Al Jazeera's Charles Stratford reports on the method being used to stop Russian drones from attacking Ukrainian vehicles near the border, not far from the Russian region of Kursk where fierce fighting is ongoing.

The low battery autonomy of Unnamed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) can make smart farming (precision agriculture), disaster recovery, and the fighting against dengue vector applications difficult. This article considers two approaches, first enumerating the characteristics observed in these three IoT application types and then modeling an UAV's battery recharge coordination using the Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) approach. In this way, we propose that each drone inside the swarm does not communicate concerning this recharge coordination decision, reducing energy usage and permitting remote usage. A total of 6000 simulations were run to evaluate how two proposed policies, the BaseLine (BL) and ChargerThershold (CT) coordination recharging policy, behave in 30 situations regarding how each simulation sets conclude the simulation runs and how much time they work until recharging results. CT policy shows more reliable results in extreme system usage. This work conclusion presents the potential of these three IoT applications to achieve their perpetual service without communication between drones and ground stations. This work can be a baseline for future policies and simulation parameter enhancements.

Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians in Gaza in strikes on Saturday, according to the Gaza health ministry, the latest in a string of Israeli attacks on the enclave that have kept up despite a roughly two-month-old truce with Hamas. Since the cease-fire went into effect in mid-January, the military has conducted constant strikes in Gaza. Israel has accused militants of threatening its forces by laying explosive devices, flying drones or by approaching where Israeli troops are deployed. Hamas has claimed those attacks have killed more than 150 people since the truce took effect, at least some of them civilians. And it has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the agreement by continuing military operations.

At least nine people, including three journalists, have been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli drone attack on Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, according to Palestinian media. The attack on Saturday reportedly targeted a relief team that was accompanied by journalists and photographers. At least three local journalists are among the dead. The Palestinian Journalists' Protection Center said in a statement that "the journalists were documenting humanitarian relief efforts for those affected by Israel's genocidal war" and called on Gaza ceasefire mediators to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move forward with implementing the agreed truce and prisoner exchange. Israel has rejected opening talks on the second phase of the ceasefire between it and Hamas, which would require it to negotiate over a permanent end to the war, a key Hamas demand.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stresses the United Kingdom's intention to provide "robust and credible" security guarantees to prevent Russia from attacking Ukraine again as Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to sign up to a US-brokered truce proposal as fighting rages on the ground. "We will build up Ukraine's own defences and armed forces and be ready to deploy as a'coalition of the willing' in the event of a peace deal to help secure Ukraine on the land, at sea and in the sky," Starmer said on Saturday after a virtual meeting with 25 European Union and other world leaders as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "We agreed military planners would convene again in the UK this week to progress practical plans for how our militaries can support Ukraine's future security," Starmer added. The meeting was held after Putin on Friday agreed in principle to an immediate 30-day ceasefire put forward by Washington and already accepted by Ukraine. But on Friday, Putin also said there were issues to work out.

A team of charity workers has been killed in Israeli strikes in northern Gaza, the UK-registered Al Khair Foundation has told the BBC. The charity said eight workers - including volunteers and journalists documenting their activities - were killed when their vehicles were targeted on Saturday in what Hamas described as a "blatant violation" of the ceasefire agreement with Israel. The Israeli military has said it had struck "two terrorists who were identified operating a drone that posed a threat to Israeli troops", adding that it then targeted "additional terrorists" who arrived at the scene. The charity rejects the allegation that members of its team were terrorists.

At Tehran's Amirkabir University, authorities installed facial recognition software at its entrance gate to also find women not wearing the hijab, the report said. Surveillance cameras on Iran's major roads are also being used to search for uncovered women. Investigators also said they obtained the "Nazer" mobile phone app offered by Iranian police, which allows "vetted" members of the public and the police to report on uncovered women in vehicles, including ambulances, buses, metro cars and taxis. "Users may add the location, date, time and the licence plate number of the vehicle in which the alleged mandatory hijab infraction occurred, which then'flags' the vehicle online, alerting the police," the report said. According to the report, a text message is then sent to the registered owner of the vehicle, warning them they had been found in violation of the mandatory hijab laws.

Motion planning and trajectory generation are crucial technologies in various domains including the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), manipulators, and rockets. However, optimization-based real-time motion planning becomes increasingly challenging due to the problem's probable non-convexity and the inherent limitations of Non-Linear Programming algorithms. Highly nonlinear dynamics, obstacle avoidance constraints, and non-convex inputs can exacerbate these difficulties. To address these hurdles, this paper proposes a two-layer optimization algorithm for 2D vehicles by dynamically reformulating small time horizon convex programming subproblems, aiming to provide real-time guarantees for trajectory optimization. Our approach involves breaking down the original problem into small horizon-based planning cycles with fixed final times, referred to as planning cycles. Each planning cycle is then solved within a series of restricted convex sets identified by our customized search algorithms incrementally. The key benefits of our proposed algorithm include fast computation speeds and lower task time. We demonstrate these advantages through mathematical proofs under some moderate preconditions and experimental results.

Russia pushed Ukrainian forces out of most of the territory they controlled in the Russian region of Kursk during the past week, raising questions about whether a weeklong US intelligence cutoff materially helped the Russian counterattack. The US said it had restored intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine on Tuesday night, after Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire plan discussed in Riyadh for nine-and-a-half hours. Russian efforts to recapture Kursk intensified on March 6, a day after the White House cut off military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine. Russian forces attacked 32 times in Kursk, said Ukraine's general staff. According to Russian military reporters, Russia had prioritised that front, moving some of its best drone operators there and deploying electronic warfare to prevent Ukrainian drone counterattacks.

This paper addresses the Dubins path planning problem for vehicles in 3D space. In particular, we consider the problem of computing CSC paths -- paths that consist of a circular arc (C) followed by a straight segment (S) followed by a circular arc (C). These paths are useful for vehicles such as fixed-wing aircraft and underwater submersibles that are subject to lower bounds on turn radius. We present a new parameterization that reduces the 3D CSC planning problem to a search over 2 variables, thus lowering search complexity, while also providing gradients that assist that search. We use these equations with a numerical solver to explore numbers and types of solutions computed for a variety of planar and 3D scenarios. Our method successfully computes CSC paths for the large majority of test cases, indicating that it could be useful for future generation of robust, efficient curvature-constrained trajectories.