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 Drones


Smell-seeking drone uses moth antenna to follow a scent

New Scientist

A drone equipped with an antenna from a male moth can locate the source of a smell more accurately than any electrical sensors. Unfortunately, however, the only smell it can detect is the sex pheromone emitted by female moths. Electrical sensors for odours are commonly used to detect gas leaks, but these are relatively slow to react to smells and even slower to reset between measurements, says Daigo Terutsuki at Shinshu University, Japan. "It's very difficult to apply that to…


U.S. to send long-range surveillance drones to Japan amid Taiwan tensions

The Japan Times

The U.S. military will deploy several long-range surveillance drones to Okinawa Prefecture, near Japan's far-flung southwestern islands area near Taiwan, as the allies seek to counter China's ramped-up drone presence in the same area. Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said Tuesday that the U.S. MQ-4C Triton drones will be sent to the U.S. air base in Kadena, on Okinawa's main island, in the coming weeks. "This deployment is expected to enhance the Japan-U.S. alliance's intelligence-gathering capabilities and, by extension, the alliance's deterrence and response capabilities," Nakatani told a news conference.


Ukrainians doubt potential of Trump's peace plan amid deadly Russia attacks

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Thread-thin, glistening in the sun and kilometres long, optical fibres wind through the branches of trees on the frontlines of eastern Ukraine. The cords were – sometimes still are – attached to Russian drones, making them immune to radio-electronic jamming. The drones may have been shot down. Some are still operational, waylaid and replete with danger. "When somebody is passing by, they just fly up and attack," Oleh, a military officer deployed in eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,138

Al Jazeera

Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defence units "intercepted and destroyed" 11 Ukrainian drones over the country's Kursk and Belgorod regions, which border Ukraine, as well as the southern Rostov region overnight. Russia's Defence Ministry said Kyiv carried out seven attacks on Moscow's energy infrastructure facilities between April 5 and 6, despite a moratorium on energy strikes brokered by the United States. According to the ministry, the attacks targeted the Crimean region, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as well as Russia's Bryansk, Rostov and Voronezh regions. The ministry also said that Kremlin forces launched an overnight strike using long-range precision weapons and drones against Ukraine's central artillery armament base and defence industry enterprises involved in drone production. According to the ministry, Moscow also gained control over the village of Basivka in Ukraine's Sumy region in a rare cross-border advance.


HDVIO2.0: Wind and Disturbance Estimation with Hybrid Dynamics VIO

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for state estimation in autonomous micro aerial vehicles using onboard sensors. Current methods improve VIO by incorporating a model of the translational vehicle dynamics, yet their performance degrades when faced with low-accuracy vehicle models or continuous external disturbances, like wind. Additionally, incorporating rotational dynamics in these models is computationally intractable when they are deployed in online applications, e.g., in a closed-loop control system. We present HDVIO2.0, which models full 6-DoF, translational and rotational, vehicle dynamics and tightly incorporates them into a VIO with minimal impact on the runtime. HDVIO2.0 builds upon the previous work, HDVIO, and addresses these challenges through a hybrid dynamics model combining a point-mass vehicle model with a learning-based component, with access to control commands and IMU history, to capture complex aerodynamic effects. The key idea behind modeling the rotational dynamics is to represent them with continuous-time functions. HDVIO2.0 leverages the divergence between the actual motion and the predicted motion from the hybrid dynamics model to estimate external forces as well as the robot state. Our system surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art methods in experiments using public and new drone dynamics datasets, as well as real-world flights in winds up to 25 km/h. Unlike existing approaches, we also show that accurate vehicle dynamics predictions are achievable without precise knowledge of the full vehicle state.


Russian air strikes kill 1 in Kyiv as Zelenskyy demands more pressure on Putin

FOX News

One person was killed Sunday as Russian air strikes hit the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while the death toll from Friday's deadly attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih continued to rise. The Kyiv victim was found close to the strike's epicenter of the attack in the city's Darnytskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A further three people were injured in the strike, which saw fires break out in several nonresidential areas, damaging cars and buildings. In a statement on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the intensifying Russian attacks showed that there is still insufficient international pressure on Moscow. US WILL KNOW IN'MATTER OF WEEKS' IF RUSSIA IS SERIOUS ABOUT PEACE OR USING'DELAY TACTIC': RUBIO He said Russia has launched more than 1,460 guided aerial bombs, nearly 670 attack drones and more than 30 missiles at Ukraine in the past week alone.


Ukraine says children among 14 killed in Russian attack on Kryvyi Rih

Al Jazeera

At least 14 people, including six children, have been killed in a Russian missile attack on a residential area of the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, making it one of Moscow's deadliest strikes this year. Friday's attack on Zelenskyy's hometown, which comes as United States President Donald Trump is pushing for a ceasefire in the war, damaged residential blocks and caused fires, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. The dead and wounded could be seen lying on the pavement, one of them by a playground, in unverified videos circulating on Telegram as grey smoke rose into the sky. At least 50 people were wounded, the emergency services said, adding that the figure was growing. More than 30 people, including a three-month-old baby, were admitted to hospital, Lysak said.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,135

Al Jazeera

A Russian ballistic missile strike killed at least four people and wounded 17 in the city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown. The attack also sparked a fire in the city, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of Kryvyi Rih's military administration. Russian drone attacks overnight targeted the Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhia and Kharkiv, killing one person and injuring several others, officials said. Two people were killed and at least 32, including two children, were injured by a Russian drone attack which hit several multistorey apartment blocks in Kharkiv, the region's governor said. One person was also injured in a separate drone attack on Ruski Tyshky, a village outside Kharkiv.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,134

Al Jazeera

One person was killed and two others injured in a Russian overnight attack on southeast Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said. A Russian ballistic missile strike on Ukraine's Kryvyi Rih killed at least four people and injured 14 others, including two children, Ukrainian authorities said. An infant, a seven-year-old boy and six others were also injured in a drone attack on Ukraine's Kharkiv region, said Oleh Syniehubov, the region's governor. Kharkiv's Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 15 drone strikes were carried out in the region. At least 60 people were forced to evacuate from their homes in the Russian city of Kursk after falling debris from intercepted Ukrainian drones hit their apartment buildings, acting governor, Alexander Khinshtein, said.


Towards Mobile Sensing with Event Cameras on High-agility Resource-constrained Devices: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the increasing complexity of mobile device applications, these devices are evolving toward high agility. This shift imposes new demands on mobile sensing, particularly in terms of achieving high accuracy and low latency. Event-based vision has emerged as a disruptive paradigm, offering high temporal resolution, low latency, and energy efficiency, making it well-suited for high-accuracy and low-latency sensing tasks on high-agility platforms. However, the presence of substantial noisy events, the lack of inherent semantic information, and the large data volume pose significant challenges for event-based data processing on resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper surveys the literature over the period 2014-2024, provides a comprehensive overview of event-based mobile sensing systems, covering fundamental principles, event abstraction methods, algorithmic advancements, hardware and software acceleration strategies. We also discuss key applications of event cameras in mobile sensing, including visual odometry, object tracking, optical flow estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while highlighting the challenges associated with event data processing, sensor fusion, and real-time deployment. Furthermore, we outline future research directions, such as improving event camera hardware with advanced optics, leveraging neuromorphic computing for efficient processing, and integrating bio-inspired algorithms to enhance perception. To support ongoing research, we provide an open-source \textit{Online Sheet} with curated resources and recent developments. We hope this survey serves as a valuable reference, facilitating the adoption of event-based vision across diverse applications.