Russia's defence ministry said its forces destroyed a wave of 20 Ukrainian drones over the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula. There were no casualties and no damage as a result of the attempted attack early on Saturday morning, the defence ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. Fourteen drones were destroyed by air defence systems and six were suppressed by electronic warfare, the ministry said. It was not immediately clear what was the target of the reported attacks on the peninsula. Sergei Kryuchkov, an adviser to the Russia-installed governor of Crimea, said earlier that air defence systems were engaged in repelling air attacks in different parts of the peninsula.

This paper addresses the problem of active collaborative localization in heterogeneous robot teams with unknown data association. It involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. We model the problem as a sequential two player game, in which the first player positions the UGVs and the second identifies the two distinct hypothetical poses of the UAV at which the sets of measurements to the UGVs differ by as little as possible. We solve the underlying problem from the vantage point of the first player for a subclass of measurement models using a mixture of local optimization and exhaustive search procedures. Real-world experiments with a team of UAV and UGVs show that our method can achieve centimeter-level global localization accuracy. We also show that our method consistently outperforms random positioning of UGVs by a large margin, with as much as a 90% reduction in position and angular estimation error. Our method can tolerate a significant amount of random as well as non-stochastic measurement noise. This indicates its potential for reliable state estimation on board size, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained UAVs. This work enables robust localization in perceptually-challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.

A California-based company is developing a new drone for delivery services. Drone delivery is the way of the future, revolutionizing the speed and convenience of getting products and food right to your doorstep. Just ask Paul and Susie Sensmeier who've already used it over 1,200 times. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER They are early adopters of Wing's drone delivery service. The married couple from Virginia in their 80s have been using the drone delivery service since 2019, and now it's the only way they want to shop.

Bucharest, Romania – Last Wednesday, a Russian drone attack on Ukraine's grain port infrastructure shook Romania, a NATO member. The force of the attack on the Izmail port, across the Danube River from the Eastern European nation, was so intense that the windows of some village homes in southeastern Romania shattered. Even though she lives far from the county of Tulcea, where the impact was felt, 28-year-old Alexandra, a paralegal from the capital Bucharest, is concerned. "We share a border with Ukraine and the conflict could expand at any moment," she told Al Jazeera. Russia has launched several attacks on Danube ports since pulling out of the wartime Black Sea grain deal.

An MQ-9 Reaper drone with Customs and Border Protection awaits a mission over the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 4, 2022 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said using drone strikes against the cartels is on the table if he is elected president.

Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject to large reaction forces at grasp, which limit performance at high speeds. The few reported examples of aggressive aerial grasping rely on motion capture systems, or fail to generalize across environments and grasp targets. We describe the first example of a soft aerial manipulator equipped with a fully onboard perception pipeline, capable of robustly localizing and grasping visually and morphologically varied objects. The proposed system features a novel passively closing tendon-actuated soft gripper that enables fast closure at grasp, while compensating for position errors, complying to the target-object morphology, and dampening reaction forces. The system includes an onboard perception pipeline that combines a neural-network-based semantic keypoint detector with a state-of-the-art robust 3D object pose estimator, whose estimate is further refined using a fixed-lag smoother. The resulting pose estimate is passed to a minimum-snap trajectory planner, tracked by an adaptive controller that fully compensates for the added mass of the grasped object. Finally, a finite-element-based controller determines optimal gripper configurations for grasping. Rigorous experiments confirm that our approach enables dynamic, aggressive, and versatile grasping. We demonstrate fully onboard vision-based grasps of a variety of objects, in both indoor and outdoor environments, and up to speeds of 2.0 m/s -- the fastest vision-based grasp reported in the literature. Finally, we take a major step in expanding the utility of our platform beyond stationary targets, by demonstrating motion-capture-based grasps of targets moving up to 0.3 m/s, with relative speeds up to 1.5 m/s.

Russia has begun making copies of attack drones it acquired from Iran last year and is using them in combat against Ukrainian forces despite sanctions imposed to cripple the country's weapons production, according to a report issued Thursday by a weapons research group. The researchers traveled to Kyiv in late July and inspected the wreckage of two attack drones that were used in combat in southeastern Ukraine. Both appeared to be Iranian Shahed-136s, but they contained electronic modules that match components previously recovered from Russian surveillance drones, according to the report. Additionally, the materials used to build the two drones and the internal structure of their fuselages differed greatly from those known to have been made in Iran, the researchers said. The investigation was conducted by Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Ukrainian authorities ordered a mandatory evacuation Thursday of nearly 12,000 civilians from 37 towns and villages in the eastern Kharkiv region, where Russian forces reportedly are making a concerted effort to punch through the front line. The local military administration in Kharkiv's Kupiansk district said residents must comply with the evacuation order or sign a document saying they would stay at their own risk. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar had said the previous day that "the intensity of combat and enemy shelling is high" in the area.

Lifeguards in Flagler Beach, Florida, formed a human chain to rescue a boogie boarder who appeared to have drifted far from shore. A team of lifeguards in Florida were captured on drone video over the weekend forming a human chain to rescue a boogie boarder from a rip current that was pulling him out into the ocean. Joe Osborne was on break from his job at a tattoo parlor in Flagler Beach when he decided to fly his drone over the ocean and captured the lifeguards in action. "I was actually kind of impressed," Osborne told FOX35 Orlando. "It was definitely a rehearsed thing ... with their buoys and their lines, and they use them in unison. I thought it was very neat."

Bogged down in small-scale infantry attacks and incremental advances, Ukraine sought to gain an advantage in the 76th week of the war by attacking Russian shipping at range and was accused of drone strikes targeting Moscow. Drone footage Ukraine released on August 4 showed the prow of a surface drone approaching the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a Ropucha-class Russian landing ship, before going blank at contact range. The attack happened just outside Novorossiysk harbour, supposedly a safe port on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, to which Russia had relocated much of its navy fleet based in Sevastopol after Ukraine sank its Black Sea flagship in May. Daylight footage showed the Olenegorsky Gornyak listing severely to port as it was towed to Novorossiysk harbour. "This poses a great dilemma for the Russians," wrote Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategy at St Andrews University.