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? At least 4 killed in major Russian drone, missile attack on Ukraine's Kyiv Russia's President Vladimir Putin said his forces are prevailing in what he described as a "righteous battle" in Ukraine . "Our fighters and commanders go on the attack, and the entire country, all of Russia, is waging this righteous battle and working hard," he said.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba (right) attends a joint news conference with Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake at the Prime Minister's Office on Monday. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake met in Tokyo on Monday and agreed that Japan will provide about 10 surveillance drones, worth about ¥500 million ($3.36 million), to the South Asian nation's navy. This will be Japan's first provision of defense equipment to Sri Lanka under its official security assistance program. The stability and development of Sri Lanka, which is located at a strategic point in the Indian Ocean, is extremely important, Ishiba said at a joint news conference after the meeting. In response, the president voiced his commitment to creating a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific region.

Abstract--In this paper, we propose a new modeling approach and a fast algorithm for 3D motion planning, applicable for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. The goal is to construct the shortest path connecting given initial and final configurations subject to motion constraints. Our work differs from existing literature in two ways. First, we consider full vehicle orientation using a body-attached frame, which includes roll, pitch, and yaw angles. However, existing work uses only pitch and/or heading angle, which is insufficient to uniquely determine orientation. Second, we use two control inputs to represent bounded pitch and yaw rates, reflecting control by two separate actuators. In contrast, most previous methods rely on a single input, such as path curvature, which is insufficient for accurately modeling the vehicle's kinematics in 3D. We use a rotation minimizing frame to describe the vehicle's configuration and its evolution, and construct paths by concatenating optimal Dubins paths on spherical, cylindrical, or planar surfaces. Numerical simulations show our approach generates feasible paths within 10 seconds on average and yields shorter paths than existing methods in most cases. HE use of Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs) is rapidly growing in civilian and military applications, including search and rescue and surveillance. Fixed-wing UA Vs are of particular interest due to longer flight times, larger payload capacity, and the ability to fly at higher altitudes [1], [2]. However, they are persistently in motion, i.e., cannot stop or hover mid-air, and cannot change their heading angle instantaneously. Hence, they have a bound on the rate of change of their heading/orientation, which manifests itself as curvature constraints on the path.

Multispectral object detection is an important application for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, it faces several challenges. First, low-light RGB images weaken the multispectral fusion due to details loss. Second, the interference information is introduced to local target modeling during multispectral fusion. Third, computational cost poses deployment challenge on UAV platforms, such as transformer-based methods with quadratic complexity. To address these issues, a framework named DEPFusion consisting of two designed modules, Dual-Domain Enhancement (DDE) and Priority-Guided Mamba Fusion (PGMF) , is proposed for UAV multispectral object detection. Firstly, considering the adoption of low-frequency component for global brightness enhancement and frequency spectra features for texture-details recovery, DDE module is designed with Cross-Scale Wavelet Mamba (CSWM) block and Fourier Details Recovery (FDR) block. Secondly, considering guiding the scanning of Mamba from high priority score tokens, which contain local target feature, a novel Priority-Guided Serialization is proposed with theoretical proof. Based on it, PGMF module is designed for multispectral feature fusion, which enhance local modeling and reduce interference information. Experiments on DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets demonstrate that DEPFusion achieves good performance with state-of-the-art methods.

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm-assisted communication networks has become an increasingly vital approach for remediating coverage limitations in infrastructure-deficient environments, with especially pressing applications in temporary scenarios, such as emergency rescue, military and security operations, and remote area coverage. However, complex geographic environments lead to unpredictable and highly dynamic wireless channel conditions, resulting in frequent interruptions of air-to-ground (A2G) links that severely constrain the reliability and quality of service in UAV swarm-assisted mobile communications. To improve the quality of UAV swarm-assisted communications in complex geographic environments, we propose an integrated communication and control co-design mechanism. Given the stringent energy constraints inherent in UAV swarms, our proposed mechanism is designed to optimize energy efficiency while maintaining an equilibrium between equitable communication rates for mobile ground users (GUs) and UAV energy expenditure. We formulate the joint resource allocation and 3D trajectory control problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework to enable real-time coordinated actions across the UAV swarm. To optimize the action policy of UAV swarms, we propose a novel multi-agent hybrid proximal policy optimization with action masking (MAHPPO-AM) algorithm, specifically designed to handle complex hybrid action spaces. The algorithm incorporates action masking to enforce hard constraints in high-dimensional action spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a fairness index of 0.99 while reducing energy consumption by up to 25% compared to baseline methods.

