Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs), equipped with cameras, are employed in numerous applications, including aerial photography, surveillance, and agriculture. In these applications, robust object detection and tracking are essential for the effective deployment of UA Vs.

Belgian authorities say they have arrested three people in connection with a plot to attack Prime Minister Bart De Wever and other politicians using drone-mounted explosives. Federal prosecutor Ann Fransen announced the arrests on Thursday and said the group were under investigation for an "attempted terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group", according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. "There are also indications that the suspects aimed to construct a drone to which a payload could be attached," she added. Fransen did not name their intended targets, but social media posts from senior figures in De Wever's government indicate that he was on the list. "The news of a planned attack targeting Prime Minister Bart De Wever is deeply shocking," wrote Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prevot in a post on X. "I express my full support to the Prime Minister, his wife, and his family, as well as my gratitude to the security and justice services whose swift action prevented the worst."

This technology is our future threat, warns Serhiy Beskrestnov, who has just got his hands on a newly intercepted Russian drone. It was no ordinary drone either, he discovered. Assisted by artificial intelligence, this unmanned aerial vehicle can find and attack targets on its own. Beskrestnov has examined numerous drones in his role as Ukrainian defence forces consultant. Unlike other models, it didn't send or receive any signals, so could not be jammed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears uninterested in peace in Ukraine, and there is no end to the war in sight. Kyiv has increasingly reached the conclusion that the country must do all it can to guarantee its own security. The Russians have yet again shifted their tactics, says Sokil. Several months ago, they would send small units into battle, but now, it is often just single soldiers operating on their own. And they are no longer looking to fight, preferring instead to just sneak forward and wait for air support, says the Ukrainian major. Their FPV drones are everywhere," he says, using the common shorthand for first-person view." On a mild, late summer night, Sokil is resting at a farm on the western edge of the Donbas, taking a drag from his cigarette.

Existing decentralized methods for multi-agent motion planning lack formal, infinite-horizon safety guarantees, especially for communication-constrained systems. We present R3R, to our knowledge the first decentralized and asynchronous framework for multi-agent motion planning under distance-based communication constraints with infinite-horizon safety guarantees for systems of nonlinear agents. R3R's novelty lies in combining our gatekeeper safety framework with a geometric constraint called R-Boundedness, which together establish a formal link between an agent's communication radius and its ability to plan safely. We constrain trajectories to within a fixed planning radius that is a function of the agent's communication radius, which enables trajectories to be shown provably safe for all time, using only local information. Our algorithm is fully asynchronous, and ensures the forward invariance of these guarantees even in time-varying networks where agents asynchronously join, leave, and replan. We validate our approach in simulations of up to 128 Dubins vehicles, demonstrating 100% safety in dense, obstacle rich scenarios. Our results demonstrate that R3R's performance scales with agent density rather than problem size, providing a practical solution for scalable and provably safe multi-agent systems.

This paper presents a nonlinear integrated guidance and control (IGC) approach for flexible leader-follower formation flight of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while accounting for high-fidelity aerodynamics and thrust dynamics. Unlike conventional leader-follower schemes that fix the follower's position relative to the leader, the follower is steered to maintain range and bearing angles (which is the angle between its velocity vector and its line-of-sight (LOS) with respect to the leader) arbitrarily close to the prescribed values, enabling the follower to maintain formation on a hemispherical region behind the leader. The proposed IGC framework directly maps leader-follower relative range dynamics to throttle commands, and the follower's velocity orientation relative to the LOS to aerodynamic control surface deflections. This enables synergism between guidance and control subsystems. The control design uses a dynamic surface control-based backstepping approach to achieve convergence to the desired formation set, where Lyapunov barrier functions are incorporated to ensure the follower's bearing angle is constrained within specified bounds. Rigorous stability analysis guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of all error states and strict constraint satisfaction in the presence of aerodynamic nonlinearities. The proposed flexible formation scheme allows the follower to have an orientation mismatch relative to the leader to execute anticipatory reconfiguration by transitioning between the relative positions in the admissible formation set when the leader aggressively maneuvers. The proposed IGC law relies only on relative information and onboard sensors without the information about the leader's maneuver, making it suitable for GPS-denied or non-cooperative scenarios. Finally, we present simulation results to vindicate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen calls for action against Russian hybrid warfare after drones and warplanes violated six European nations' airspace in two weeks.

Three killed in latest Ukrainian strike on Russia's Belgorod region Three people have been killed and at least nine others injured in Ukraine's latest attack on the Russian border region of Belgorod, according to its governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. The deaths happened following a strike on the village of Maslova Pristan early on Wednesday, Gladkov said. Emergency workers were continuing to search for people feared trapped under rubble. It is the third consecutive day that Ukraine has struck the region, leaving thousands of people without power and at least two other people dead. Ukraine has not commented on the attacks but has repeatedly struck targets inside Russia, including Belgorod, during the conflict, which is now in its fourth year.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces have captured almost 5,000 square kilometres (1,930sq miles) of Ukrainian territory so far this year, and Moscow retains the strategic initiative on the battlefield. Russian troops have captured the Ukrainian villages of Novovasylivka in the southeastern Zaporizhia region and Fedorivka in the eastern Donetsk region, Russia's defence ministry said.

The National Police Agency held its first expert panel meeting on Tuesday on countering illegal drone flights amid rising concerns over their potential use in terrorism and other threats. The National Police Agency on Tuesday held the first meeting of an expert panel on measures against illegal drone flights, in light of the growing threat of drones being used for terrorism and other purposes. The panel plans to compile a report by the end of the year on expanding the list of no-fly zones and penalties, with a view to revising the drone control law. The law was established in 2016 in the wake of an incident in which a drone fell on the roof of the Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo. It currently bans drone flights within about 300 meters of important facilities such as the National Diet Building, the Imperial Palace and nuclear power plants.