This paper presents a scalable decentralized multi agent framework that facilitates the exchange of information between computing units through computer networks. The architectural boundaries imposed by the tool make it suitable for collective intelligence research experiments ranging from agents that exchange hello world messages to virtual drone agents exchanging positions and eventually agents exchanging information via radio with real Crazyflie drones in VU Amsterdam laboratory. The field modulation theory is implemented to construct synthetic local perception maps for agents, which are constructed based on neighbouring agents positions and neighbouring points of interest dictated by the environment. By constraining the experimental setup to a 2D environment with discrete actions, constant velocity and parameters tailored to VU Amsterdam laboratory, UAV Crazyflie drones running hill climbing controller followed collision-free trajectories and bridged sim-to-real gap.

Panicked locals in two cities north of Los Angeles, California, piled onto Amazon's Ring neighbors app to report UFOs that'zig zagged' and hovered over the weekend. Their reports of a'bright light' that looked like'a shooting star' but acted more like a'hovercraft' sparked shockwaves across social media -- alongside the emergence of eerie cell phone videos that purported to capture some of these six alleged craft. But a wide community of experts, including UFO researchers with Harvard's Galileo Project, told DailyMail.com The videos appeared to show drone swarms used in an LED light show thousands of miles away from California, based on landmarks and other visual cues, they said. And some of these UFO videos were paired with old and unrelated audio tracks passed off as the videos' own.

A suspected Israeli drone attack on a car in southern Lebanon has killed a commander from a coalition of Palestinian armed groups as tensions remain high along the Israel-Lebanon border. The attack targeted a car in the city of Sidon on Wednesday morning, killing Khalil al-Maqdah, a senior officer of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. A Hamas commander was also killed in the same region earlier this month. Meanwhile, the Israeli army launched a series of overnight air raids targeting what it said were ammunition depots belonging to Lebanon's Hezbollah group in the country's Bekaa region, killing one person and wounding at least 20 others. Hezbollah said it launched dozens of rockets towards northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Ukraine targeted Moscow on Wednesday in what Russian officials called one of largest drone strikes on the capital since the war began in 2022. All 11 drones heading toward the capital in the Moscow region were destroyed, Russia's Ministry of Defense said. In total, Russia said its air defenses downed 45 Ukrainian drones, including 23 over the Bryansk region, six over Belgorod, three over Kaluga and two over Kursk. "This was one of the biggest attempts of all time to attack Moscow using drones," Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said on his Telegram channel, adding that strong air defenses around the capital prevented the drones from striking their intended targets. Some Russian social media channels shared videos of drones apparently being destroyed by air defense systems, which then set off car alarms.

Ukraine has launched one of its largest drone attacks on Moscow, as it presses on with a major incursion into Russia's Kursk region, Russian authorities said. Russia's Ministry of Defence said on Wednesday that air defence forces shot down 11 drones over Moscow and its surrounding region, with some reportedly downed over the city of Podolsk some 38km (24 miles) south of the Kremlin. "This is one of the largest ever attempts to attack Moscow with drones," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app. No damage or casualties were reported, he said in an earlier post. Drone attacks on Moscow are rare.

Ukraine launched one of the largest ever drone attacks on Moscow on Wednesday, the city's mayor said, with Russian air defense units destroying at least 11 drones flying toward the capital. Some of the drones were destroyed over the city of Podolsk, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The city in the Moscow region is some 38 kilometers south of the Kremlin. "The air defense systems of the Defense Ministry continue to repel enemy UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) attacks," Sobyanin wrote on the Telegram messaging app at 4:43 a.m. "This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever. We continue to monitor the situation."

The agency recently granted Amazon's Prime Air program approval to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight from its pilots in parts of Texas. The FAA has also granted similar waivers to hundreds of police departments around the country, which are now able to fly drones miles away, much to the ire of privacy advocates. However, while the FAA doling out more waivers is notable, there's a much bigger change coming in less than a month. It promises to be the most significant drone decision in decades, and one that will decide just how many drones we all can expect to see and hear buzzing above us in the US on a daily basis. By September 16--if the FAA adheres to its deadline--the agency must issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking about whether drones can be flown beyond a visual line of sight.

Coordination of multi-robot systems (MRSs) relies on efficient sensing and reliable communication among the robots. However, the sensors and communication channels of these robots are often vulnerable to cyberattacks and faults, which can disrupt their individual behavior and the overall objective of the MRS. In this work, we present a multi-robot integrity monitoring framework that utilizes inter-robot range measurements to (i) detect the presence of cyberattacks or faults affecting the MRS, (ii) identify the affected robot(s), and (iii) reconstruct the resulting localization error of these robot(s). The proposed iterative algorithm leverages sequential convex programming and alternating direction of multipliers method to enable real-time and distributed implementation. Our approach is validated using numerical simulations and demonstrated using PX4-SiTL in Gazebo on an MRS, where certain agents deviate from their desired position due to a GNSS spoofing attack. Furthermore, we demonstrate the scalability and interoperability of our algorithm through mixed-reality experiments by forming a heterogeneous MRS comprising real Crazyflie UAVs and virtual PX4-SiTL UAVs working in tandem.

A novel approach for achieving fast evasion in self-localized swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) threatened by an intruding moving object is presented in this paper. Motivated by natural self-organizing systems, the presented approach of fast and collective evasion enables the UAV swarm to avoid dynamic objects (interferers) that are actively approaching the group. The main objective of the proposed technique is the fast and safe escape of the swarm from an interferer ~discovered in proximity. This method is inspired by the collective behavior of groups of certain animals, such as schools of fish or flocks of birds. These animals use the limited information of their sensing organs and decentralized control to achieve reliable and effective group motion. The system presented in this paper is intended to execute the safe coordination of UAV swarms with a large number of agents. Similar to natural swarms, this system propagates a fast shock of information about detected interferers throughout the group to achieve dynamic and collective evasion. The proposed system is fully decentralized using only onboard sensors to mutually localize swarm agents and interferers, similar to how animals accomplish this behavior. As a result, the communication structure between swarm agents is not overwhelmed by information about the state (position and velocity) of each individual and it is reliable to communication dropouts. The proposed system and theory were numerically evaluated and verified in real-world experiments.

It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell. Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military's contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region. "I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities," Paparo said, "so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything." Cheap, easily weaponizable drones have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East in recent years, and the US military is rapidly adapting to this new uncrewed future.