Russian drones struck port and grain storage facilities in and around the Danube River port of Izmail. Ukraine's infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said the attacks damaged about 40,000 tonnes of grains expected by countries in Africa. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of waging an attack on "global food security". The Ukrainian governor of Kherson said two people were injured following a Russian attack on a residential area. More than 10 Russian drones were downed during an attack on Kyiv at about 3am (00:00 GMT), Ukrainian officials said.

Nano-quadcopters are versatile platforms attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Their tiny form factor, i.e., $\,$10 cm diameter, makes them particularly useful in narrow scenarios and harmless in human proximity. However, these advantages come at the price of ultra-constrained onboard computational and sensorial resources for autonomous operations. This work addresses the task of estimating human pose aboard nano-drones by fusing depth and images in a novel CNN exclusively trained in simulation yet capable of robust predictions in the real world. We extend a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Crazyflie nano-drone -- equipped with a 320$\times$240 px camera and an ultra-low-power System-on-Chip -- with a novel multi-zone (8$\times$8) depth sensor. We design and compare different deep-learning models that fuse depth and image inputs. Our models are trained exclusively on simulated data for both inputs, and transfer well to the real world: field testing shows an improvement of 58% and 51% of our depth+camera system w.r.t. a camera-only State-of-the-Art baseline on the horizontal and angular mean pose errors, respectively. Our prototype is based on COTS components, which facilitates reproducibility and adoption of this novel class of systems.

Achieving precise, highly-dynamic maneuvers with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a major challenge due to the complexity of the associated aerodynamics. In particular, unsteady effects -- as might be experienced in post-stall regimes or during sudden vehicle morphing -- can have an adverse impact on the performance of modern flight control systems. In this paper, we present a vortex particle model and associated model-based controller capable of reasoning about the unsteady aerodynamics during aggressive maneuvers. We evaluate our approach in hardware on a morphing-wing UAV executing post-stall perching maneuvers. Our results show that the use of the unsteady aerodynamics model improves performance during both fixed-wing and dynamic-wing perching, while the use of wing-morphing planned with quasi-steady aerodynamics results in reduced performance. While the focus of this paper is a pre-computed control policy, we believe that, with sufficient computational resources, our approach could enable online planning in the future.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Russian drones on Wednesday hit a Ukrainian port city along the border with Romania, causing significant damage and a huge fire at facilities that are key to Ukrainian grain exports. The attacks followed the end of a deal with Russia that had allowed Ukrainian shipments to world markets from the Black Sea port of Odesa. Since scrapping the deal, Russia has hammered the country's ports with strikes, compounding the blow to the key industry.

For many islanders, delays to the postal service are an inescapable part of life. But that should no longer be the case for those living in Orkney, after it became the first place in Britain to have mail delivered by a drone. The new Royal Mail service will see post transported from the Kirkwall delivery office to the village of Stromness, where drones will then transfer items to posties on the islands of Hoy and Graemsay for their regular routes. Currently, mail arrives at Kirkwall Airport before being sent by plane or ferry to Orkney's 19 inhabited islands. But the challenging geography and weather conditions often result in delivery disruptions.

Ukraine's coastal region of Odesa was rattled by Russian drones which hit grain storage facilities in the south of the region, according to authorities in Kyiv. The grain port of Izmail, an inland port across the Danube River from NATO-member Romania, was the main target of Moscow's drone attack. "As a result of the attack, fires broke out at the facilities of the port and industrial infrastructure of the region, and an elevator was damaged," Odesa region Governor Oleh Kiper said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. Russia's continued attacks against the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on #Danube, in the proximity of Romania, are unacceptable. These are war crimes and they further affect UA's capacity to transfer their food products towards those in need in the world.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with at least 10 drones overnight, damaging a multistory administrative tower and other buildings, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday, as Moscow kept up the pressure on metropolitan centers far from the front lines. The officials said that Ukraine's air defenses had shot down all the drones aimed at Kyiv but that falling debris from the interceptions had caused damage. The State Emergency Service said that an administrative building had been hit, and the head of the Kyiv regional administration, Ruslan Kravchenko, said that a house, a garage and a car had caught fire. "Another mass attack of the enemy involving attack U.A.V.s," said a statement by the regional administration on the Telegram app, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles. "Groups of drones were flying toward Kyiv simultaneously from multiple directions," it added.

The Russian military said anti-aircraft units thwarted a Ukrainian "terrorist attack" and downed drones targeting Moscow, but that one drone struck a high-rise tower that was hit earlier in the week. Russia said it had repelled an overnight Ukrainian drone attack aimed at its patrol boats in the Black Sea. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told the Reuters news agency that Kyiv did not attack and would not attack civilian vessels in the Black Sea, calling Russian claims "fictitious". Drones struck populated areas in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, destroying two floors of a college dormitory, according to local officials. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said there had been three separate attacks on Ukraine's second-largest city.

This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial vehicle and enable it to perform safe and reliable grasping. These components include a custom collision tolerant cage and low-cost Gripper Extension Package, which we call GREP, for object grasping. Small vehicles enable applications in highly constrained environments, but are often limited by computational resources. This work evaluates the challenges of pick-and-place tasks, with entirely onboard computation of object pose and visual odometry based state estimation on a small platform, and demonstrates experiments with enough accuracy to reliably grasp objects. In a total of 70 trials across challenging cases such as cluttered environments, obstructed targets, and multiple instances of the same target, we demonstrated successfully grasping the target in 93% of trials. Both the hardware component designs and software framework are released as open-source, since our intention is to enable easy reproduction and application on a wide range of small vehicles.

UAVs are becoming versatile and valuable platforms for various applications. However, the main limitation is their flying time. We present BEAVIS, a novel aerial robotic platform striking an unparalleled trade-off between the manoeuvrability of drones and the long lasting capacity of blimps. BEAVIS scores highly in applications where drones enjoy unconstrained mobility yet suffer from limited lifetime. A nonlinear flight controller exploiting novel, unexplored, aerodynamic phenomena to regulate the ambient pressure and enable all translational and yaw degrees of freedom is proposed without direct actuation in the vertical direction. BEAVIS has built-in rotor fault detection and tolerance. We explain the design and the necessary background in detail. We verify the dynamics of BEAVIS and demonstrate its distinct advantages, such as agility, over existing platforms including the degrees of freedom akin to a drone with 11.36x increased lifetime. We exemplify the potential of BEAVIS to become an invaluable platform for many applications.