The United States has condemned growing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), blaming an armed group it says is backed by neighbouring Rwanda. Fighting has flared in recent days in the eastern part of the DRC between the M23 rebel group and government forces, resulting in dozens of soldiers and civilians being killed or wounded. The fighting has also pushed tens of thousands of civilians to flee towards the eastern city of Goma, which is located between Lake Kivu and the border with Rwanda. "This escalation has increased the risk to millions of people already exposed to human rights abuses including displacement, deprivation, and attacks," US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement. "The United States condemns Rwanda's support for the M23 armed group and calls on Rwanda to immediately withdraw all Rwanda Defense Force personnel from the DRC and remove its surface-to-air missile systems, which threaten the lives of civilians, UN and other regional peacekeepers, humanitarian actors, and commercial flights in eastern DRC," Miller added.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has accused Rwanda of carrying out a drone attack that damaged a civilian aircraft at the airport in the strategic eastern city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Fighting has flared in recent days around the town of Sake, 20km (12 miles) from Goma, between M23 rebels – which Kinshasa says are backed by Kigali – and Congolese government forces. "On the night of Friday to Saturday, at 2-o-clock in the morning local time, there was a drone attack by the Rwandan army," said Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaume Ndjike Kaito, army spokesperson for North Kivu province. "It had obviously come from the Rwandan territory, violating the territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic of the Congo," he added in a video broadcast by the governorate. The drones "targeted aircraft of DRC armed forces".

This paper tackles the problem of planning minimum-energy coverage paths for multiple UAVs. The addressed Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (mCPP) is a crucial problem for many UAV applications such as inspection and aerial survey. However, the typical path-length objective of existing approaches does not directly minimize the energy consumption, nor allows for constraining energy of individual paths by the battery capacity. To this end, we propose a novel mCPP method that uses the optimal flight speed for minimizing energy consumption per traveled distance and a simple yet precise energy consumption estimation algorithm that is utilized during the mCPP planning phase. The method decomposes a given area with boustrophedon decomposition and represents the mCPP as an instance of Multiple Set Traveling Salesman Problem with a minimum energy objective and energy consumption constraint. The proposed method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of computational time and energy efficiency of produced paths. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the energy consumption estimation is on average 97% compared to real flight consumption. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified in a real-world coverage experiment with two UAVs.

Seven people, including three children, were killed in a Russian drone attack on a gas station in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday. A missile strike on the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border on Thursday killed six people, including a child, and injured 18 others, a Russian official said. It was the latest in exchanges of long-range missile and rocket fire in Russia's war on Ukraine. Hours earlier, Russia fired two dozen cruise and ballistic missiles at a broad area of Ukraine, hitting multiple regions after a midnight strike in Ukraine's northeast killed five people in an apartment building, authorities said. Five of the 18 people injured in Belgorod, a city of around 340,000 people, were children, regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram.

Kirk Lippold discusses the reported three U.S. strikes against Houthis in Yemen on'Your World.' Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its accompanying warships have spent four months straight at sea defending against ballistic missiles and flying attack drones fired by Iranian-backed Houthis, and are now more regularly also defending against a new threat -- fast unmanned vessels that are fired at them through the water. While the Houthis have launched unmanned surface vessels, or USVs, in the past against Saudi coalition forces that have intervened in Yemen's civil war, they were used for the first time against U.S. military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea on Jan. 4. In the weeks since, the Navy has had to intercept and destroy multiple USVs. It's "more of an unknown threat that we don't have a lot of intel on, that could be extremely lethal -- an unmanned surface vessel," said Rear Adm. Marc Miguez, commander of Carrier Strike Group Two, of which the Eisenhower is the flagship. The Houthis "have ways of obviously controlling them just like they do the (unmanned aerial vehicles), and we have very little little fidelity as to all the stockpiles of what they have USV-wise," Miguez said.

Ukraine changed its military leadership and announced a change of tactics in the past week, as a vote in the US Senate brought renewed hope of US aid for the embattled country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed ground forces commander Oleksandr Syrskii as commander-in-chief of the armed forces on February 8. Zelenskyy reportedly asked the outgoing Valery Zaluzhny to "continue to be part of the team", without specifying what that meant. "We stood against a vile and powerful enemy. Endured together," wrote Zaluzhny, an immensely popular general who stopped Russia's invasion in February 2022 and ordered a counterattack in August that year, which claimed more than 1,500sq km (580sq miles) Since then, Ukrainian forces have become bogged down in positional warfare. A counteroffensive last summer failed to achieve its goal of cutting the Russian front in two.

Ukraine said it critically damaged the Caesar Kunikov, a Russian landing warship, off occupied Crimea, in a drone attack, the latest blow to the Russian navy's Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine said the ship, one of Russia's newest vessels, had a crew of 87 and had taken part in wars in Georgia and Syria as well as Ukraine. There was no official comment from Russia on the attack. Newly-appointed Ukrainian armed forces chief Oleksandr Syrskyii visited troops fighting around the key flashpoint of Avdiivka on the eastern front line, and described the situation as "extremely complex and stressful". Syrskyii, who was accompanied by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, said Russian forces had "a numerical advantage in personnel".

We propose a novel self-supervised approach for learning to visually localize robots equipped with controllable LEDs. We rely on a few training samples labeled with position ground truth and many training samples in which only the LED state is known, whose collection is cheap. We show that using LED state prediction as a pretext task significantly helps to learn the visual localization end task. The resulting model does not require knowledge of LED states during inference. We instantiate the approach to visual relative localization of nano-quadrotors: experimental results show that using our pretext task significantly improves localization accuracy (from 68.3% to 76.2%) and outperforms alternative strategies, such as a supervised baseline, model pre-training, and an autoencoding pretext task. We deploy our model aboard a 27-g Crazyflie nano-drone, running at 21 fps, in a position-tracking task of a peer nano-drone. Our approach, relying on position labels for only 300 images, yields a mean tracking error of 4.2 cm versus 11.9 cm of a supervised baseline model trained without our pretext task. Videos and code of the proposed approach are available at https://github.com/idsia-robotics/leds-as-pretext

From Thursday, African leaders will gather in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, home of the African Union (AU), for the continental body's annual summit. According to AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat, regional integration and "maintaining momentum in addressing issues of peace and security" is high on the agenda. But in an ironic twist, the host of the summit has either initiated or been involved in multiple conflicts in the last three years. Ethiopia's two-year civil war with the state of Tigray may have ended in November 2022 after a Pretoria pact, but federal troops are currently upping drone strikes against rebels known as Fano militia in the state of Amhara, next door to Tigray. This week, the Ethiopian Human Rights Council said "at least 45 civilians" had been killed by federal troops in Amhara.

Senator Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., joins'Fox News Live' to discuss the specifics on the 95B Ukraine-Israel aid bill. As the radio crackles with enemy communications that are hard to decipher, one Russian command rings out clear: "Brew five Chinese tea bags on 38 orange." A Ukrainian soldier known on the battlefield as Mikhass is able to quickly decode the gibberish. It means: Prepare five Beijing-made artillery shells and fire them on a specific Ukrainian position in the Serebryansky Forest, which forms the front line in the country's restive northeast. Hiding in the basement of an abandoned home 7 miles away, Mikhass immediately warns the commander of a unit embedded in that part of the forest, giving him crucial minutes to get his men into trenches, saving their lives.