France experienced its worst drought on record last month, and officials have since been cracking down on conserving water. Now a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be added to their arsenal, after it successfully uncovered 20,356 illegally-built private swimming pools. The country's tax authority announced yesterday that the system allowed it to collect about €10 million (£8.5 million) from homeowners who failed to report the facilities. Developed by Google and Capgemini, the AI software was trained to spot pools in aerial images of nine French departments. The results of a trial run last October were then cross-checked with land registry databases, before Direction generale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP) took action.

Point clouds can be captured by an ever-increasing number of means to understand the surrounding reality and detect critical developments. Diverse applications of 3D laser scanning or'Lidar', which is a technology on a sky-rocketing path to be used for mapping and surveying, are changing the way we collect and refine topographic data. Which technologies and processes are building the capability for high-density 3D data? This article outlines the latest industry developments. National topographic databases store data refined from field measurements, imagery and laser scanning data at certain specifications and purposes, but lack the ability to adapt to ever-changing needs and situational awareness. 'Data on demand' is a recognized megatrend in the geospatial industry.

With help from high resolution satellite imagery and some advanced artificial intelligence techniques, European scientists have been counting the trees in a parched African desert. They pored over 1.3 million square kilometres of the waterless western Sahara and the arid lands of the Sahel to the south, to identify what is in effect an unknown forest. This region a stretch of dunes and dryland larger than Angola, or Peru, or Niger proved to be home to 1.8 billion trees and shrubs with crowns larger than three square metres. "We were very surprised to see that quite a few trees actually grow in the Sahara Desert because up till now, most people thought that virtually none existed. We counted hundreds of millions of trees in the desert alone," said Martin Brandt, a geographer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who led the research.

It is just over a week until this years Maker Faire even in Rome and this is the largest even of its kind in Europe. The fair will start on Friday, open to school groups only in the morning then fully opening at 2 pm. This year there will be seven themed pavilions for an exhibition surface area of over 100,000 square metres. The subdivision of the pavilions proposed by the curators invites visitors to become active participants, already starting from their names: Re-think, Learn, Create, Discover, Make, Research. During the Call for Makers over a thousand projects from over 40 countries were submitted with 600 being chosen for exhibition at the fair.

Amazon is set to test its cashier-less checkouts in bigger stores, according to the latest report. The firm is already testing the Amazon Go system in small convenience stores which are less than 2,500 square feet (232 square metres) large in Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago. However, reports suggest the firm would like to start implementing the checkout-free system in Whole Foods stores, which are typically 40,000 square feet (3,700 square metres) large. In September it was revealed Amazon was looking to open 3,000 of its cashier-less stores by 2021. Amazon is set to test its cashier-less checkouts in bigger stores, according to the latest report (file photo).

Lying on a patch of rocky earth, in Chiba, just north of Tokyo, is a large machine about the size of a dinner table; it could be a small tank if it wasn't for the six legs aligned, insect-like along two sides of its rectangular body. Slowly, the machine rises up onto its feet and walks forward like a giant, silver beetle. This is not a creature from the latest Godzilla movie but a robot being developed by a group at Chiba University. If all goes according to plan, their test ground could soon be exchanged for the deserts of Afghanistan and Comet III could be working to help solve one of the country's biggest problems. Afghanistan is plagued by land mines.

For those who hate mowing the lawn, a new robot could prove to be the answer. Described by its makers as the'world's first fully autonomous all-season garden robot', Kobi can cut grass, pick up leaves and even plough snow. The autonomous machine sports a rechargeable battery and will automatically dock itself in its charging station when it needs a power boost. Described by its makers as the'world's first fully autonomous all-season garden robot', Kobi can cut grass, pick up leaves and even plough snow Using GPS and built-in sensors, the robot helper can navigate around on its own. It can cut grass over a lawn measuring up to 7 acres (28,328 square metres) pick up leaves over an area of 3 acres (12,141 square metres) and shovel show over 0.37 acres (1,497 square metres).