Performing striking aerobatic flight in complex environments demands manual designs of key maneuvers in advance, which is intricate and time-consuming as the horizon of the trajectory performed becomes long. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages diffusion models to automate and scale up aerobatic trajectory generation. Our key innovation is the decomposition of complex maneuvers into aerobatic primitives, which are short frame sequences that act as building blocks, featuring critical aerobatic behaviors for tractable trajectory synthesis. The model learns aerobatic primitives using historical trajectory observations as dynamic priors to ensure motion continuity, with additional conditional inputs (target waypoints and optional action constraints) integrated to enable user-editable trajectory generation. During model inference, classifier guidance is incorporated with batch sampling to achieve obstacle avoidance. Additionally, the generated outcomes are refined through post-processing with spatial-temporal trajectory optimization to ensure dynamical feasibility. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments have validated the key component designs of our method, demonstrating its feasibility for deploying on real drones to achieve long-horizon aerobatic flight.

This paper introduces MILUV, a Multi-UAV Indoor Localization dataset with UWB and Vision measurements. This dataset comprises 217 minutes of flight time over 36 experiments using three quadcopters, collecting ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging data such as the raw timestamps and channel-impulse response data, vision data from a stereo camera and a bottom-facing monocular camera, inertial measurement unit data, height measurements from a laser rangefinder, magnetometer data, and ground-truth poses from a motion-capture system. The UWB data is collected from up to 12 transceivers affixed to mobile robots and static tripods in both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions. The UAVs fly at a maximum speed of 4.418 m/s in an indoor environment with visual fiducial markers as features. MILUV is versatile and can be used for a wide range of applications beyond localization, but the primary purpose of MILUV is for testing and validating multi-robot UWB- and vision-based localization algorithms. The dataset can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.25452/figshare.plus.28386041.v1. A development kit is presented alongside the MILUV dataset, which includes benchmarking algorithms such as visual-inertial odometry, UWB-based localization using an extended Kalman filter, and classification of CIR data using machine learning approaches. The development kit can be found at https://github.com/decargroup/miluv, and is supplemented with a website available at https://decargroup.github.io/miluv/.

Integrated Navigation (IN) techniques have emerged as a promising solution by combining multiple sensor measurements, such as those obtained from Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), and vision-based sensors. IN approaches offer significant advantages, including robustness, improved accuracy, and the ability to overcome the limitations of individual sensors. Among the various mathematical tools employed in IN, quaternions have garnered considerable attention for estimating a vehicle's attitude (orientation). Quaternions provide an elegant and compact representation of orientation, avoiding the limitations of traditional Euler angles, such as singularities and ambiguity.

A day before Easter, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a temporary ceasefire for the Christian holiday. Like other Russian promises, this one was broken too. Ukrainian media reported Russian drone attacks, shelling and firefights across the front lines. Ukrainian civilians were also targeted. This ceasefire that wasn't came on the tail of another one: a 30-day ceasefire that was supposed to cover energy infrastructure.

Drones could be used for NHS-related missions in remote areas, inspecting offshore wind turbines and supplying oil rigs by 2026 as part of a new regulatory regime in the UK. David Willetts, the head of a new government unit helping to deploy new technologies in Britain, said there were obvious situations where drones could be used if the changes go ahead next year. Ministers announced plans this month to allow drones to fly long distances without their operators seeing them. Drones cannot be flown "beyond visual line of sight" under current regulations, making their use for lengthy journeys impossible. In an interview with the Guardian, Lord Willetts, chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), said the changes could come as soon as 2026, but that they would apply in "atypical" aviation environments at first, which would mean remote areas and over open water. Referring to the NHS, Willetts said there was potentially a huge market for drone operators.

A new bill moving through the Florida Senate would give homeowners the right to use "reasonable force" to take down drones infringing on their right to privacy, directly conflicting with federal airspace regulations while raising new legal questions regarding how far a person can go to defend their home from surveillance. The bill primarily focuses on further regulating the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) while broadening the scope of locations that are protected from drone flights within the state, such as airports and correctional facilities. Notably, the bill would permit homeowners to use "reasonable force" to stop a drone from infringing on their expectation of privacy. A bill proposed in the Florida Senate would allow homeowners to use "reasonable force" to take down drones infringing on their right to privacy. "No one wants to have a drone sitting over their property, filming what they do for any number of reasons," Florida-based attorney Raul Gastesi told Fox News Digital.

Russia unleashed a barrage of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine as a short-lived Easter ceasefire expired. Russian forces launched 96 drones and three missiles on eastern and southern Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's Air Force reported on Monday. The swift return to major hostilities following a pause declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin comes as the United States struggles to persuade Moscow to agree on a longer-term ceasefire. The overnight assault targeted Ukraine's Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Cherkasy regions, the Air Force wrote on Telegram. Air defence units intercepted 42 drones and redirected another 47.

At least three blasts were heard in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine amid an Easter ceasefire declared by Moscow, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing local "operative services." Ukraine's forces reported nearly 3,000 violations of Russia's own ceasefire pledge, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that Kyiv's forces were instructed to mirror the Russian Army's actions. Russia's Ministry of Defence said Ukraine had broken the Easter ceasefire declared by the Kremlin more than a thousand times, claiming that Ukrainian forces shot at Russian positions 444 times. The ministry also said Kremlin forces encountered more than 900 Ukrainian drone attacks during this time. At least three blasts were heard in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine amid an Easter ceasefire declared by Moscow, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing local "operative services."

In the early hours of Monday, residents in several Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv, were urged by local authorities to go immediately to nearby shelters due to the threat of drone strikes. The BBC has not independently verified the claims by Kyiv and Moscow. US President Donald Trump - who has been pushing for an end to the war - said late on Sunday that "hopefully Russia and Ukraine will make a deal this week". He gave no further details. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and currently controls about 20% Ukraine's territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of breaching an "Easter truce" announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine said was being violated from the moment it started. In a surprise announcement on Saturday, Putin ordered his forces to "stop all military activity" along the front line in the war against Ukraine, citing humanitarian reasons. The 30-hour cessation of hostilities would have been the most significant pause in the fighting throughout the three-year conflict. But just hours after the order was meant to have come into effect, air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv and several other Ukrainian regions, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accusing Russia of having maintained its attacks and engaging in a PR stunt. Russia's Ministry of Defence also alleged on Sunday that Ukraine had broken the truce more than 1,000 times.