The United States has announced that it is sanctioning Iranian industries that produce ballistic missiles and drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which the US says have been used to facilitate Russia's war in Ukraine. In a news release on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the sanctions would target seven people in leadership positions at Qods Aviation Industries -- an Iranian UAV manufacturer -- and Iran's Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO), which manages the country's ballistic missile programme. "Iran has now become Russia's top military backer," Blinken said in the statement. "Iran must cease its support for Russia's unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to disrupt and delay these transfers and impose costs on actors engaged in this activity." Iran is fueling Russia's war in Ukraine with its provision of UAV technology. Today, the United States sanctioned seven people involved in Iran's UAV and ballistic missile programs – programs Moscow is using to target Ukraine's critical infrastructure.

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven.

In this paper we focus on the evaluation of contextual autonomy for robots. More specifically, we propose a fuzzy framework for calculating the autonomy score for a small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for performing a task while considering task complexity and environmental factors. Our framework is a cascaded Fuzzy Inference System (cFIS) composed of combination of three FIS which represent different contextual autonomy capabilities. We performed several experiments to test our framework in various contexts, such as endurance time, navigation, take off/land, and room clearing, with seven different sUAS. We introduce a predictive measure which improves upon previous predictive measures, allowing for previous real-world task performance to be used in predicting future mission performance.

Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar is a promising sensor technology for indoor drones as it provides range, angular as well as Doppler-velocity information about obstacles in the environment. Recently, deep learning approaches have been proposed for processing FMCW data, outperforming traditional detection techniques on range-Doppler or range-azimuth maps. However, these techniques come at a cost; for each novel task a deep neural network architecture has to be trained on high-dimensional input data, stressing both data bandwidth and processing budget. In this paper, we investigate unsupervised learning techniques that generate low-dimensional representations from FMCW radar data, and evaluate to what extent these representations can be reused for multiple downstream tasks. To this end, we introduce a novel dataset of raw radar ADC data recorded from a radar mounted on a flying drone platform in an indoor environment, together with ground truth detection targets. We show with real radar data that, utilizing our learned representations, we match the performance of conventional radar processing techniques and that our model can be trained on different input modalities such as raw ADC samples of only two consecutively transmitted chirps.

On a bluff south of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an electric motor whips a drone built by startup Zipline off a catapult launch ramp beside me and into the air on a test flight. The aircraft, with a fixed-wing design resembling that of a conventional airplane, pilots itself north, plans its approach based on the wind direction, makes a sweeping turn and drops a box of Band-Aids, Advil and Tums by parachute onto the grass a few yards in front of me. Drone deliveries could be dropping into your life, too, as the technology involved matures and expands beyond isolated test projects. In 2023, drones could replace vans and your own trip to the store when you need medicine, takeout dinners, cordless drill batteries or dishwasher soap. Today, Alphabet Wing drones reach hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, Finland and Texas and will expand its service in 2023, according to Jonathan Bass, who runs marketing for the business.

Robot delivery firm Ottonomy has unveiled a new Ottobot model called the Yeti with a new automated package delivery mechanism. That could allow it to do last mile drop-offs directly to a locker or remove the need for someone to receive a package, TechCrunch has reported. As shown at the end of Ottonomy's latest video, the Yeti uses a simple tilting mechanism and rollers to dispense the packages. That would allow it to drop packages onto a doorstep or transfer them to a locker, making it fully independent from humans. It may also allow for easy returns, as TechCrunch noted.

Ukraine has started the new year with a major attack that killed many Russian soldiers in their barracks, and with a defensive victory – its air force said it managed to shoot down all the Iranian drones Russia launched against Ukrainian infrastructure since the beginning of the year. Ukraine launched six artillery rockets at a barracks in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region, using its US-supplied HIMARS system a couple of minutes into New Year's Day. Four of the rockets got through air defences, the Russian defence ministry admitted, striking their target. Russia acknowledged 63 deaths two days after the strike, later raising that number to 89. But video of the wreckage showed that the temporary barracks, a former vocational school, had been almost completely flattened, suggesting that casualties may be much higher and it may take time to extract bodies.

A Ukrainian intelligence assessment has found that a single Iranian-made attack drone launched by Russia contained parts made by more than a dozen US companies. The Iranian Shahed-136 drone, downed during an attack last fall, contained 40 components manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to a CNN report citing the assessment. For months, Russia has been hammering Ukraine's civilian infrastructure with waves of drone attacks, which are designed to overwhelm air defenses and demoralize the population. Though the company that built the drones, Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries Corporation (HESA), has been under US sanctions since 2008, Iran appears to be obtaining the sophisticated electronics using intermediaries. To investigate the issue, the White House last month launched an'all hands on deck' task force involving agencies from across Washington - including the departments of Defense, State, Justice, Commerce and Treasury. Part of a downed Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone launched by Russia is seen near Kupiansk, Ukraine.

Heavy fighting around the largely ruined Ukrainian-held city of Bakhmut is likely to persist for the foreseeable future, according to a senior US administration official. Putin has sent a warship towards the Atlantic and Indian oceans armed with new hypersonic Zircon cruise missiles, which he said were unique worldwide. The Ukrainian foreign minister says that Patriot air defence systems being sent by the United States are expected to be deployed in Ukraine soon. Russia says that mass production of new electronic warfare and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems will start in the next few months. Ukraine says Russia had launched seven missile strikes, 18 air raids and more than 85 attacks from multiple-launch rocket systems in the past 24 hours on three cities – Kramatorsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

A North Korean drone entered the northern end of a 3.7km (2.2 miles) radius no-fly zone around South Korea's presidential office in Seoul when it intruded into the country's airspace last month, South Korean military officials say. "It [the drone] briefly flew into the northern edge of the zone, but it did not come close to key security facilities," a military official told South Korea's Yonhap News Agency on Thursday. The drone was among five North Korean unmanned aerial vehicles that crossed the border and entered South Korean airspace on December 26, prompting South Korea's military to scramble fighter jets and attack helicopters. The military could not bring down the drones, which flew over South Korean territory for hours. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff had denied that one of the drones intruded into the presidential office no-fly zone, however, on Thursday confirmed that a drone had violated the northern end of the secure area but did not fly directly over the Yongsan area, where the office of President Yoon Suk-yeol is located.