At least three people, including a six-year-old girl, were killed after Russian drones hit a truck delivering gas cylinders to houses in a border village in the northern Chernihiv region, Ukraine's national police force said on Telegram. Four people, including two children, were injured. At least 12 people, including a three-year-old girl, were injured after a Russian glide bomb struck a five-storey apartment block in northeastern Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city. The bomb struck late on Wednesday night, starting a fire, the regional governor said. Russia's Ministry of Defence said its army had taken full control of the strategic hilltop town of Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine.

This paper presents a method for detecting and estimating vehicle speeds using PlanetScope SuperDove satellite imagery, offering a scalable solution for global vehicle traffic monitoring. Conventional methods such as stationary sensors and mobile systems like UAVs are limited in coverage and constrained by high costs and legal restrictions. Satellite-based approaches provide broad spatial coverage but face challenges, including high costs, low frame rates, and difficulty detecting small vehicles in high-resolution imagery. We propose a Keypoint R-CNN model to track vehicle trajectories across RGB bands, leveraging band timing differences to estimate speed. Validation is performed using drone footage and GPS data covering highways in Germany and Poland. Our model achieved a Mean Average Precision of 0.53 and velocity estimation errors of approximately 3.4 m/s compared to GPS data. Results from drone comparison reveal underestimations, with average speeds of 112.85 km/h for satellite data versus 131.83 km/h from drone footage. While challenges remain with high-speed accuracy, this approach demonstrates the potential for scalable, daily traffic monitoring across vast areas, providing valuable insights into global traffic dynamics.

We present a new simulator of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that is tailored to the needs of testing cyber-physical security attacks and defenses. Recent investigations into UAV safety have unveiled various attack surfaces and some defense mechanisms. However, due to escalating regulations imposed by aviation authorities on security research on real UAVs, and the substantial costs associated with hardware test-bed configurations, there arises a necessity for a simulator capable of substituting for hardware experiments, and/or narrowing down their scope to the strictly necessary. The study of different attack mechanisms requires specific features in a simulator. We propose a simulation framework based on ROS2, leveraging some of its key advantages, including modularity, replicability, customization, and the utilization of open-source tools such as Gazebo. Our framework has a built-in motion planner, controller, communication models and attack models. We share examples of research use cases that our framework can enable, demonstrating its utility.

Black-box runtime verification methods for cyber-physical systems can be used to discover errors in systems whose inputs and outputs are expressed as signals over time and their correctness requirements are specified in a temporal logic. Existing methods, such as requirement falsification, often focus on finding a single input that is a counterexample to system correctness. In this paper, we study how to create test generators that can produce multiple and diverse counterexamples for a single requirement. Several counterexamples expose system failures in varying input conditions and support the root cause analysis of the faults. We present the WOGAN algorithm to create such test generators automatically. The algorithm works by training iteratively a Wasserstein generative adversarial network that models the target distribution of the uniform distribution on the set of counterexamples. WOGAN is an algorithm that trains generative models that act as test generators for runtime verification. The training is performed online without the need for a previous model or dataset. We also propose criteria to evaluate such test generators. We evaluate the trained generators on several well-known problems including the ARCH-COMP falsification benchmarks. Our experimental results indicate that generators trained by the WOGAN algorithm are as effective as state-of-the-art requirement falsification algorithms while producing tests that are as diverse as a sample from uniform random sampling. We conclude that WOGAN is a viable method to produce test generators automatically and that these test generators can generate multiple and diverse counterexamples for the runtime verification of cyber-physical systems.

Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss why President Biden and Vice President Harris are facing scrutiny for their response to Hurricane Helene. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) clarified a message that warned civilian drone pilots not to fly near Hurricane Helene recovery and rescue efforts -- or risk penalty, fines or "criminal prosecution" -- after facing intense backlash online. Reached by Fox News Digital, a DOT spokesperson said civilian drone pilots are permitted and are assisting in rescue and recovery efforts, and previous "temporary flight restrictions" have since been lifted. Some X users -- collectively with millions of followers -- reacted adversely to a message addressed to drone pilots and with accompanying video from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg shared by the department earlier this week. The message and video argued the restrictions would prohibit civilian volunteers from legally searching for victims or survivors when response time matters most or capturing their own footage of the disaster.

The US Army is closer to unleashing robots on the battlefield after sending one dubbed'Lone Wolf' to the Middle East. The robot dog features an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on its back that is attached to an AI-powered rotating mount capable of spotting aerial targets. The armed machine was sent overseas for rehearsal drills at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia. The military shared a photo of Lone Wolf last week, showing a Korean-made Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) at an undisclosed location. The US Army recently carried out testing of a new war machine in the Middle East.

An autonomous drone fleet overseen by Ocean Infinity has rediscovered the USS Stewart, the only US Navy destroyer ever captured by Japanese forces during World War II. The marine robotics company's trio of orange, 20-foot-long underwater robots found the historic vessel while mapping what is now the 1,286-square-mile Cordell Bank national marine sanctuary off the California coast. Also known as the "Ghost Ship of the Pacific," the 314-foot-long ship has spent the past 78 years resting roughly 3,500 feet below the ocean's surface, and appears to remain almost completely intact and upright. "This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a US Navy'four-piper' destroyer known to exist," Maria Brown, superintendent for both Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement to The New York Times on October 1. The USS Stewart's story is unique in US maritime history, making it one of the most sought-after wrecks for decades.

Fox News' Rachel Campos-Duffy and Griff Jenkins discuss the latest pop culture news during an appearance on'Fox & Friends Weekend.' Singer Lana Del Rey slammed paparazzi for following her and new husband, a Louisiana alligator tour guide, after their intimate wedding day. Del Rey, 39, and Jeremy Dufrene, a captain of an airboat tour company, reportedly tied the knot during a backyard ceremony in Louisiana on Sept. 26, according to Page Six. Their nuptials were hosted next to the Bayous des Allemends, where Dufrene operates his boat tours outside of New Orleans, the media outlet claimed. Singer Lana Del Rey slammed paparazzi for following her and new husband, a Louisiana alligator tour guide, with drones after their intimate nuptials. However, their special moment took a turn when Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant, shared that paparazzi swarmed the couple with drones.

Drone operators from the private sector who volunteered to fly unmanned vehicles to the disaster-hit Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture following January's magnitude 7.6 earthquake returned to the region last week after record-breaking rainfall caused severe floods and cut off access to remote communities. The Japan UAS Industrial Development Association (JUIDA), an industry body of drone companies, was commissioned by the Self-Defense Forces to carry out multiple missions to transport bread, vegetable juice, milk, and cooked and dry-packed rice to people in areas that had been cut off. Other operators that took part in the effort included KDDI SmartDrone, which was directly commissioned by the prefecture to fly drones over wrecked roads to snap images that would help assess the damage caused by landslides.

Navigating complex environments requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous systems to perform trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance in real-time. While many control strategies have effectively utilized linear approximations, addressing the non-linear dynamics of UAV, especially in obstacle-dense environments, remains a key challenge that requires further research. This paper introduces a Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for the DJI Matrice 100, addressing these challenges by using a dynamic model and B-spline interpolation for smooth reference trajectories, ensuring minimal deviation while respecting safety constraints. The framework supports various trajectory types and employs a penalty-based cost function for control accuracy in tight maneuvers. The framework utilizes CasADi for efficient real-time optimization, enabling the UAV to maintain robust operation even under tight computational constraints. Simulation and real-world indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrated the NMPC ability to adapt to disturbances, resulting in smooth, collision-free navigation.