Drones
Mysterious glowing orbs 'coming from mothership' off Florida coast spark fears of another drone invasion
Mysterious glowing orbs have been spotted flying off the coast of Florida - months after New Jersey was invaded by drones. Residents of Daytona Beach have described the unidentified objects rising directly from the ocean and flying over the surface of the water. One extremely viral video from March 17 at around 10pm captured what appeared to be a large object moving toward land, and the flare of light surrounding it gradually dissipating to reveal the shape of an aircraft. While many have dismissed it as simply a passenger plane, locals have shared similar videos online claiming the objects moved in unconventional ways. One particularly extraordinary theory has surfaced on social media, where locals say a'group of whistleblowers' claiming to be'military personnel and sailors' told them the US Navy discovered a'huge' underwater mothership that they believe is producing the orbs.
US to meet Ukraine again in Riyadh after talks with Russian delegation
United States officials are set to meet with their Ukrainian counterparts again after a round of talks with Russian negotiators on a partial ceasefire in Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official told the AFP news agency that the meeting would be held later on Monday after US and Russian delegations wrap up their day's talks in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh. Monday's US-Russia talks were primarily focused on ending attacks on Black Sea shipping, with a view to ushering in a broader ceasefire agreement that would bring an end to the three-year Russia-Ukraine war. US officials had already met the Ukrainian team on Sunday to discuss the protection of civilian and energy infrastructure, said Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, who led the delegation and called the talks "productive". Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera's Assed Baig said Ukraine was now keen to see Russia agree to a deal that would protect Black Sea shipping, particularly "the cessation of shelling of Ukrainian ports Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv".
CoinFT: A Coin-Sized, Capacitive 6-Axis Force Torque Sensor for Robotic Applications
Choi, Hojung, Low, Jun En, Huh, Tae Myung, Uribe, Gabriela A., Hong, Seongheon, Hoffman, Kenneth A. W., Di, Julia, Chen, Tony G., Stanley, Andrew A., Cutkosky, Mark R.
--We introduce CoinFT, a capacitive 6-axis force / torque (F / T) sensor that is compact, light, low-cost, and robust with an average mean-squared error of 0.11 N for force and 0.84 mNm for moment when the input ranges from 0 10 N and 0 4 N in normal and shear directions, respectively. CoinFT is a stack of two rigid PCBs with comb-shaped electrodes connected by an array of silicone rubber pillars. The microcontroller interrogates the electrodes in different subsets in order to enhance sensitivity for measuring 6-axis F / T . The combination of desirable features of CoinFT enables various contact-rich robot interactions at a scale, across different embodiment domains including drones, robot end-effectors, and wearable haptic devices. We demonstrate the utility of CoinFT on drones by performing an attitude-based force control to perform tasks that require careful contact force modulation. RECISE force and torque measurement is vital for robots to perform contact-rich tasks safely and effectively. Tasks such as table wiping [1], assembly [2], or palpating soft tissue [3] require the application of force and torque within a specific range--sufficient to complete the task but not so excessive as to cause damage or waste energy. Depending on the application and interaction type, robots performing contact-rich tasks come in various forms, including robotic arms [4], grippers [5], drones [6], and wearable devices [7]. Therefore, equipping these diverse robotic platforms with sensors that can accurately measure force and torque is essential. Extensive research has been dedicated to developing 6-axis force / torque (F / T) sensors using various transduction methods [8]. Commercially available sensors also exist, such as the Gamma (A TI Industries), and 6-axis F / T sensors from MinebeaMitsumi or ReSense.
A deal in the desert? US and Ukraine meet ahead of Russia ceasefire talks
"I feel that he (Putin) wants peace," said President Trump's personal envoy Steve Witkoff, adding: "I think that you're going to see in Saudi Arabia on Monday some real progress." Yet Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman has dampened expectations. "We are only at the beginning of this path," he told Russian state TV. Kyiv suffered one of its heaviest attacks from Russian drones on Saturday night, with three people killed, including a five-year-old girl. "We need to push Putin to give a real order to stop the strikes," said Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in his evening address on Sunday.