Search and rescue operations require unmanned aerial vehicles to both traverse unknown unstructured environments at high speed and track targets once detected. Achieving both capabilities under degraded sensing and without global localization remains an open challenge. Recent works on relative navigation have shown robust tracking by anchoring planning and control to a visible detected object, but cannot address navigation when no target is in the field of view. We present HUNT (High-speed UAV Navigation and Tracking), a real-time framework that unifies traversal, acquisition, and tracking within a single relative formulation. HUNT defines navigation objectives directly from onboard instantaneous observables such as attitude, altitude, and velocity, enabling reactive high-speed flight during search. Once a target is detected, the same perception-control pipeline transitions seamlessly to tracking. Outdoor experiments in dense forests, container compounds, and search-and-rescue operations with vehicles and mannequins demonstrate robust autonomy where global methods fail.

Abstract-- We present a cooperative aerial-ground search-and-rescue (SAR) framework that pairs two unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to achieve rapid victim localization and obstacle-aware navigation in unknown environments. In our framework, a goal-searching UA V executes real-time onboard victim detection and georeferencing to nominate goals for the ground platform, while a terrain-scouting UA V flies ahead of the UGV's planned route to provide mid-level traversability updates. The UGV fuses aerial cues with local sensing to perform time-efficient A* planning and continuous replanning as information arrives. Additionally, we present a hardware demonstration (using a GEM e6 golf cart as the UGV and two X500 UA Vs) to evaluate end-to-end SAR mission performance and include simulation ablations to assess the planning stack in isolation from detection. Empirical results demonstrate that explicit role separation across UA Vs, coupled with terrain scouting and guided planning, improves reach time and navigation safety in time-critical SAR missions. Search and rescue (SAR) operations stand to benefit from recent advances in autonomous aerial and ground robotics. Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs) enable rapid, large-area coverage due to their agility and mobility. The adoption of drones across civilian and military applications has highlighted advantages in speed and perspective.

Why is Israel still in southern Lebanon? A war to shape Lebanon's future At least one person has been killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon, according to the state-run National News Agency (NNA), as near-daily attacks by Israel continue despite a November ceasefire. The attack on Monday hit an excavator in the Shamsiyah area of Sohmor in the Bekaa Valley, killing its driver. Footage on social media, verified by Al Jazeera, showed emergency responders carrying the victim away on a stretcher. One drone targeted the town of Aitaroun on Monday afternoon while another bombed a house in Houmin al-Fauqa. No casualties were reported in those attacks.

Denmark has banned all civilian drone flights this week ahead of a European Union summit in Copenhagen, the country's transport minister said on Sunday. The ministry said the decision was made in order to simplify security work for the police, and they could not accept foreign drones creating uncertainty and disruption. Denmark is one of several European countries that have reported drone incidents in recent weeks, with unidentified drones sighted above Danish military sites as recently as Saturday. Defence ministers from 10 EU countries have agreed to create a drone wall in response to the sightings, and Nato says it has enhanced vigilance across the Baltic. In their statement announcing the ban, the transport ministry said police were on significantly increased alert ahead of this week's summit and that they needed to take care of Danes and our guests.

Men stand at the site of heavily damaged residential buildings following a Russian air attack on the outskirts of Kyiv on Sunday. KYIV - A massive Russian drone and missile attack against Ukraine lasting 12 hours into Sunday killed at least four people in Kyiv, including a 12-year-old girl, Ukrainian authorities said. Neighboring Poland scrambled jets to secure its airspace in the wake of the barrage, after NATO accused Moscow of being behind a series of violations of the defense alliance's airspace. Diplomatic efforts to stop the war have faltered, and Russia has vowed to press on with the offensive that it launched in February 2022. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.