Controlling a distributed autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation is usually considered in the context of recovering the connectivity graph should a single UAV agent be lost. At the same time, little focus is made on how such loss affects the dynamics of the formation as a system. To compensate for the negative effects, we propose an adaptation algorithm that reduces the increasing interaction between the UAV agents that remain in the formation. This algorithm enables the autonomous system to adjust to the new equilibrium state. The algorithm has been tested by computer simulation on full nonlinear UAV models. Simulation results prove the negative effect (the increased final cruising speed of the formation) to be completely eliminated.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging is a suitable solution for real-time monitoring different vehicles on the urban scale. Real-time vehicle detection with the use of uncertainty estimation in deep meta-learning for the portable platforms (e.g., UAV) potentially improves video understanding in real-world applications with a small training dataset, while many vehicle monitoring approaches appear to understand single-time detection with a big training dataset. The purpose of real-time vehicle detection from oblique UAV images is to locate the vehicle on the time series UAV images by using semantic segmentation. Real-time vehicle detection is more difficult due to the variety of depth and scale vehicles in oblique view UAV images. Motivated by these facts, in this manuscript, we consider the problem of real-time vehicle detection for oblique UAV images based on a small training dataset and deep meta-learning. The proposed architecture, called SA-Net.v2, is a developed method based on the SA-CNN for real-time vehicle detection by reformulating the squeeze-and-attention mechanism. The SA-Net.v2 is composed of two components, including the squeeze-and-attention function that extracts the high-level feature based on a small training dataset, and the gated CNN. For the real-time vehicle detection scenario, we test our model on the UAVid dataset. UAVid is a time series oblique UAV images dataset consisting of 30 video sequences. We examine the proposed method's applicability for stand real-time vehicle detection in urban environments using time series UAV images. The experiments show that the SA-Net.v2 achieves promising performance in time series oblique UAV images.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shares his response to the U.S. drone strike on al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan on'The Story.' GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joined Martha MacCallum Wednesday to share his take on the illegal migrant crisis at the southern border and how terror might be on the rise as a result on "The Story." SENATOR GRAHAM: Now, when's the last time you can remember that America was on the receiving end of a bad deal in Afghanistan? It's when the Taliban were in charge. They created safe havens for al Qaeda inside of Afghanistan, and the rest is history. The 9/11 attackers came here and a lot of them were visa overstays.

For a year, U.S. officials have been saying that taking out a terrorist threat in Afghanistan with no American troops on the ground would be difficult but not impossible. Last weekend, the U.S. did just that -- killing al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri with a CIA drone strike. Other high-profile airstrikes in the past had inadvertently killed innocent civilians. In this case, the U.S. carefully chose to use a type of Hellfire missile that greatly minimized the chance of other casualties. Although U.S. officials have not publicly confirmed which variant of the Hellfire was used, experts and others familiar with counterterrorism operations said a likely option was the highly secretive Hellfire R9X -- know by various nicknames, including the "knife bomb" or the "flying Ginsu."

Localization without Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is a critical functionality in autonomous operations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Vision-based localization on a known map can be an effective solution, but it is burdened by two main problems: places have different appearance depending on weather and season, and the perspective discrepancy between the UAV camera image and the map make matching hard. In this work, we propose a localization solution relying on matching of UAV camera images to georeferenced orthophotos with a trained convolutional neural network model that is invariant to significant seasonal appearance difference (winter-summer) between the camera image and map. We compare the convergence speed and localization accuracy of our solution to six reference methods. The results show major improvements with respect to reference methods, especially under high seasonal variation. We finally demonstrate the ability of the method to successfully localize a real UAV, showing that the proposed method is robust to perspective changes.

The New York Times was accused of stealth-editing its report on the U.S. drone strike that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, scrubbing his ties to a Taliban leader the paper previously gave a platform to. The Biden Administration announced Monday it successfully targeted al-Zawahri, one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks. The Times published a report outlining details surrounding the drone strike, including where exactly he was located in Kabul, Afghanistan. "According to one American analyst, the house that was struck was owned by a top aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior official in the Taliban government whom American officials say is close to senior Qaeda figures," the Times wrote. Recently slain Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahri speaks on the 11th Anniversary of Usama bin Laden's death.

During his long career as a polemicist and a strategist of terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri often taunted the United States. He hewed to the familiar theme that America was an apostate power at war with Islam. But he also described it as a spent force. In a video released this spring, he said that "U.S. weakness" was responsible for the war triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and he mocked the country's standing "after its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the economic disasters caused by the 9/11 invasions, after the coronavirus pandemic, and after it left its ally Ukraine as prey for the Russians." The U.S. drone strike in Kabul last Saturday that killed Zawahiri, who was seventy-one, added a punctuation mark to the long search for justice for the victims of 9/11 and of other deadly attacks that Zawahiri directly approved, such as the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed twelve Americans and more than two hundred Africans.

At first glance, the July 31 killing of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri by a US drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, appears to be the most significant setback the group has experienced since the death of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in 2011. However, throughout the decade he administered al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri worked to ensure the organisation has all the necessary tools in place to survive his death. As such, while the operation that eliminated one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks is undoubtedly a major win for the current US administration, it is unlikely to debilitate the group. Indeed, the fallout from this targeted assassination will be minimal for al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, seen by many as nothing other than a "grey bureaucrat", can easily be replaced by someone with a similar managerial mindset.

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Kabul, Afghanistan – The news of the killing of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri slowly made its way through the Afghan capital. For many Afghans, it came as a complete surprise. The announcement by the United States of a "precision" drone attack that killed the elusive 71-year-old al-Qaeda leader came in Kabul in the early hours of Tuesday. As the day advanced, more details started to trickle in. However, in a sign of the growing fears over the freedom of speech under a Taliban government, many city residents seemed hesitant to talk about the killing of al-Zawahiri, who had a reward of $25m on his head for the 9/11 attacks.