Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost platforms with flexible hardware configurations, as well as an increasing number of autonomous capabilities, including take-off, landing, object tracking and obstacle avoidance. However, little attention has been paid to how UAVs deal with object detection uncertainties caused by false readings from vision-based detectors, data noise, vibrations, and occlusion. In most situations, the relevance and understanding of these detections are delegated to human operators, as many UAVs have limited cognition power to interact autonomously with the environment. This paper presents a framework for autonomous navigation under uncertainty in outdoor scenarios for small UAVs using a probabilistic-based motion planner. The framework is evaluated with real flight tests using a sub 2 kg quadrotor UAV and illustrated in victim finding Search and Rescue (SAR) case study in a forest/bushland. The navigation problem is modelled using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and solved in real time onboard the small UAV using Augmented Belief Trees (ABT) and the TAPIR toolkit. Results from experiments using colour and thermal imagery show that the proposed motion planner provides accurate victim localisation coordinates, as the UAV has the flexibility to interact with the environment and obtain clearer visualisations of any potential victims compared to the baseline motion planner. Incorporating this system allows optimised UAV surveillance operations by diminishing false positive readings from vision-based object detectors.

A Russian missile attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv killed seven people and wounded 144, according to officials. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the dead included a six-year-old girl and that there were 15 children among the wounded. "Our soldiers will respond to Russia for this terrorist attack – a tangible answer," he pledged. A United Nations official denounced the raid, which came during the Orthodox holiday of the Transfiguration of the Lord, as "heinous". The strike hit a theatre in Chernihiv's main square during a gathering of drone manufacturers and aerial reconnaissance training schools, organiser Mariia Berlinska confirmed. Berlinska said the event was officially agreed on in advance with the local authorities and venue.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are desirable platforms for time-efficient and cost-effective task execution. 3-D path planning is a key challenge for task decision-making. This paper proposes an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) with an adaptive areal weight adjustment (AAWA) strategy to make a tradeoff between the total flight path length and the terrain threat. AAWA is designed to improve the diversity of the solutions. More specifically, AAWA first removes a crowded individual and its weight vector from the current population and then adds a sparse individual from the external elite population to the current population. To enable the newly-added individual to evolve towards the sparser area of the population in the objective space, its weight vector is constructed by the objective function value of its neighbors. The effectiveness of MOEA/D-AAWA is validated in twenty synthetic scenarios with different number of obstacles and four realistic scenarios in comparison with other three classical methods.

A new drone which flies almost silently without wings or propellers has raised questions about how many supposed UFO sightings might actually be man-made craft. The Silent Ventus drone, made by Florida-based start-up Undefined Technologies, uses ion propulsion, with electrodes ionizing the air to generate thrust, and flies incredibly quietly. The hi-tech drones may possibly explain sightings such as the famous'Tic Tac' drone sighting, where pilots spotted a craft resembling the breath mint performing impossible maneuvers during a training mission with the USS Nimitz off the Southern California coast in 2004. Undefined Technologies' claim that its ion-propelled eVTOL drone generates 150% more thrust than rivals (Undefined Technologies) The company hopes to achieve a 15-minute flight this year and believes the drone could be used for'last mile' deliveries (Undefined Technologies) Undefined Technologies' claim that its ion-propelled eVTOL drone generates 150 percent more thrust than rivals. The company hopes to demonstrate a 15-minute flight with noise levels below 70dB this year - ion drives are widely used in satellites and spacecraft, but less common on Earth.

Today's robotic laboratories for drones are housed in a large room. At times, they are the size of a warehouse. These spaces are typically equipped with permanent devices to localize the drones, e.g., Vicon Infrared cameras. Significant time is invested to fine-tune the localization apparatus to compute and control the position of the drones. One may use these laboratories to develop a 3D multimedia system with miniature sized drones configured with light sources. As an alternative, this brave new idea paper envisions shrinking these room-sized laboratories to the size of a cube or cuboid that sits on a desk and costs less than 10K dollars. The resulting Dronevision (DV) will be the size of a 1990s Television. In addition to light sources, its Flying Light Specks (FLSs) will be network-enabled drones with storage and processing capability to implement decentralized algorithms. The DV will include a localization technique to expedite development of 3D displays. It will act as a haptic interface for a user to interact with and manipulate the 3D virtual illuminations. It will empower an experimenter to design, implement, test, debug, and maintain software and hardware that realize novel algorithms in the comfort of their office without having to reserve a laboratory. In addition to enhancing productivity, it will improve safety of the experimenter by minimizing the likelihood of accidents. This paper introduces the concept of a DV, the research agenda one may pursue using this device, and our plans to realize one.

This paper presents a new Metacognitive Decision Making (MDM) framework inspired by human-like metacognitive principles. The MDM framework is incorporated in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for decentralized stochastic search without communication for detecting stationary targets (fixed/sudden pop-up) and dynamic targets. The UAVs are equipped with multiple sensors (varying sensing capability) and search for targets in a largely unknown area. The MDM framework consists of a metacognitive component and a self-cognitive component. The metacognitive component helps to self-regulate the search with multiple sensors addressing the issues of "which-sensor-to-use", "when-to-switch-sensor", and "how-to-search". Each sensor possesses inverse characteristics for the sensing attributes like sensing range and accuracy. Based on the information gathered by multiple sensors carried by each UAV, the self-cognitive component regulates different levels of stochastic search and switching levels for effective searching. The lower levels of search aim to localize the search space for the possible presence of a target (detection) with different sensors. The highest level of a search exploits the search space for target confirmation using the sensor with the highest accuracy among all sensors. The performance of the MDM framework with two sensors having low accuracy with wide range sensor for detection and increased accuracy with low range sensor for confirmation is evaluated through Monte-Carlo simulations and compared with six multi-UAV stochastic search algorithms (three self-cognitive searches and three self and social-cognitive based search). The results indicate that the MDM framework is efficient in detecting and confirming targets in an unknown environment.

A Ukrainian military drone has damaged a building in central Moscow, causing an explosion that was heard across the city's business district in the latest attack on the Russian capital by unmanned aerial vehicles. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that air defence systems had shot down a drone early on Friday morning and debris had fallen on the city's Expo Center. The Expo Center – a large event space used for major exhibitions – is located less than 5km (3.1 miles) from the Kremlin. A video published by Russian media outlets showed thick smoke rising next to skyscrapers in the city. The Russian defence ministry said that Ukraine launched the drone attack at about 4am local time (01:00 GMT) "using an unmanned aerial vehicle against objects located in Moscow and the Moscow region".

It said that, after activating the city's air defence systems, the drone had "changed its flight path", falling on a non-residential building on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, an area of Moscow which hosts a number of government buildings.

President Zelensky has described seaborne drones as Ukraine's "eyes and protection on the frontline", with claims of a series of successful strikes against Russian ships in the Black Sea and on a key bridge to Crimea. These remote-controlled devices are playing an increasingly prominent role, with both sides ramping up their use for attacks and reconnaissance. The BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner and BBC Verify examine their influence on the conflict.

Here is the situation on Thursday, August 17, 2023. Ukraine said Russia carried out a series of drone attacks on grain silos and warehouses at a Danube River port near the border with Romania. Kyiv said its forces liberated the settlement of Urozhaine in the southeast, but top general Oleksandr Syrskyi warned the situation around Kupiansk on the northeastern front was deteriorating amid Russian counterattacks. Video obtained by Al Jazeera suggests a controversial unit of Chechen troops has been policing the town of Enerhodar near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Russia's Ministry of Defence said it shot down three Ukrainian drones southwest of Moscow and one over Crimea.