aspect of artificial intelligence, Nvidia stock has soared over 200% in the last year and likely already reflects a great deal of revenue from AI. Consequently, investors should wait for a better entry point before buying Nvidia stock. But four other tech stocks Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), Delphi Automotive PLC (NYSE:DLPH), Visteon Corp (NYSE:VC), and Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:BIDU) -- are definitely poised to get a meaningful boost from AI and should be bought at current levels.

"Jetson TX2 brings powerful AI capabilities at the edge, making possible a new class of intelligent machines. These devices will enable intelligent video analytics that keep our cities smarter and safer, new kinds of robots that optimize manufacturing, and new collaboration that makes long-distance work more efficient." The chipmaker has also revealed that around a dozen partner companies are already using the TX2 in different ways. Cisco is using the platform for an all-in-one collaboration device that enables screen sharing, interactive whiteboarding and video conferencing. A company called Fellow Robots relies on TX2 to record on-shelf inventory and to detect items and availability in store.

As a postdoc, plant biologist Christopher Topp was not satisfied with the usual way of studying root development: growing plants on agar dishes and placing them on flatbed scanners to measure root lengths and angles. Five years later, the idea of using detailed imaging to study plant form and function has caught on. The use of drones and robots is also on the rise as researchers pursue the'quantified plant'--one in which each trait has been carefully and precisely measured from nearly every angle, from the length of its root hairs to the volatile chemicals it emits under duress. Such traits are known as an organism's phenotype, and researchers are looking for faster and more comprehensive ways of characterizing it. From February 10 to 14, scientists will gather in Tucson, Arizona, to compare their methods.

Technologies including AI, bots, drones and robots will lead to the automation of large parts of the global workforce More than 861,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation, according to a study that comes as a further blow after hundreds of thousands of UK public sector jobs disappeared following the government's austerity cuts during and after the recession. However, it has to be said, that as more and more governments around the world experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, including Scotland who may even start trails next week, the news doesn't come as a complete surprise. The research conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, the business advisory firm, found that the 1.3m administrative jobs across the public sector had the highest chance of being automated. New blockchain DNS system would put an end to DDoS attacks But, following on from the London Borough of Enfields move to replace some customer services clerks with a bot called "Amelia," even teachers, police officers and social workers could be replaced, at least in part, allowing the government to either free up more staff for frontline work or reduce the number of workers on the payroll. The research is included in Deloitte's State of the State report, which analyses the state of public finances and the challenges facing public services. Deloitte's previous work has shown that all sectors will be affected by automation in the next two decades, with 74% of jobs in transportation and storage, 59% in wholesale and retail trades and 56% in manufacturing having a high chance of being automated.