Faced with an increasingly fraught security environment, rapid changes in modern warfare and dwindling troop numbers, the Self-Defense Forces have begun incorporating what they hope will be affordable yet game-changing technologies that could give them an edge in any future conflict: drones. Whether for use in the air, on land or at sea, the SDF is gradually integrating these increasingly capable and often autonomous systems into their units as Japan takes lessons from the war in Ukraine on how the assets can act as force multipliers while minimizing human losses and operate continuously for long periods. "It is safe to say that the unprecedented scale of unmanned aerial vehicle deployments in the Ukraine war, and their effectiveness, has been an important driver behind the interest in UAVs," said Naoko Aoki, a Japan expert and political scientist at the Rand Corp.

Russia's creeping advance in Donetsk has captured 4,168 square kilometres (1,609sq miles) of territory at the cost of 430,000 soldiers, according to a new analysis. Ukraine will reportedly receive its first French Mirage 2000-5F multirole fighters this month, according to French magazine Avions Legendaires. A Russian court has ordered the largest search engine in Russia, Yandex, to hide maps and photos of one of the country's biggest oil refineries after repeated attacks by Ukrainian drones, state news agency TASS reports. Russia's creeping advance in Donetsk has captured 4,168 square kilometres (1,609sq miles) of territory at the cost of 430,000 soldiers, according to a new analysis. Ukraine will reportedly receive its first French Mirage 2000-5F multirole fighters this month, according to French magazine Avions Legendaires.

Low-altitude mobility, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has introduced transformative advancements across various domains, like transportation, logistics, and agriculture. Leveraging flexible perspectives and rapid maneuverability, UAVs extend traditional systems' perception and action capabilities, garnering widespread attention from academia and industry. However, current UAV operations primarily depend on human control, with only limited autonomy in simple scenarios, and lack the intelligence and adaptability needed for more complex environments and tasks. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable problem-solving and generalization capabilities, offering a promising pathway for advancing UAV intelligence. This paper explores the integration of LLMs and UAVs, beginning with an overview of UAV systems' fundamental components and functionalities, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM technology. Subsequently, it systematically highlights the multimodal data resources available for UAVs, which provide critical support for training and evaluation. Furthermore, it categorizes and analyzes key tasks and application scenarios where UAVs and LLMs converge. Finally, a reference roadmap towards agentic UAVs is proposed, aiming to enable UAVs to achieve agentic intelligence through autonomous perception, memory, reasoning, and tool utilization. Related resources are available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAVs_Meet_LLMs.

Russia's gradual, grinding advance in parts of Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk succeeded in wresting away 4,168 sq km (1,609 square miles) of fields and abandoned villages in 2024 – equivalent to 0.69 percent of the country. That was the assessment of the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, based on satellite imagery and geolocated video footage. "Russian forces have seized four mid-sized settlements – Avdiivka, Selydove, Vuhledar, and Kurakhove – in all of 2024, the largest of which had a pre-war population of just over 31,000 people," said the ISW. Russian forces spent four months taking Avdiivka, and two months each for Selydove and Kurakhove. "Seizing these settlements has not allowed Russian forces to threaten any notable Ukrainian defensive nodes," said the ISW, adding that Moscow's troops failed to conduct the kind of rapid, mechanised manoeuvre necessary to convert these "tactical gains into deep penetrations of Ukraine's rear".

One person has been killed and four others were injured when Russian drones targeted the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, military and civilian officials said, as Russia launched barrages across the country. The Ukrainian Air Force said its air defences shot down 60 out of 93 Russian drones launched at Ukraine since the early hours of Friday. Moscow's forces have escalated aerial attacks across Ukraine in recent days, including a New Year's Day drone attack targeting central Kyiv that killed two people. In the latest barrage, a truck driver was killed by drone debris, according to Mykola Kalashnyk, acting governor for the Kyiv region. He said the debris also damaged several houses, injuring four people, including a 16-year-old boy.

While official reports of eerie drone-like UFOs dropped over the holidays, New Jersey residents are still coming forward with bizarre encounters. Two witnesses in Manalapan Township, for example, videotaped a bus-sized, 25- to 50-foot-long black triangle UFO that they saw'pull off a high g [force] maneuver over a residential area' just days before Christmas. The sighting, which lasted at least one minute, ended with the object zooming'in the general direction of McGuire [Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst]' -- matching a persistent pattern of'drone' UFO incursions over US bases in recent years. Another New Jersey skywatcher recorded what they described as a classic'flying saucer' with an'aura or haze around object' just three miles off the coast of Atlantic City. And still more Garden State witnesses now say they saw as many as 20 to 30 drones just this Wednesday night, which'kind of hovered and all looked like miniature aircraft,' in an account posted to Facebook.

Path planning is essential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as it determines the path that the UAV needs to follow to complete a task. This work addresses this problem by introducing a new algorithm called navigation variable-based multi-objective particle swarm optimization (NMOPSO). It first models path planning as an optimization problem via the definition of a set of objective functions that include optimality and safety requirements for UAV operation. The NMOPSO is then used to minimize those functions through Pareto optimal solutions. The algorithm features a new path representation based on navigation variables to include kinematic constraints and exploit the maneuverable characteristics of the UAV. It also includes an adaptive mutation mechanism to enhance the diversity of the swarm for better solutions. Comparisons with various algorithms have been carried out to benchmark the proposed approach. The results indicate that the NMOPSO performs better than not only other particle swarm optimization variants but also other state-of-the-art multi-objective and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. Experiments have also been conducted with real UAVs to confirm the validity of the approach for practical flights. The source code of the algorithm is available at https://github.com/ngandng/NMOPSO.

In its notice, the Commerce Department said that drones could be used to damage physical infrastructure in a collision, deliver an explosive payload or gather information about critical infrastructure, including building layouts. In addition, with critical infrastructure in the United States increasingly reliant on drones, any efforts to remotely incapacitate them would create a risk to national security. The department added that in the past, drone companies based in China had pushed updates to their devices to create no-fly restrictions that disabled them in conflict zones defined by the companies. The notice said that the Commerce Department was also considering whether any measures could mitigate the risks and allow the sale of Chinese drones to continue, such as certain design requirements or cybersecurity software. The proposed rule is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to examine and eliminate vulnerabilities in high-tech products and communications infrastructure that collect huge amounts of data about Americans.

The banks of a canal in Cheshire collapsed on New Year's Day after parts of the UK were lashed by heavy rain. Drone footage showed how fields near the village of Little Bollington, which is close to Altrincham, were inundated with water pouring from the Bridgewater Canal. Cheshire Police said nearby properties were evacuated and a section of the M56 had to be closed. It came on the same day that Greater Manchester police declared a major incident due to floodwater trapping people in their homes across the north west of England.

Aviva Siegel, who was held hostage by Hamas for 51 days, tells'Fox & Friends' about her husband, who is still being held in captivity in Gaza, and recounts the harrowing experiences she witnessed during the terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. A top Hamas commander responsible for the heinous Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz has been killed by a targeted drone strike, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) announced. Abd al-Hadi Sabah, who led the infiltration into Kibbutz Nir Oz, which ravaged the community near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, was killed on Tuesday local time in the Western Khan Yunis Battalion. The IDF said in a release on social media Tuesday that they conducted the intelligence-based strike alongside the Israeli Security Agency (ISA). The agencies said that Sabah was hiding in a shelter in the designated humanitarian area in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza.