Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has slammed Elon Musk for indirectly allowing Russian forces to attack Ukrainian cities after it was revealed his Starlink satellite communications interfered with a drone operation. Details of the incident are laid out in a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, due out on Tuesday. The book describes how the network turned off communications near the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula as Ukrainian drones were approaching Russian warships, resulting in "lost connectivity". Musk allegedly ordered Starlink engineers to turn off the communications as he feared Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea, according to Isaacson's book. "I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation," Musk is quoted as saying.

Russia continued its attacks on Ukraine's Danube ports. Governor Oleh Kiper said Russian drone attacks lasting three hours damaged port infrastructure, a grain silo and administrative buildings in the Izmail district of Ukraine's Odesa region. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said there were no indications that drone debris found on Romanian territory was caused by a deliberate Russian attack, but that air attacks close to NATO borders posed a risk. Romania lies just across the river from Izmail. Stoltenberg also said that Ukraine was making progress in its counteroffensive and started to reclaim territory seized by Russia.

This paper presents a robust and secure framework for achieving accurate and reliable mutual localization in multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. Challenges of accurate localization and security threats are addressed and corresponding solutions are brought forth and accessed in our paper with numerical simulations. The proposed solution incorporates two key components: the Mobility Adaptive Gradient Descent (MAGD) and Time-evolving Anomaly Detectio (TAD). The MAGD adapts the gradient descent algorithm to handle the configuration changes in the mutual localization system, ensuring accurate localization in dynamic scenarios. The TAD cooperates with reputation propagation (RP) scheme to detect and mitigate potential attacks by identifying UAVs with malicious data, enhancing the security and resilience of the mutual localization

Elon Musk ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships, according to a new biography. CNN quoted an excerpt from the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which described how armed submarine drones were approaching their targets when they "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly". The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. He is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a "strategic defeat" on the Kremlin. Musk's threats to withdraw Starlink communications at various stages of the conflict have been previously reported, but this is the first time it has been alleged he cut off Ukrainian forces in the middle of a specific operation.

Fox News correspondent Alex Hogan has more on the provocative military action near Taiwan on "Special Report." The U.S. Air Force's development of a pilotless aircraft run by artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to give American forces the upper hand in any conflict, but it also raises ethical questions about how such powerful technology should be deployed on the battlefield. "This technology is something we'll need for the future of defense," Phil Siegel, an AI expert and the founder of the Center For Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation, told Fox News Digital. Siegel's comments come as the Air Force continues development of XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft, an artificial intelligence-run stealth platform that the U.S. hopes can provide a relatively inexpensive weapon that can be used to limit losses to manned planes and pilots in a conflict with a near-peer rival such as China. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? The XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrates the separation of the ALTIUS-600 small unmanned aircraft system in a test at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground test range in Arizona on March 26, 2021.

At least five Ukrainian combat drones have been downed over Russian territory as Kyiv continues with a pledge to bring Moscow's war in Ukraine back to Russia. Two drones were shot down on approach to Bryansk city in Russia's southwest, two were shot down over the southern Rostov region, and one was intercepted near the capital, Moscow, Russian officials and state news agencies reported early on Thursday. One person was injured and several vehicles damaged when one drone was shot down and crashed in the city of Rostov-on-Don in the early hours of Thursday, according to Russia's state-run TASS news agency. "According to verified information, air defence systems shot down two unmanned aerial vehicles," Rostov's regional Governor Vasily Golubev said, according to TASS. A separate news report said that buildings were also damaged in Rostov-on-Don due to falling debris from the destroyed drone.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly increasing in applications ranging from surveillance and first-aid missions to industrial automation involving cooperation with other machines or humans. To maximize area coverage and reduce mission latency, swarms of collaborating drones have become a significant research direction. However, this approach requires open challenges in positioning, mapping, and communications to be addressed. This work describes a distributed mapping system based on a swarm of nano-UAVs, characterized by a limited payload of 35 g and tightly constrained on-board sensing and computing capabilities. Each nano-UAV is equipped with four 64-pixel depth sensors that measure the relative distance to obstacles in four directions. The proposed system merges the information from the swarm and generates a coherent grid map without relying on any external infrastructure. The data fusion is performed using the iterative closest point algorithm and a graph-based simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm, running entirely on-board the UAV's low-power ARM Cortex-M microcontroller with just 192 kB of SRAM memory. Field results gathered in three different mazes from a swarm of up to 4 nano-UAVs prove a mapping accuracy of 12 cm and demonstrate that the mapping time is inversely proportional to the number of agents. The proposed framework scales linearly in terms of communication bandwidth and on-board computational complexity, supporting communication between up to 20 nano-UAVs and mapping of areas up to 180 m2 with the chosen configuration requiring only 50 kB of memory.

Coverage path planning (CPP) is a critical problem in robotics, where the goal is to find an efficient path that covers every point in an area of interest. This work addresses the power-constrained CPP problem with recharge for battery-limited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this problem, a notable challenge emerges from integrating recharge journeys into the overall coverage strategy, highlighting the intricate task of making strategic, long-term decisions. We propose a novel proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach with map-based observations, utilizing action masking and discount factor scheduling to optimize coverage trajectories over the entire mission horizon. We further provide the agent with a position history to handle emergent state loops caused by the recharge capability. Our approach outperforms a baseline heuristic, generalizes to different target zones and maps, with limited generalization to unseen maps. We offer valuable insights into DRL algorithm design for long-horizon problems and provide a publicly available software framework for the CPP problem.

Parts of what could be a Russian drone fell on Romanian territory, Romania's Defence Minister Angel Tilvar says, two days after Ukraine said Russian drones had detonated on the NATO member's land. Romanian officials had earlier denied reports of drones falling on Romanian territory and said Russian attacks in neighbouring Ukraine did not cause a direct threat. Tilvar told local news channel Antena 3 CNN on Wednesday that parts of what was most likely a drone were discovered in the eastern Tulcea county, an area of the Danube that forms a natural border between Romania and war-torn Ukraine. "I confirm that in this area, pieces that may be of a drone were found," he said, adding that the pieces did not pose a threat. He said the area had not been evacuated because there was nothing to suggest that the parts were dangerous and said the pieces would be analysed to confirm their origin.

One person was killed in Russian drone attacks on a port district in Ukraine's southwestern Odesa region while Ukrainian air defence successfully shot down a barrage of Russian missiles fired at targets in the capital Kyiv, officials said. The night-time attacks on Odesa's Izmail district lasted three hours, regional Governor Oleg Kiper said on the Telegram messaging app early on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, one person died," said Kiper, adding that it was an agricultural worker who had been seriously injured and died in hospital. "Destruction and fires were recorded in several settlements," he added, saying that port and agricultural infrastructure had been damaged, including administrative buildings. The Danube river port of Izmail, which borders NATO member Romania, has become a main export route for Ukrainian agricultural produce since Russia's withdrawal from a United Nations-brokered grain deal in July.