Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that a Russian drone had struck a cover built to contain radiation at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, adding that "radiation levels have not increased." The Ukrainian air force said that Russia had launched more than 100 drones across the country overnight -- including attack drones -- targeting northern regions of the country where the Chernobyl power plant lies. "Last night, a Russian attack drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the cover protecting the world from radiation at the destroyed 4th power unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant," Zelenskyy said in a social media post. The International Atomic Energy Agency also reported an "explosion" at the site, and said "radiation levels inside and outside remain normal and stable." The agency, which has had a team deployed on the site since the early stages of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, published images apparently showing the drone on fire after crashing into the covering.

The IAEA, which monitors nuclear safety the world, said radiation levels inside and outside Chernobyl remain normal and stable. The agency remains on "high alert" after the incident, with its director general Rafael Mariano Grossi saying there is "no room for complacency". Chernobyl is the site of the world's worst nuclear accident - a catastrophic explosion that sent a plume of radioactive material into the air in 1986, triggering a public health emergency across Europe. Zelensky posted footage on X appearing to show damage to the giant shield, made of concrete and steel, which covers the remains of the reactor that lost its roof in the explosion. The shield is designed to prevent further radioactive material leaking out over the next century.

Simulation frameworks play a pivotal role in the safe development of robotic applications. However, often different components of an envisioned robotic system are best simulated in different environments/simulators. This poses a significant challenge in simulating the entire project into a single integrated robotic framework. Specifically, for partially-open or closed-source simulators, often two core limitations arise. i) Actors in the scene other than the designated robots cannot be controlled during runtime via interfaces such as ROS and ii) retrieving real-time state information (such as pose, velocity etc.) of objects in the scene is prevented. In this work, we address these limitations and describe our solution for the use case of integrating aerial drones simulated by the powerful simulator Sphinx (provided by Parrot Drone) into the Gazebo simulator. We achieve this by means of a mirrored instance of a drone that is included into existing Gazebo-based environments. A promising application of our integrated simulation environment is the task of target tracking that is common in aerial multi-robot scenarios. Therefore, to demonstrate the effectiveness our our integrated simulation, we also implement a model predictive controller (MPC) that outperforms the default PID-based controller framework provided with the Parrot's popular Anafi drone in various dynamic tracking scenarios thus enhancing the utility of the overall system. We test our solution by including the Anafi drone in an existing Gazebo-based simulation and evaluate the performance of the MPC through rigorous testing in simulated and real-world tracking experiments against a customized PID controller baseline. Source code is published on https://github.com/robot-perception-group/anafi_sim.

An arson suspect was arrested on suspicion of starting four separate fires across the city of Santa Monica earlier this month, police said Wednesday. Marco Antonio Rubio, 36, is accused of the spate of fires that began around 1 p.m. on Sunday with the use of a lighter and an aerosol can to set them, Santa Monica police said in a news release. No one was injured in the incidents. Police said Rubio is alleged to have lighted a discarded pillow and some cardboard in the 1000 block of Colorado Avenue, ignited a discarded mattress on 16th Street and Michigan Avenue, set fire to a net on a little league batting cage at Memorial Park and also a parked vehicle in the 1500 block of 18th Street. Investigators located the suspect using aerial drone technology, police said.

Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich has the latest on peace talks on'Special Report.' Ukraine's air force indicated in a Facebook post on Thursday that the Eastern European nation had been targeted in a drone attack overnight. "85 ENEMY UAVS SHOT, 52 DRONES FAILED TO REACH THEIR TARGETS (LOCATIONALLY LOST)," the top of the post read, according to a Google translation of the Ukrainian text. The announcement came after U.S. President Donald Trump noted on Wednesday that he had spoken to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. TRUMP SAYS RUSSIA AGREES TO'IMMEDIATELY' BEGIN NEGOTIATIONS TO END WAR IN UKRAINE Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a joint press conference with the President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Kyiv on Feb. 10, 2025, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine (TETIANA DZHAFAROVA/AFP via Getty Images) In a Truth Social post, the president described his call with Putin as "lengthy and highly productive."

