Federal officials face a looming threat of foreign nationals utilizing drones to surveil United States military bases after two recent arrests and a string of mysterious incursions suggest the country's airspace is ill-equipped to handle the rapidly evolving technology. In late 2024, the Department of Justice announced charges against Yinpiao Zhou, 39, for allegedly flying a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and taking photos of the facility. The Chinese-American citizen was detained as he attempted to board a China-bound flight and was charged with violation of national defense airspace and failure to register an aircraft. "Anyone operating a drone over a restricted space, like a military base, would be subject to prosecution," Ken Gray, a former FBI agent and military analyst, told Fox News Digital. "A foreign national operating [a drone] raises a concern about that person being involved in some type of espionage or intelligence gathering."

Testing autonomous robotic systems, such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles, is challenging due to their interaction with highly unpredictable environments. A common practice is to first conduct simulation-based testing, which, despite reducing real-world risks, remains time-consuming and resource-intensive due to the vast space of possible test scenarios. A number of search-based approaches were proposed to generate test scenarios more efficiently. A key aspect of any search-based test generation approach is the choice of representation used during the search process. However, existing methods for improving test scenario representation remain limited. We propose RILaST (Representation Improvement in Latent Space for Search-Based Testing) approach, which enhances test representation by mapping it to the latent space of a variational autoencoder. We evaluate RILaST on two use cases, including autonomous drone and autonomous lane-keeping assist system. The obtained results show that RILaST allows finding between 3 to 4.6 times more failures than baseline approaches, achieving a high level of test diversity.

The potential of tree planting as a natural climate solution is often undermined by inadequate monitoring of tree planting projects. Current monitoring methods involve measuring trees by hand for each species, requiring extensive cost, time, and labour. Advances in drone remote sensing and computer vision offer great potential for mapping and characterizing trees from aerial imagery, and large pre-trained vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), may be a particularly compelling choice given limited labeled data. In this work, we compare SAM methods for the task of automatic tree crown instance segmentation in high resolution drone imagery of young tree plantations. We explore the potential of SAM for this task, and find that methods using SAM out-of-the-box do not outperform a custom Mask R-CNN, even with well-designed prompts, but that there is potential for methods which tune SAM further. We also show that predictions can be improved by adding Digital Surface Model (DSM) information as an input.

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.

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".

--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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.