Drones with a control system from UAV Navigation are helping emergency services in Spain tackle major fires in the current heatwave. The Spanish Emergency Military Unit (UME) is a dedicated paramilitary force that was established for missions where intervention is required to preserve the safety of Spanish citizens in cases of natural disaster. The UME mainly focuses on supporting firefighters to tackle wildfire emergencies with over 4,000 staff and uses a wide variety of vehicles, tools, and equipment, including UAVs. Among these UAVs is the Spanish A-800 helicopter UAV, which uses the flight controller from Spanish developer UAV Navigation. This is providing timely information to commanders on the ground about the development of a wildfire while at the same time reducing the risk to people on the ground.

The drone strike was the latest in a series of American military operations against ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria, which have been relatively rare since the fall of the Islamic State's so-called caliphate in 2019. On June 16, Army Delta Force commandos seized Hani Ahmed al-Kurdi, a top Islamic State bomb maker and operations facilitator also known as Salim, in a ground raid in Aleppo, Syria. Nine days later, the United States carried out an airstrike in Idlib Province that the military said killed Abu Hamzah al Yemeni, a senior leader of Hurras al-Din, Al Qaeda's branch in Syria. The U.S. attack on Tuesday came as Mr. Biden prepared to depart for Israel and Saudi Arabia, his first visit to the Middle East as president. The trip will largely focus on Iran's nuclear program and malign activities in the region.

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, fired three drones toward Israeli gas rigs this month in an area of the eastern Mediterranean claimed by Lebanon. Israeli officials said that the drones, which were quickly intercepted, did not carry arms of any kind and that they were launched only to show that Hezbollah is able to reach a point considered strategic and sensitive. The Israeli defense establishment has sophisticated air-defense mechanisms capable of intercepting rockets fired by enemies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Israel also has a complex system of sensors able to detect tunnels that Palestinian and Lebanese militants sometimes dig under Israel's borders. But those defenses are relatively inefficient against the drone.

Moments after US President Joe Biden touches down in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, the Israeli military will show him new hardware it says is essential to confronting Iran: anti-drone lasers. While Israel has long been known for its efforts to thwart Tehran's nuclear ambitions, Israeli officials have increasingly been sounding the alarm over Iran's fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This month, the Israeli military said it had intercepted a total of four unarmed drones headed for an offshore gas rig. It said the drones were Iranian-made and launched by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which is backed by Tehran. This image grab from a video released by the Israeli army spokesperson's unit on July 2, 2022, reportedly shows a drone launched by Lebanon's Hezbollah movement that was headed towards an offshore gas field in the Mediterranean Photo: AFP As concerns mount over drone warfare, Israel hopes the new "Iron Beam" system will secure its skies. While not yet operational, the military hardware was described as a "game-changer" in April by then-prime minister Naftali Bennett.

A man who US officials called the leader of the Islamic State militant group in Syria was killed Tuesday in a drone strike while riding a motorcycle in the northern part of the country, the Pentagon and local organizations said. Maher al-Agal was killed near Jindires in northern Syria, and one of his top aides was seriously injured in the attack, Pentagon Central Command spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Dave Eastburn told AFP. The volunteer Syrian Civil Defense Force, known as the "White Helmets," said the attack targeted the two while they were on a motorcycle outside Aleppo. President Joe Biden said the strike "takes a key terrorist off the field and significantly degrades the ability of ISIS to plan, resource, and conduct their operations in the region." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Agal's death and said he was the Islamic State governor for the Levant region.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are aircraft whose flights can be fully autonomous without any provision for human intervention. One of the most useful and promising domains where UAVs can be employed is natural disaster management. In this paper, we focus on an emergency scenario and propose the use of a fleet of UAVs that help rescue teams to individuate people needing help inside an affected area. We model this situation as an original graph theoretical problem called Multi-Depot Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Total Completion Times minimization (MDMT-VRP-TCT); we go through some problems already studied in the literature that appear somehow similar to it and highlight the differences, propose a mathematical formulation for our problem as a MILP, design a matheuristic framework to quickly solve large instances, and experimentally test its performance. Beyond the proposed application, our solution works in any case in which a multi-depot multi-trip vehicle routing problem must be solved.

Online trajectory planners enable quadrotors to safely and smoothly navigate in unknown cluttered environments. However, tuning parameters is challenging since modern planners have become too complex to mathematically model and predict their interaction with unstructured environments. This work takes humans out of the loop by proposing a planner parameter adaptation framework that formulates objectives into two complementary categories and optimizes them asynchronously. Objectives evaluated with and without trajectory execution are optimized using Bayesian Optimization (BayesOpt) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), respectively. By combining two kinds of objectives, the total convergence rate of the black-box optimization is accelerated while the dimension of optimized parameters can be increased. Benchmark comparisons demonstrate its superior performance over other strategies. Tests with changing obstacle densities validate its real-time environment adaption, which is difficult for prior manual tuning. Real-world flights with different drone platforms, environments, and planners show the proposed framework's scalability and effectiveness.

Remote sensing is the process of detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. It is being broadly used to monitor ecosystems, mainly for their preservation. Ever-growing reports of invasive species have affected the natural balance of ecosystems. Exotic invasive species have a critical impact when introduced into new ecosystems and may lead to the extinction of native species. In this study, we focus on Ludwigia peploides, considered by the European Union as an aquatic invasive species. Its presence can negatively impact the surrounding ecosystem and human activities such as agriculture, fishing, and navigation. Our goal was to develop a method to identify the presence of the species. We used images collected by a drone-mounted multispectral sensor to achieve this, creating our LudVision data set. To identify the targeted species on the collected images, we propose a new method for detecting Ludwigia p. in multispectral images. The method is based on existing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods modified to handle multispectral data. The proposed method achieved a producer's accuracy of 79.9% and a user's accuracy of 95.5%.

A senior US official said Tuesday that Russia's plan to acquire hundreds of combat drones from Iran shows its urgent need to reinforce due to heavy losses four months after invading Ukraine. John Kirby, a spokesman for the national security council, said the deal, revealed by the White House on Monday, also shows Iran's willingness to support Moscow's war on Ukraine. But he said supply the drones would not necessarily affect US ongoing attempts to negotiate a return to the 2015 six-party deal to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. "We continue to want to see a nuclear deal that takes Iran's nuclear ambitions, at least its nuclear weapons ambitions, off the table," Kirby said. On Monday the White House revealed intelligence that Russia and Iran are moving quickly on a drone supply pact, which comes as Russia forces face stiff Ukrainian resistance in their push to consolidate control of eastern and southern Ukraine.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The leader of the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria has been killed Tuesday by a U.S. drone strike. Maher al-Agal, whom military officials describe as "one of the top five ISIS leaders and the leader of ISIS in Syria," was taken out after being targeted near Jindayris in the country's northwest. "This strike reaffirms CENTCOM's steadfast commitment to the region and the enduring defeat of ISIS," Col. Joe Buccino, a Central Command spokesperson, said in a statement.