Iran's defence ministry has reported several drone attacks on a military plant in the country's central city of Isfahan. The attacks were "unsuccessful" and there were no casualties, the ministry said in a statement early on Sunday. "One of [the drones] was hit by the … air defence and the other two were caught in defence traps and blew up," said the statement carried by the state news agency, IRNA. "Fortunately, this unsuccessful attack did not cause any loss of life and caused minor damage to the workshop's roof," it said. The ministry did not say who was suspected of carrying out the attack.

Three members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran were involved in a murder-for-hire plot against a New York-based journalist, a U.S. citizen, the Department of Justice alleged Friday. A loud blast has been reported at an Iranian military facility and officials in the country say it was the result of an "unsuccessful" drone attack. "One of (the drones) was hit by the ... air defense and the other two were caught in defense traps and blew up. Fortunately, this unsuccessful attack did not cause any loss of life and caused minor damage to the workshop's roof," the ministry said in a statement carried by the state news agency IRNA. Iranian news agencies earlier reported the loud blast and carried a video showing a flash of light at the plant, said to be an ammunitions factory, and footage of emergency vehicles and fire trucks outside the plant.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A new barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the office of Ukraine's president said Friday as the country worked to recover from an earlier wave of Russian missile strikes and drone attacks. Regional officials said towns and villages in the east and in the south that are within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson, and two in the Kharkiv region.

An armature drone photographer captured stunning footage of a dolphin pod swimming through the crystal-blue waters off the coast of Florida. Local restaurant owner Paul Dabill, 48, filmed approximately 50 dolphins while'looking for life to film' around Jupiter last week. The mesmerizing video shows the marine animals diving in and out of the sea and playing keep-away with a strand of sargassum seaweed. Dabill said he spent 30 minutes filing the pod, one of the largest he had seen. The clip was captured on January 18, when the skies were clear and the ocean was blue.

Telecommunications company KDDI, map-maker Zenrin and others in Japan launched a drone delivery service using U.S. aerospace company SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet access service in Chichibu, a mountainous city in Saitama Prefecture, on Thursday. By connecting a drone to the Starlink service that provides a stable communication environment even in mountain areas, the new delivery service allows residents in a district of Chichibu affected by a road closure following a mudslide in September last year to receive food and other supplies on a regular basis. According to KDDI, it is the first time that a regular drone delivery service using the Starlink service by SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies, has been launched in Japan. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Unmanned aerial vehicles assist in maritime search and rescue missions by flying over large search areas to autonomously search for objects or people. Reliably detecting objects of interest requires fast models to employ on embedded hardware. Moreover, with increasing distance to the ground station only part of the video data can be transmitted. In this work, we consider the problem of finding meaningful region of interest proposals in a video stream on an embedded GPU. Current object or anomaly detectors are not suitable due to their slow speed, especially on limited hardware and for large image resolutions. Lastly, objects of interest, such as pieces of wreckage, are often not known a priori. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end future frame prediction model running in real-time on embedded GPUs to generate region proposals. We analyze its performance on large-scale maritime data sets and demonstrate its benefits over traditional and modern methods.

Small teams in the field can benefit from the capabilities provided by small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) for missions such as reconnaissance, hostile attribution, remote emplacement, and search and rescue. The mobility, communications, and flexible payload capacity of sUAS can offer teams new levels of situational awareness and enable more highly coordinated missions than previously possible. However, piloting such aircraft for specific missions draws personnel away from other mission-critical tasks, increasing the load on remaining personnel while also increasing complexity of operations. For wider adoption and use of sUAS for security and humanitarian missions, safe and robust autonomy must be employed to reduce this burden on small teams. In this paper, we present the development of the Collaborative-UAS for Hostile Attribution, Surveillance, Emplacement, and Reconnaissance (CHASER) testbed, for rapidly prototyping capabilities that will reduce strain on small teams through sensor-guided autonomous control. We attempt to address autonomy needs unfilled by commercial sUAS platforms by creating and testing a series of composable modules that can be configured to support multiple missions. Methods implemented and presented here include radar track correlation, on-board computer vision target detection, target position estimation, closed-loop relative position control, and efficient search of a 3D volume for target acquisition. We configure and test a series of these modules in an example mission, executing a fully autonomous chase of an intruding sUAS in live flight, and demonstrating the success of the modularized autonomy approach. We present performance results from simulation or live flight tests for each module. Lastly, we describe the software architecture that we have developed for flexible controls and comment on how the capabilities presented may enable additional missions.

At least one person was reported killed in Kyiv as Russia pummeled Ukraine with a wave of missile and drone attacks. Thursday's rush-hour assault came a day after Kyiv secured the battle tanks it has long called for from Germany and the United States, a development Russia warned was a "dangerous" escalation. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said a missile killed a 55-year-old man, the first death from an attack in the capital since New Year's Eve, while two people were injured. Crowds of people took shelter in train stations as air raid sirens rang out across the country. A Ukrainian air force spokesperson said as many as six Tu-95 warplanes took off from the Arctic region of Murmansk in northern Russia and launched long-range missiles.

North Korea and South Korea violated the armistice that governs their shared border by sending drones into each other's airspace in December, the US-led United Nations Command says. Five North Korean drones crossed into the South on December 26, prompting South Korea's military to scramble fighter jets and helicopters as well as send surveillance aircraft into the North to photograph its military installations. The UN Command, which has helped oversee the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas since an armistice ended fighting in the 1950-1953 Korean War, said on Thursday that it had conducted a special investigation of the airspace incursions to determine whether there were any violations of the ceasefire. The drone incursions by the two countries constituted violations, but South Korea's efforts to shoot down the drones in its airspace did not violate the armistice, the UN Command said in a statement. Seoul and Pyongyang remain technically at war because no permanent peace treaty has ever been reached to end the Korean War.

'Special Report' panelists discuss the impact of the Abrams tanks for Ukrainian forces amid the Russian onslaught. Ukraine sounded alarms across the country on Thursday after Russia launched a wave of missile and drone strikes, officials said. Air sirens were also heard in the country's capital city of Kyiv, where missile defense systems successfully struck down 15 targets. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Ukrainian military general Serhii Popko said missiles were fired "in the direction of Kyiv," but did not disclose if Russia was intending to target government buildings or something else.