Trump envoy doesn't believe Putin wants to take over Europe
President Donald Trump's envoy to Russia and Ukraine says he doesn't believe Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to invade Europe. Envoy Steve Witkoff made the statement during a Sunday morning appearance on "Fox News Sunday," commenting on Putin's motives on a "larger scale." "Now I've been asked my opinion about what President Putin's motives are on a larger scale. And I simply have said that I just don't see that he wants to take all of Europe," Witkoff said. "This is a much different situation than it was in World War II. There was no NATO," he added.
Massive Russian drone attack kills 7 in Ukraine ahead of US peace talks
Former U.S. senior diplomat Gregory Slayton joined'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's phone call with Russian President Putin and the latest on the war in Gaza after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended. Russia launched a massive drone attack targeting Kyiv and other major cities in Ukraine overnight on Sunday, killing at least seven people. The attack comes just days before Ukrainian and Russian delegations are set to meet for indirect peace talks with the U.S. in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will mediate the talks and meet with representatives separately. Ukraine's air force says Sunday's attack from Russia involved 147 drones, 97 of which were shot down and another 25 failed to reach their targets.
Three killed in Russian attacks on Kyiv before peace talks in Saudi Arabia
At least seven people have been killed in overnight Russian drone attacks on the Ukrainian capital, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged his Western allies to put more pressure on Moscow to cease its attacks on the country in advance of peace talks in Saudi Arabia. Three people, including a five-year-old, were killed and 10 were injured in a drone attack on Kyiv, the city's military administration said on Sunday. Elsewhere, four people were killed in Russian attacks in Donetsk region, regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said, including three who died in an attack on the front-line Ukrainian town of Dobropillya. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram that emergency services were dispatched to several city districts following fires and damage. Earlier, the country's air force said Russia launched 147 drones overnight on several Ukrainian regions.
Co-SemDepth: Fast Joint Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation on Aerial Images
AlaaEldin, Yara, Odone, Francesca
Understanding the geometric and semantic properties of the scene is crucial in autonomous navigation and particularly challenging in the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Such information may be by obtained by estimating depth and semantic segmentation maps of the surrounding environment and for their practical use in autonomous navigation, the procedure must be performed as close to real-time as possible. In this paper, we leverage monocular cameras on aerial robots to predict depth and semantic maps in low-altitude unstructured environments. We propose a joint deep-learning architecture that can perform the two tasks accurately and rapidly, and validate its effectiveness on MidAir and Aeroscapes benchmark datasets. Our joint-architecture proves to be competitive or superior to the other single and joint architecture methods while performing its task fast predicting 20.2 FPS on a single NVIDIA quadro p5000 GPU and it has a low memory footprint. All codes for training and prediction can be found on this link: https://github.com/Malga-Vision/Co-SemDepth
Deadly Russian drone attack in Ukraine before next US talks in Saudi Arabia
With the United States set to meet delegations from Russia Ukraine separately in Saudi Arabia on Monday in an ongoing bid to halt the three-year war, Russia has launched a drone attack on Friday night on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing three people and wounding 12, Ukrainian officials said. The city was hit by 12 drones, police said. Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said residential buildings, cars and communal buildings were set on fire. Photos from the scene showed emergency services scouring the rubble for survivors. Ukraine and Russia agreed this week in principle to a limited ceasefire after US President Donald Trump held separate calls on consecutive days with the countries' leaders, but what actual targets would be off limits to attack remains contentious.
HoverAir X1 ProMax Review: A Great but Expensive Selfie Drone
There's now an entire subcategory of small, pocketable camera drones built just for capturing selfies, and ZeroZero Robotics' HoverAir X1 ProMax might be the most assured, impressive model in it. It's effortlessly portable, making even the likes of the DJI Mini 4 Pro seem bulky. Weighing just 6.79 ounces with a clever folding design and all-over cage to keep the propellers out of harm's way, the X1 ProMax can be tossed into a coat pocket or backpack without fear of it getting damaged. It's the kind of thing you can casually bring along on any day trip or vacation alongside your sunglasses and water bottle, just on the off chance it comes in useful. Pull it out, unfold it, hit the power button, select your preferred selfie video style with the left and right buttons, place the drone on your outstretched palm facing you, tap the power button again, and it'll take off, capture your selected shot, and return to land on your palm, ready to be put away again.