A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.

Measuring an overall autonomy score for a robotic system requires the combination of a set of relevant aspects and features of the system that might be measured in different units, qualitative, and/or discordant. In this paper, we build upon an existing non-contextual autonomy framework that measures and combines the Autonomy Level and the Component Performance of a system as overall autonomy score. We examine several methods of combining features, showing how some methods find different rankings of the same data, and we employ the weighted product method to resolve this issue. Furthermore, we introduce the non-contextual autonomy coordinate and represent the overall autonomy of a system with an autonomy distance. We apply our method to a set of seven Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and obtain their absolute autonomy score as well as their relative score with respect to the best system.

The collective operation of robots, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating as a team or swarm, is affected by their individual capabilities, which in turn is dependent on their physical design, aka morphology. However, with the exception of a few (albeit ad hoc) evolutionary robotics methods, there has been very little work on understanding the interplay of morphology and collective behavior. There is especially a lack of computational frameworks to concurrently search for the robot morphology and the hyper-parameters of their behavior model that jointly optimize the collective (team) performance. To address this gap, this paper proposes a new co-design framework. Here the exploding computational cost of an otherwise nested morphology/behavior co-design is effectively alleviated through the novel concept of ``talent" metrics; while also allowing significantly better solutions compared to the typically sub-optimal sequential morphology$\to$behavior design approach. This framework comprises four major steps: talent metrics selection, talent Pareto exploration (a multi-objective morphology optimization process), behavior optimization, and morphology finalization. This co-design concept is demonstrated by applying it to design UAVs that operate as a team to localize signal sources, e.g., in victim search and hazard localization. Here, the collective behavior is driven by a recently reported batch Bayesian search algorithm called Bayes-Swarm. Our case studies show that the outcome of co-design provides significantly higher success rates in signal source localization compared to a baseline design, across a variety of signal environments and teams with 6 to 15 UAVs. Moreover, this co-design process provides two orders of magnitude reduction in computing time compared to a projected nested design approach.

This study develops a framework for unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to monitor fall hazard prevention systems near unprotected edges and openings in high-rise building projects. A three-step machine-learning-based framework was developed and tested to detect guardrail posts from the images captured by UAS. First, a guardrail detector was trained to localize the candidate locations of posts supporting the guardrail. Since images were used in this process collected from an actual job site, several false detections were identified. Therefore, additional constraints were introduced in the following steps to filter out false detections. Second, the research team applied a horizontal line detector to the image to properly detect floors and remove the detections that were not close to the floors. Finally, since the guardrail posts are installed with approximately normal distribution between each post, the space between them was estimated and used to find the most likely distance between the two posts. The research team used various combinations of the developed approaches to monitor guardrail systems in the captured images from a high-rise building project. Comparing the precision and recall metrics indicated that the cascade classifier achieves better performance with floor detection and guardrail spacing estimation. The research outcomes illustrate that the proposed guardrail recognition system can improve the assessment of guardrails and facilitate the safety engineer's task of identifying fall hazards in high-rise building projects.

NITI Aayog, the policy think tank of the Government of India, is looking at expanding its "Medicines from the Sky" project, which uses unmanned aerial systems for the delivery of vaccines in remote areas, to the North-Eastern parts of the country. It is also exploring use of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) in medical diagnostics. NITI Aayog, in collaboration with the Government of Telangana and the World Economic Forum (WEF), launched the'Medicines from the Sky' project on piloting the use of unmanned aerial systems for the delivery of vaccines in remote areas. These drone trials are focused on laying the groundwork for a drone delivery network that will improve access to vital healthcare supplies for remote and vulnerable communities. The scope includes deliveries of MMR (maternal mortality rate), flu and C-19 vaccines.

To efficiently navigate their surrounding environments and complete missions, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) should be able to detect multiple objects in their surroundings and track their movements over time. So far, however, enabling multi-object tracking in unmanned aerial vehicles has proved to be fairly challenging. Researchers at Lockheed Martin AI Center have recently developed a new deep learning technique that could allow UASs to track multiple objects in their surroundings. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could aid the development of better performing and more responsive autonomous flying systems. "We present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Plan Jericho has introduced Ai-Search – an artificial intelligence (Ai) prototype – to transform airborne search and rescue. The prototype came about after Air Commodore Darren Goldie challenged Jericho to find a way of using a detector on an aircraft to enhance search and rescue (SAR). Plan Jericho's Ai lead Wing Commander Michael Gan said Jericho saw the opportunity to use Ai to augment and enhance SAR. "The idea was to train a machine-learning algorithm and Ai sensors to complement existing visual search techniques. Our vision was to give any aircraft and other Defence platforms, including unmanned aerial systems, a low-cost, improvised SAR capability," Wing Commander Gan said.

OBJECTIVE: Develop a system that can be integrated and deployed in a class 1 or class 2 Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to automatically Detect, Recognize, Classify, Identify (DRCI) and target personnel and ground platforms or other targets of interest. The system should implement learning algorithms that provide operational flexibility by allowing the target set and DRCI taxonomy to be quickly adjusted and to operate in different environments. DESCRIPTION: The use of UASs in military applications is an area of increasing interest and growth. This coupled with the ongoing resurgence in the research, development, and implementation of different types of learning algorithms such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) provide the potential to develop small, rugged, low cost, and flexible systems capable of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and other DRCI capabilities that can be integrated in class 1 or class 2 UASs. Implementation of a solution is expected to potentially require independent development in the areas of sensors, communication systems, and algorithms for DRCI and data integration.

Investment in unmanned aerial systems is soaring, but challenges remain. Here's what stakeholders need to know about the evolving landscape. Most people think of a drone, also known as an unmanned aerial system (UAS), as a sophisticated military technology or a hobbyist's tool for capturing images of foliage, sporting events, and cityscapes. But businesses across industries realize that drones have multiple commercial applications, some of which go beyond basic surveillance, photography, or videos, and they are already using them to transform daily work in some industries. Insurance companies are using drones to inspect damaged assets, for instance, and farmers are sending them to monitor crops and collect soil data.

Russian officials have unveiled a'microwave gun' that can disable an unmanned drone and even a missile from up to 0.6 miles (1km) away. The first sample of the weapons have been revealed following a secretive Russian Defense Ministry exhibition. The'death ray' will be used to target enemy drones and apparently deactivates the radios of UAVs and warheads, causing them to lose control. Russian officials have unveiled a'microwave gun' that can disable an unmanned drone and even a missile from up to 0.6 miles (1km) away. A Krasukha, a Russian electronic warfare system, is pictured.