British navy personnel planted explosives and blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month, Russia's defence ministry says, a claim London called false and designed to distract from Moscow's military failures in Ukraine. Russia did not give evidence for its allegation that a leading NATO member had sabotaged critical Russian infrastructure amid the worst crisis in relations between the West and Moscow since the depths of the Cold War. The Russian ministry alleged "British specialists" from the same unit that directed Ukrainian drone attacks on ships from the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea earlier on Saturday were responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. "According to available information, representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year – blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines," the ministry said. The United Kingdom denied the accusation.

The Russian army accused Ukraine of a "massive" drone attack on its Black Sea Fleet in Crimea on Saturday, claiming the UK helped in the strike that damaged a ship. Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea, which has been targeted several times in recent months, serves as the headquarters for the fleet and a logistical hub for operations in Ukraine. The Russian army claimed to have "destroyed" nine aerial drones and seven maritime ones, in an attack early Saturday in the port. Moscow's forces alleged British "specialists", whom they said were based in the southern Ukrainian city of Ochakiv, had helped prepare and train Kyiv to carry out the strike. In a further singling out of the UK -- which Moscow sees as one of the most unfriendly Western countries -- Moscow said the same British unit was involved in explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipeline last month.

"In the course of repelling a terrorist attack on the outer roadstead of Sevastopol, the use of naval weapons and naval aviation of the Black Sea Fleet destroyed four marine unmanned vehicles, three more devices were destroyed on the internal roadstead," a statement from the ministry read.

The Russian navy has "repelled" a drone attack in the bay of Sevastopol, home to Moscow's Black Sea Fleet in Moscow-annexed Crimea, according to a statement by a Russian-installed governor, as a battle rages for the control of southeastern Ukrainian cities Kherson and Bakhmut. "Today, starting at 04:30am for several hours, various air defence systems in Sevastopol repelled drone attacks," Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said on Telegram early on Saturday. "All UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have been shot down," he added. "Nothing has been hit in the city. The situation is under control."

The discovery of gunpowder in the ninth century and the invention of the atomic bomb in the twentieth century may be considered the first two revolutions in warfare. The third revolution in warfare is Artificial Intelligence (AI), the branch of computer sciences that is engaged in the development of intelligence machines i.e. those that could think and function like human beings. AI has gained enough prominence in military spheres by way of autonomous weaponry on land, sea, air, space and cyber domains to be considered as a breakthrough that militaries around the world are scampering to exploit so as to dominate, or at least gain an advantage over, potential or existing adversaries. Air power, from the days of Douhet, concerns air supremacy; that is to say, it aims at possessing the capability to use the medium of air to own advantage while denying its use to the adversary. However, concepts of air power thought have evolved remarkably since Douhet on account of technological innovations. From gladiatorial dogfights between knights of the air, the instruments of air power have progressed astoundingly with the advent of Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missiles, air-to-surface weapons launched from long distances without visually sighting the targets they are aimed at, stealth and speed enhancements and aircraft performance in terms of manoeuver ability and agility.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said he demanded Tehran stop providing Russia with weapons in a phone call with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amirabdollahian. Ukrainian officials and their Western allies have accused Iran of providing so-called "kamikaze" drones to Russia, which have recently been used to devastating effect by Moscow's forces in strikes aimed at Ukrainian infrastructure. Iran has strenuously denied that it has sent any weaponry, including drones, to Russia. "Today, I received a call from Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian," Kuleba wrote in a tweet late on Friday. "I demanded Iran to immediately cease the flow of weapons to Russia used to kill civilians and destroy critical infrastructure in Ukraine," he wrote.

Scientists have developed a theory that can explain how flying insects determine the gravity direction without using accelerometers. It also forms a substantial step in the creation of tiny, autonomous drones. Scientists have discovered a novel manner for flying drones and insects to estimate the gravity direction. Whereas drones typically use accelerometers to this end, the way in which flying insects do this has until now been shrouded in mystery, since they lack a specific sense for acceleration. In an article published in Nature, scientists from TU Delft and Aix Marseille Université / CNRS in France have shown that drones can estimate the gravity direction by combining visual motion sensing with a model of how they move.

We propose a novel framework for swarm-based drone delivery services with in-flight energy recharging. The framework aims to enhance the delivery time of multiple packages by reducing the number of stops and recharging times at intermediate stations. The proposed framework considers various intrinsic and extrinsic delivery constraints. We propose to use support drones whose sole purpose is to recharge other drones in the swarm during their flight. In this respect, we compute the optimal set of optimal support drones to minimize the probability of delivery services and recharging time at the next stations. We also use two settings to position the support drones in a flight formation for comparative purposes. Two novel energy sharing methods are proposed, namely, Priority-based and Fairness-based methods. A re-ordering method of the delivery drones is presented to facilitate the in-flight energy composition process. An enhanced A* algorithm is implemented to compose the optimal services in terms of delivery time. Experimental results prove the efficiency of our proposed approach.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cyber-physical system for aerial manipulation. This UAV's body is capable of exerting powerful propulsion force in the longitudinal direction, decoupling the translational dynamics and the rotational dynamics on the longitudinal plane. A high-level impedance control law is proposed to drive the vehicle for trajectory tracking and interaction with the environments. In addition, a vision-based real-time target identification and tracking method integrating a YOLO v3 real-time object detector with feature tracking, and morphological operations is proposed to be implemented onboard the vehicle with support of model compression techniques to eliminate latency caused by video wireless transmission and heavy computation burden on traditional teleoperation platforms.

We present a game benchmark for testing human-swarm control algorithms and interfaces in a real-time, high-cadence scenario. Our benchmark consists of a swarm vs. swarm game in a virtual ROS environment in which the goal of the game is to capture all agents from the opposing swarm; the game's high-cadence is a result of the capture rules, which cause agent team sizes to fluctuate rapidly. These rules require players to consider both the number of agents currently at their disposal and the behavior of their opponent's swarm when they plan actions. We demonstrate our game benchmark with a default human-swarm control system that enables a player to interact with their swarm through a high-level touchscreen interface. The touchscreen interface transforms player gestures into swarm control commands via a low-level decentralized ergodic control framework. We compare our default human-swarm control system to a flocking-based control system, and discuss traits that are crucial for swarm control algorithms and interfaces operating in real-time, high-cadence scenarios like our game benchmark. Our game benchmark code is available on Github; more information can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/swarm-game-benchmark.