In an update on Saturday, Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitchsko said four more bodies had been pulled from the rubble of a warehouse that was hit by a missile - taking the total number of killed in the city to 13 and the overall death toll to at least 34.

Ukrainian officials have said that at least 30 people have been killed and more than 140 wounded after Russia targeted cities across the war-torn country with a massive salvo of missiles and drones in one of the largest aerial assaults of the war. Russia's defence ministry has said its forces downed 32 Ukrainian drones over the Bryansk, Oryol, Kursk and Moscow regions overnight. Polish military authorities have said that a Russian missile briefly passed through the country's airspace on Friday, prompting concern from the country that borders Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have said that at least 30 people have been killed and more than 140 wounded after Russia targeted cities across the war-torn country with a massive salvo of missiles and drones in one of the largest aerial assaults of the war. Russia's defence ministry has said its forces downed 32 Ukrainian drones over the Bryansk, Oryol, Kursk and Moscow regions overnight.

Weeks after a deadly drone attack on November 30 killed five civilians in the town of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia's Amhara region about 570km (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa, a witness is still reeling from the trauma. "It's extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath," said Gebeyehu, who requested use of his first name only for safety reasons. "Bodies were burned so badly they had turned to dust. I saw the finger bones of one of the victims still shaped as though it was still clutching a mobile phone." Several witnesses told Al Jazeera that a drone fired on an ambulance as it approached the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena and obliterated it.

Inter-agent relative localization is critical for many multi-robot systems operating in the absence of external positioning infrastructure or prior environmental knowledge. We propose a novel inter-agent relative 3D pose estimation system where each participating agent is equipped with several ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging tags. Prior work typically supplements noisy UWB range measurements with additional continuously transmitted data, such as odometry, leading to potential scaling issues with increased team size and/or decreased communication network capability. By equipping each agent with multiple UWB antennas, our approach addresses these concerns by using only locally collected UWB range measurements, a priori state constraints, and detections of when said constraints are violated. Leveraging our learned mean ranging bias correction, we gain a 19% positional error improvement giving us experimental mean absolute position and heading errors of 0.24m and 9.5 degrees respectively. When compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, our work demonstrates improved performance over similar systems, while remaining competitive with methods that have significantly higher communication costs. Additionally, we make our datasets available.

As the presence of flying robots continues to grow in both commercial and private sectors, it necessitates an understanding of appropriate methods for nonverbal interaction with humans. While visual cues, such as gestures incorporated into trajectories, are more apparent and thoroughly researched, acoustic cues have remained unexplored, despite their potential to enhance human-drone interaction. Given that additional audiovisual and sensory equipment is not always desired or practicable, and flight noise often masks potential acoustic communication in rotary-wing drones, such as through a loudspeaker, the rotors themselves offer potential for nonverbal communication. In this paper, quadrotor trajectories are augmented by acoustic information that does not visually affect the flight, but adds audible information that significantly facilitates distinctiveness. A user study (N=192) demonstrates that sonically augmenting the trajectories of two aerial gestures makes them more easily distinguishable. This enhancement contributes to human-drone interaction through onboard means, particularly in situations where the human cannot see or look at the drone.

In this article, we consider a multi-agent path planning problem in a stochastic environment. The environment, which can be an urban road network, is represented by a graph where the travel time for selected road segments (impeded edges) is a random variable because of traffic congestion. An unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) wishes to travel from a starting location to a destination while minimizing the arrival time at the destination. UGV can traverse through an impeded edge but the true travel time is only realized at the end of that edge. This implies that the UGV can potentially get stuck in an impeded edge with high travel time. A support vehicle, such as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is simultaneously deployed from its starting position to assist the UGV by inspecting and realizing the true cost of impeded edges. With the updated information from UAV, UGV can efficiently reroute its path to the destination. The UGV does not wait at any time until it reaches the destination. The UAV is permitted to terminate its path at any vertex. The goal is then to develop an online algorithm to determine efficient paths for the UGV and the UAV based on the current information so that the UGV reaches the destination in minimum time. We refer to this problem as Stochastic Assisted Path Planning (SAPP). We present Dynamic $k$-Shortest Path Planning (D*KSPP) algorithm for the UGV planning and Rural Postman Problem (RPP) formulation for the UAV planning. Due to the scalability challenges of RPP, we also present a heuristic based Priority Assignment Algorithm (PAA) for the UAV planning. Computational results are presented to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to solve SAPP.

Safe operations of UAVs are of paramount importance for various mission-critical and safety-critical UAV applications. In context of airborne target tracking and following, UAVs need to track a flying target avoiding collision and also closely follow its trajectory. The safety situation becomes critical and more complex when the flying target is non-cooperative and has erratic movements. This paper proposes a method for collision avoidance in an autonomous fast moving dynamic quadrotor UAV tracking and following another target UAV. This is achieved by designing a safety controller that minimally modifies the control input from a trajectory tracking controller and guarantees safety. This method enables pairing our proposed safety controller with already existing flight controllers. Our safety controller uses a control barrier function based quadratic program (CBF-QP) to produce an optimal control input enabling safe operation while also follow the trajectory of the target closely. We implement our solution on AirSim simulator over PX4 flight controller and with numerical results, we validate our approach through several simulation experiments with multiple scenarios and trajectories.

With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, its applications span various sectors such as public, industrial, private and military. In particular, the drone sector has gained significant attention for both commercial and military purposes. As a result, there has been a surge in research focused on vulnerability analysis of drones. However, most security research to mitigate threats to IoT devices has focused primarily on networks, firmware and mobile applications. Of these, the use of fuzzing to analyse the security of firmware requires emulation of the firmware. However, when it comes to drone firmware, the industry lacks emulation and automated fuzzing tools. This is largely due to challenges such as limited input interfaces, firmware encryption and signatures. While it may be tempting to assume that existing emulators and automated analysers for IoT devices can be applied to drones, practical applications have proven otherwise. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of dynamically analysing drone firmware and propose potential solutions. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology by applying it to DJI drones, which have the largest market share.

Six "unarmed" Palestinians were "deliberately" killed in an Israeli drone strike in the occupied West Bank.

Russia has claimed that US sanctions levied against the Arctic LNG 2 project undermine global energy security. The Russian foreign ministry's spokeswoman hit out on Wednesday at Washington's "unacceptable" move to clamp down on the massive Arctic LNG 2. The sanctions are just the latest measure implemented as the West seeks to limit Moscow's financial ability to wage war in Ukraine. The remarks came after Washington announced sanctions against the new liquefied natural gas plant that is under development on the Gydan Peninsula in the Arctic last month. "We consider such actions unacceptable, especially in relation to such large international commercial projects as Arctic LNG 2, which affect the energy balance of many states," said foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova. "The situation around Arctic LNG 2 once again confirms the destructive role for global economic security played by Washington, which speaks of the need to maintain this security but in fact, by pursuing its own selfish interests, tries to oust competitors and destroy global energy security."