Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Drones


Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra

Al Jazeera

Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra NewsFeed Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra Drone video shows widespread destruction in part of Sumatra in Indonesia, where more than 440 people have died in flooding and landslides across the country. Hundreds of others are still missing. Pope Leo says two-state is'only solution' for Israel-Palestine Netanyahu requests Israel's president grant a pardon in corruption cases


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,376

Al Jazeera

Here's where things stand on Monday, December 1. The number of casualties from a Russian attack on Ukraine's Kyiv on Sunday rose to one person killed and 18 wounded, according to regional Governor Mykola Kalashnyk. In southern Kherson, at least two people were killed, and seven others were wounded in more Russian attacks, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram. In the Donetsk region, at least two people were killed, and five were injured in Russian attacks on Saturday, according to Governor Vadym Filashkin. In Russia, a Ukrainian drone attack killed two men in the Belgorod region, the region's operational headquarters said in a post on Telegram.


Drones used to locate and drive away bears in Fukushima village

The Japan Times

NTT Docomo Business has begun deploying drones to locate and drive away wild bears, in partnership with the village of Showa in Fukushima Prefecture, informed sources have said. The high-performance drones, featuring a camera equipped with a thermal imaging function, can be effective in the early morning and at night, when bears tend to be active. The aircraft support the long-term evolution, or LTE, wireless communication standard, which is used for mobile phones. NTT Docomo Business, under the aegis of the group led by telecommunications giant NTT, plans to start offering the service to other municipalities as a new measure to address bear attacks at a time when reports on damage caused by the animals are increasing around the country. The drones search areas where bears were spotted to help hunters cull them. The thermal camera is used to locate bears if they flee into bushes.


RSPECT: Robust and Scalable Planner for Energy-Aware Coordination of UAV-UGV Teams in Aerial Monitoring

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the robust planning of energy-constrained unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), which act as mobile charging stations, to perform long-horizon aerial monitoring missions. More specifically, given a set of points to be visited by the UAVs and desired final positions of the UAV-UGV teams, the objective is to find a robust plan (the vehicle trajectories) that can be realized without a major revision in the face of uncertainty (e.g., unknown obstacles/terrain, wind) to complete this mission in minimum time. We provide a formal description of this problem as a mixed-integer program (MIP), which is NP-hard. Since exact solution methods are computationally intractable for such problems, we propose RSPECT, a scalable and efficient heuristic. We provide theoretical results on the complexity of our algorithm and the feasibility and robustness of resulting plans. We also demonstrate the performance of our method via simulations and experiments.


An Efficient Privacy-preserving Intrusion Detection Scheme for UAV Swarm Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their applications in diverse domains, such as surveillance, disaster management, agriculture, and defense, have revolutionized modern technology. While the potential benefits of swarm-based UAV networks are growing significantly, they are vulnerable to various security attacks that can jeopardize the overall mission success by degrading their performance, disrupting decision-making, and compromising the trajectory planning process. The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) plays a vital role in identifying potential security attacks to ensure the secure operation of UAV swarm networks. However, conventional IDS primarily focuses on binary classification with resource-intensive neural networks and faces challenges, including latency, privacy breaches, increased performance overhead, and model drift. This research aims to address these challenges by developing a novel lightweight and federated continuous learning-based IDS scheme. Our proposed model facilitates decentralized training across diverse UAV swarms to ensure data heterogeneity and privacy. The performance evaluation of our model demonstrates significant improvements, with classification accuracies of 99.45% on UKM-IDS, 99.99% on UAV-IDS, 96.85% on TLM-UAV dataset, and 98.05% on Cyber-Physical datasets.


Deep Reinforcement Learning for Drone Route Optimization in Post-Disaster Road Assessment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Rapid post-disaster road damage assessment is critical for effective emergency response, yet traditional optimization methods suffer from excessive computational time and require domain knowledge for algorithm design, making them unsuitable for time-sensitive disaster scenarios. This study proposes an attention-based encoder-decoder model (AEDM) for rapid drone routing decision in post-disaster road damage assessment. The method employs deep reinforcement learning to determine high-quality drone assessment routes without requiring algorithmic design knowledge. A network transformation method is developed to convert link-based routing problems into equivalent node-based formulations, while a synthetic road network generation technique addresses the scarcity of large-scale training datasets. The model is trained using policy optimization with multiple optima (POMO) with multi-task learning capabilities to handle diverse parameter combinations. Experimental results demonstrate two key strengths of AEDM: it outperforms commercial solvers by 20--71\% and traditional heuristics by 23--35\% in solution quality, while achieving rapid inference (1--2 seconds) versus 100--2,000 seconds for traditional methods. The model exhibits strong generalization across varying problem scales, drone numbers, and time constraints, consistently outperforming baseline methods on unseen parameter distributions and real-world road networks. The proposed method effectively balances computational efficiency with solution quality, making it particularly suitable for time-critical disaster response applications where rapid decision-making is essential for saving lives. The source code for AEDM is publicly available at https://github.com/PJ-HTU/AEDM-for-Post-disaster-road-assessment.


Top global arms producers' revenues surge as major wars rage: SIPRI report

Al Jazeera

Can Pakistan join the Gaza stabilisation force? Revenues from sales of weapons and military services by the 100 largest global arms-producing companies reached a record $679bn in 2024, according to new data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The Gaza and Ukraine wars, as well as global and regional geopolitical tensions and ever-higher military expenditures, increased revenues generated by the companies from sales of military goods and services to customers domestic and abroad by 5.9 percent compared to the year before, the organisation said in a report published on Monday. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics led the pack in the US, where the combined arms revenues of arms companies in the top 100 grew by 3.8 percent in 2024 to reach $334bn, with 30 out of the 39 US companies in the ranking increasing their revenues. However, SIPRI said widespread delays and budget overruns continue to plague key projects such as the F-35 fighter jet, the Columbia and Virginia-class submarines, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,375

Al Jazeera

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Here's where things stand on Sunday, November 30. A Russian drone attack killed one person and wounded 11, including a child, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, regional Governor Mykola Kalashnyk said on Sunday.


Russian strikes on Kyiv kill three as Ukraine envoys travel to US for talks

Al Jazeera

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Russian drone and missile strikes in and around Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, have killed at least three people and wounded dozens of others, officials said, as Ukrainian representatives travelled to the United States for talks on a renewed push to end the war. "Russia shot dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles and over 500 drones at ordinary homes, the energy grid, and critical infrastructure," Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on Saturday.


Israeli attack kills two children in southern Gaza despite ceasefire

Al Jazeera

Can Pakistan join the Gaza stabilisation force? Two Palestinian children have been killed in an Israeli drone attack on the town of Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to medics. Witnesses told Al Jazeera that drones dropped a bomb on a group of civilians near al-Farabi School on Saturday morning, killing two brothers, Juma and Fadi Tamer Abu Assi. The area targeted by the attack lies beyond the so-called Yellow Line marking the Israeli forces' redeployment boundary agreed under the ceasefire agreement, which took effect on October 10, sources said. Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli military launched ground, naval, and air attacks on several parts of Gaza.