At least one person was killed and four others, including a nine-year-old child, were injured by a Russian missile strike in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, the city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said. The strike caused damage and fires in at least four areas of the city. Regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said a woman was killed by a Ukrainian drone in Russia's Belgorod region. Gladkov said the drone struck the victim's car and killed her instantly. Ukraine's military said it shot down six out of seven ballistic missiles launched by Russia in an overnight attack.

Russia may be forced to throttle back its oil output in the coming months as U.S. sanctions hamper its access to tankers to sail to Asia and Ukrainian drone attacks hobble its refineries. The United States imposed sanctions last month that targeted 180 Russian tankers while Kyiv has stepped up drone attacks to improve its bargaining position amid expectations that U.S. President Donald Trump will press Russian leader Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Trump has said stopping the conflict is a priority and that he could impose new sanctions on Russia if his goals are not achieved.

Adaptive teaming, the ability to collaborate with unseen teammates without prior coordination, remains an underexplored challenge in multi-robot collaboration. This paper focuses on adaptive teaming in multi-drone cooperative pursuit, a critical task with real-world applications such as border surveillance, search-and-rescue, and counter-terrorism. We first define and formalize the \textbf{A}daptive Teaming in \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{D}rone \textbf{P}ursuit (AT-MDP) problem and introduce AT-MDP framework, a comprehensive framework that integrates simulation, algorithm training and real-world deployment. AT-MDP framework provides a flexible experiment configurator and interface for simulation, a distributed training framework with an extensive algorithm zoo (including two newly proposed baseline methods) and an unseen drone zoo for evaluating adaptive teaming, as well as a real-world deployment system that utilizes edge computing and Crazyflie drones. To the best of our knowledge, AT-MDP framework is the first adaptive framework for continuous-action decision-making in complex real-world drone tasks, enabling multiple drones to coordinate effectively with unseen teammates. Extensive experiments in four multi-drone pursuit environments of increasing difficulty confirm the effectiveness of AT-MDP framework, while real-world deployments further validate its feasibility in physical systems. Videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/at-mdp.

This research endeavors to design the perching maneuver and control in ornithopter robots. By analyzing the dynamic interplay between the robot's flight dynamics, feedback loops, and the environmental constraints, we aim to advance our understanding of the perching maneuver, drawing parallels to biological systems. Inspired by the elegant control strategies observed in avian flight, we develop an optimal maneuver and a corresponding controller to achieve stable perching. The maneuver consists of a deceleration and a rapid pitch-up (vertical turn), which arises from analytically solving the optimization problem of minimal velocity at perch, subject to kinematic and dynamic constraints. The controller for the flapping frequency and tail symmetric deflection is nonlinear and adaptive, ensuring robustly stable perching. Indeed, such adaptive behavior in a sense incorporates homeostatic principles of cybernetics into the control system, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to unexpected disturbances and maintain a stable posture during the perching maneuver. The resulting autonomous perching maneuvers -- closed-loop descent and turn -- , have been verified and validated, demonstrating excellent agreement with real bird perching trajectories reported in the literature. These findings lay the theoretical groundwork for the development of future prototypes that better imitate the skillful perching maneuvers of birds.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) increasingly collaborate in logistics, surveillance, inspection tasks and etc. However, existing simulators often focus on a single domain, limiting cross-domain study. This paper presents the SkyRover, a modular simulator for UAV-AGV multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF). SkyRover supports realistic agent dynamics, configurable 3D environments, and convenient APIs for external solvers and learning methods. By unifying ground and aerial operations, it facilitates cross-domain algorithm design, testing, and benchmarking. Experiments highlight SkyRover's capacity for efficient pathfinding and high-fidelity simulations in UAV-AGV coordination. Project is available at https://sites.google.com/view/mapf3d/home.