Drones
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,321
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that "two rounds of shelling struck around 1.25 km" [less than a mile] from the perimeter of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on Monday afternoon. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi warned the attacks came as the plant has been running on emergency diesel generators for almost two weeks after losing its external power source.
SketchPlan: Diffusion Based Drone Planning From Human Sketches
Norelius, Sixten, Feldman, Aaron O., Schwager, Mac
Abstract-- We propose SketchPlan, a diffusion-based planner that interprets 2D hand-drawn sketches over depth images to generate 3D flight paths for drone navigation. SketchPlan comprises two components: a SketchAdapter that learns to map the human sketches to projected 2D paths, and DiffPath, a diffusion model that infers 3D trajectories from 2D projections and a first person view depth image. Our model achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, generating accurate and safe flight paths in previously unseen real-world environments. T o train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 32k flight paths using a diverse set of photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes. We automatically label the data by computing 2D projections of the 3D flight paths onto the camera plane, and use this to train the DiffPath diffusion model. However, since real human 2D sketches differ significantly from ideal 2D projections, we additionally label 872 of the 3D flight paths with real human sketches and use this to train the SketchAdapter to infer the 2D projection from the human sketch. We demonstrate SketchPlan's effectiveness in both simulated and real-world experiments, and show through ablations that training on a mix of human labeled and auto-labeled data together with a modular design significantly boosts its capabilities to correctly interpret human intent and infer 3D paths. In real-world drone tests, SketchPlan achieved 100% success in low/medium clutter and 40% in unseen high-clutter environments, outperforming key ablations by 20-60% in task completion.
British parts found in Russian drones, Zelensky says
British microcomputers were among more than 100,000 foreign-made parts contained in Russian missiles and drones used in Sunday's deadly strikes on Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky has said. The Ukrainian president called for further effective sanctions after saying parts originating in allied countries including Germany, Japan and the US have been identified in Russian weapons. The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said it had recently undertaken efforts to crack down on UK firms whose products have continued to make their way into Russia's military supply chain. We take reports of goods from UK companies being found in Russian weaponry incredibly seriously, a government spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the government had banned the export of thousands of goods to Russia including every battlefield item Ukraine has brought to our attention, adding that they have imposed the most the most severe package of sanctions. What are the sanctions on Russia and are they working?
Ukraine's Zelenskyy says Western parts found in Russian drones, missiles
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Ukraine's Zelenskyy says Western parts found in Russian drones, missiles Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has alleged that drones and missiles fired by Russia against his country are filled with parts sourced from Western companies. In a social media post on Monday, Zelenskyy said the hundreds of weapons used in Russian attacks over the previous two nights contained tens of thousands of components produced by firms in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan and China.
YawSitter: Modeling and Controlling a Tail-Sitter UAV with Enhanced Yaw Control
Habel, Amir, Mehboob, Fawad, Sam, Jeffrin, Fortin, Clement, Tsetserukou, Dzmitry
Achieving precise lateral motion modeling and decoupled control in hover remains a significant challenge for tail-sitter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), primarily due to complex aerodynamic couplings and the absence of welldefined lateral dynamics. This paper presents a novel modeling and control strategy that enhances yaw authority and lateral motion by introducing a sideslip force model derived from differential propeller slipstream effects acting on the fuselage under differential thrust. The resulting lateral force along the body y-axis enables yaw-based lateral position control without inducing roll coupling. The control framework employs a YXZ Euler rotation formulation to accurately represent attitude and incorporate gravitational components while directly controlling yaw in the yaxis, thereby improving lateral dynamic behavior and avoiding singularities. The proposed approach is validated through trajectory-tracking simulations conducted in a Unity-based environment. Tests on both rectangular and circular paths in hover mode demonstrate stable performance, with low mean absolute position errors and yaw deviations constrained within 5.688 degrees. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed lateral force generation model and provide a foundation for the development of agile, hover-capable tail-sitter UAVs.
A Novel Unified Lightweight Temporal-Spatial Transformer Approach for Intrusion Detection in Drone Networks
Biswas, Tarun Kumar, Zannat, Ashrafun, Ishtiaq, Waqas, Hossain, Md. Alamgir
The growing integration of drones across commercial, industrial, and civilian domains has introduced significant cybersecurity challenges, particularly due to the susceptibility of drone networks to a wide range of cyberattacks. Existing intrusion detection mechanisms often lack the adaptability, efficiency, and generalizability required for the dynamic and resource constrained environments in which drones operate. This paper proposes TSLT-Net, a novel lightweight and unified Temporal Spatial Transformer based intrusion detection system tailored specifically for drone networks. By leveraging self attention mechanisms, TSLT-Net effectively models both temporal patterns and spatial dependencies in network traffic, enabling accurate detection of diverse intrusion types. The framework includes a streamlined preprocessing pipeline and supports both multiclass attack classification and binary anomaly detection within a single architecture. Extensive experiments conducted on the ISOT Drone Anomaly Detection Dataset, consisting of more than 2.3 million labeled records, demonstrate the superior performance of TSLT-Net with 99.99 percent accuracy in multiclass detection and 100 percent in binary anomaly detection, while maintaining a minimal memory footprint of only 0.04 MB and 9722 trainable parameters. These results establish TSLT-Net as an effective and scalable solution for real time drone cybersecurity, particularly suitable for deployment on edge devices in mission critical UAV systems.
Five killed across Ukraine in overnight Russian attacks
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Five people have been killed in Ukraine after Russia launched hundreds of drones and missiles across the country overnight, which officials said targeted civilian infrastructure. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Russia fired approximately 50 missiles and 500 attack drones.
Russia rains drones and missiles on Ukraine as Poland scrambles aircraft
Residents leave their apartment building, which was damaged by a Russian drone strike, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Sunday. LVIV, Ukraine - NATO member Poland said it scrambled aircraft early on Sunday to ensure its air safety after Russia launched airstrikes on Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials reporting missiles and drones raining down on the Lviv region near the Polish border. Polish and allied aircraft are operating in our airspace, while ground-based air defence and radar reconnaissance systems have been brought to the highest state of readiness, Poland's operational command said in a post on X. Eastern-flank NATO members are on high alert after Poland shot down suspected Russian drones in its airspace in September and drone sightings and air incursions, including in Copenhagen and Munich, have led to chaos in European aviation. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.
Poland scrambles jets as Russia strikes western Ukraine
Russia pounded Ukraine with missile and drone attacks overnight on Saturday and into Sunday morning, focusing on the major western city of Lviv. Ukraine's neighbour Poland scrambled fighter jets in order to ensure the safety of Polish airspace, the Polish military confirmed. Allied Nato aircraft were also deployed. Lviv's regional head Maksym Kozytskyi said two people were killed in strikes in the region, and two more injured. Elsewhere, Russia again targeted Ukraine's power plants - and one was struck in an overnight attack on Zaporizhzhia, where the mayor said one person died and more than 73,000 people were without electricity.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,319
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? One person was killed and about 30 others injured after two Russian drones struck trains at a station in Ukraine's northern Sumy region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of "terrorism", while Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow deliberately targeted civilians during the attack.