Drones attacked the Ukrainian capital early Monday morning, the Kyiv city military administration said, urging people to heed air alerts. "The enemy is attacking the capital," the administration posted on Telegram. "At the moment, 9 enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have already been shot down in the airspace of Kyiv." It added that the Russian forces were using barrage ammunition from "Shaheds", Iran-made weapons that have pummelled the capital in recent weeks. The city's civil administration announced an initial air alert at 1:56 am (2356 GMT) which lasted for just over three hours.

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics Task Force of the German Rescue Robotics Center, where both ground and aerial robots were used to explore destroyed buildings. We describe and reflect the missions as well as the lessons learned that have resulted from them. In order to make robots from research laboratories fit for real operations, realistic test environments were set up for outdoor and indoor use and tested in regular exercises by researchers and emergency forces. Based on this experience, the robots and their control software were significantly improved. Furthermore, top teams of researchers and first responders were formed, each with realistic assessments of the operational and practical suitability of robotic systems.

Drone detection has become an essential task in object detection as drone costs have decreased and drone technology has improved. It is, however, difficult to detect distant drones when there is weak contrast, long range, and low visibility. In this work, we propose several sequence classification architectures to reduce the detected false-positive ratio of drone tracks. Moreover, we propose a new drone vs. bird sequence classification dataset to train and evaluate the proposed architectures. 3D CNN, LSTM, and Transformer based sequence classification architectures have been trained on the proposed dataset to show the effectiveness of the proposed idea. As experiments show, using sequence information, bird classification and overall F1 scores can be increased by up to 73% and 35%, respectively. Among all sequence classification models, R(2+1)D-based fully convolutional model yields the best transfer learning and fine-tuning results.

Shield AI, a San Diego startup that's building artificial intelligence "pilots" for military aircraft and drones, has pulled in an additional $60 million in venture capital funding. The money is follow-on investment to a financing that Shield AI announced in June. It brings the total amount raised in the Series E round to $225 million -- made up of $150 million in equity and $75 million in debt. The additional capital came from the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund. Founded in 2015, Shield AI has raised just under $575 million since inception.

The hundreds of Russian drones hovering ominously over the Ukrainian battlefield owe their existence to an elastic, sanctions-evading supply chain that often runs through a shabby office above a Hong Kong marketplace, and sometimes through a yellow stucco home in suburban Florida. The "Sea Eagle" Orlan 10 UAV is a deceptive, relatively low-tech and cheap killer that has directed many of the up to 20,000 artillery shells that Russia has fired daily on Ukrainian positions in 2022, killing up to 100 soldiers per day, according to Ukrainian commanders. An investigation by Reuters and iStories, a Russian media outlet, in collaboration with the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London, has uncovered a logistical trail that spans the globe and ends at the Orlan's production line, the Special Technology Center in St. Petersburg, Russia. 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.

Every day, billions of people use the GPS satellite system to find their way around the world--but GPS signals are vulnerable. Jamming and spoofing attacks can cripple GPS connections entirely or make something appear in the wrong location, causing disruption and safety issues. New data analysis reveals that multiple major Russian cities appear to have faced widespread GPS disruption during the past week. The signal interference follows Ukraine launching long-range drone attacks deep into Russian territory, and it may act as a way to potentially stop drones that rely upon GPS for navigation, experts say. The GPS interference has "expanded on a scale that hasn't been seen before," says Erik Kannike, a program manager at Estonian defense intelligence firm SensusQ who has been monitoring the situation.

Dozens of people, including a United States citizen, have been released in the latest prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine, nearly 10 months into a grinding war that began after Moscow invaded its neighbour. The latest exchange included 64 Ukrainian soldiers and a US national living in Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, the head of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office said on Wednesday. Yermak identified the American as Suedi Murekezi who he said had been "helping our people" before he ended up in Russian custody. The White House national security spokesman, John Kirby, did not name the freed American, citing privacy concerns. "We certainly welcome that news," Kirby told reporters.

The Kremlin has said Patriot missile defence systems would be a legitimate target if sent to Ukraine to intercept the barrage of incoming Russian missiles that have crippled the war-torn country's power infrastructure. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday warned NATO against equipping Kyiv with Patriot missile batteries. It is likely the Kremlin will view the move as an escalation. The comments come as Moscow said no "Christmas ceasefire" was on the cards after nearly 10 months of the war in Ukraine, even as the release of dozens more prisoners, including a United States national, showed some contact between the two sides remained. Russia and Ukraine are not currently engaged in talks to end the fighting, which is raging in Ukraine's east and south while Moscow has carried out missile and drone strikes on power and water facilities across the country, including the capital city Kyiv.

Fox News correspondent Jeff Paul has the latest from Kyiv, Ukraine, on'America Reports.' Russia launched 13 Iranian-made Shahed drones into Kyiv Wednesday, in one of the largest attempted strikes of its kind on the Ukraine capital, Fox News Digital was told. All 13 drones were apparently targeting energy infrastructure but were downed before they reached their targets and no military or civilian casualties have been reported, city administrative and defense officials said. Air raid sirens rang out shortly before 6 a.m. Rescuers and police experts examine remains of a drone following a strike on an administrative building in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Dec. 14, 2022. One source told Fox News Digital that Russia was looking to hit the city's energy infrastructure and in a Telegram post city officials said, "once again [Russia] targeted the critical infrastructure of the region and the capital."

Ukrainian forces said Wednesday they had shot down an entire swarm of Iranian-made drones launched at the capital by Russian troops in their latest attack on Kyiv. Explosions rang out over a central neighbourhood in the early hours of Wednesday, the mayor said, and AFP journalists saw law enforcement and emergency service workers inspecting metal fragments at a snow-covered impact site. "The terrorists started this morning with 13 Shaheds," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, referring to the Iran-made weapons. "According to the preliminary information, all 13 were shot down by our Ukrainian air defence systems." He added that residents of the capital, which has now been subjected to nearly ten months of air raid sirens and frequent aerial attacks since Russia invaded the country in February, should stay alert to government warnings of incoming attacks.