Rubik, a Ukrainian military drone pilot, had tracked the every move of one particular Russian soldier for weeks, with the promise of earning at least six points for killing him. In a war increasingly dominated by drones, Ukraine's military has launched a new score-based purchasing system for units to replenish their stocks, and Rubik -- his military nickname -- was looking to help his brigade cash in. On the "Brave1" platform launched by Ukraine's digital transformation ministry, new drones for the troops fighting Russia's invasion go for between two and a few dozen points.

Ukraine has pounded Russia's refineries with deep strikes in the past week, worsening its petrol shortages and causing Moscow to extend a ban on exports of petroleum products. Russia responded with a deadly attack on Kyiv and a barrage of statements portraying Moscow's "special military operation" as a success and Ukraine as teetering on the edge of surrender. Russian President Vladimir Putin used his appearance at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit to suggest Russian energy exports to China and India were booming, but reports suggested that Moscow is heavily discounting its crude to hold onto clients. Ukraine's European and regional allies are meeting on Thursday to try to finalise security guarantees in case a ceasefire should come about, while calling on US President Donald Trump to use sanctions to press Putin into direct negotiations with Kyiv. Russia redeployed marines and paratroopers – elite units – from Ukraine's northern Sumy region to the eastern region of Donetsk on September 1, suggesting it may be preparing a renewed push for the city of Pokrovsk, which Ukraine has identified as a Russian key tactical objective in the east since August 2024.

Russian forces launched 408 attacks on Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, killing a 62-year-old man in the Polohy district, Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said. A man was killed in a Russian attack on the Khmelnytskyi region in western Ukraine, the region's governor, Serhii Tiurin, said. Russian attacks injured at least 35 people across Ukraine on Wednesday, including 14 people in the Donetsk area and 14 people in the Kherson region, local officials said, according to the Kyiv Independent news outlet. Russia's Ministry of Defence said that its forces shot down 170 Ukrainian drones, five guided aerial bombs and two rockets in a 24-hour period, according to Russia's state-run TASS news agency. Ukraine's air force said it shot down 430 Russian drones and 21 missiles, the Kyiv Independent reported.

The field of embodied AI (EAI) is rapidly advancing. Unlike virtual AI, EAI systems can exist in, learn from, reason about, and act in the physical world. With recent advances in AI models and hardware, EAI systems are becoming increasingly capable across wider operational domains. While EAI systems can offer many benefits, they also pose significant risks, including physical harm from malicious use, mass surveillance, as well as economic and societal disruption. These risks require urgent attention from policymakers, as existing policies governing industrial robots and autonomous vehicles are insufficient to address the full range of concerns EAI systems present. To help address this issue, this paper makes three contributions. First, we provide a taxonomy of the physical, informational, economic, and social risks EAI systems pose. Second, we analyze policies in the US, EU, and UK to assess how existing frameworks address these risks and to identify critical gaps. We conclude by offering policy recommendations for the safe and beneficial deployment of EAI systems, such as mandatory testing and certification schemes, clarified liability frameworks, and strategies to manage EAI's potentially transformative economic and societal impacts.

--In this letter, we present a distributed algorithm for flocking in complex environments that operates at constant altitude, without explicit communication, no a priori information about the environment, and by using only on-board sensing and computation capabilities. We provide sufficient conditions to guarantee that each robot reaches its goal region in a finite time, avoiding collisions with obstacles and other robots without exceeding a desired maximum distance from a predefined set of neighbors (flocking or proximity constraint). The proposed approach allows to operate in crowded scenarios and to deal with tracking errors and on-board sensing errors, without violating safety and proximity constraints. The algorithm was verified through simulations with varying number of UA Vs and also through numerous real-world experiments in a dense forest involving up to four UA Vs. Index T erms--Multi-robot systems, Distributed control, Lloyd-based algorithms. Over the past few decades, numerous applications have emerged for multi-robot systems, exhibiting their undisputed benefits in diverse fields.

Israeli forces reportedly used quadcopter drones to drop incendiary bombs on ambulances parked outside a clinic in Gaza City, causing a fire. The use of incendiary weapons is prohibited in civilian-populated areas under international humanitarian law.

An F/A-18F Super Hornet and an F-35C Lightning II arrive at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, Feb. 7, 2023, in preparation for their flyover of Super Bowl LVII at State Farm Stadium in Glendale on Feb. 12. EXCLUSIVE: Eight fighter jets will conduct a flyover when Polish President Karol Nawrocki arrives at the White House Wednesday morning, Fox News Digital has learned. President Donald Trump's meeting with Nawrocki, whom Trump backed in the Polish elections earlier in 2025, comes amid ongoing negotiations between Poland's neighboring Russia and Ukraine to end the conflict between the two countries. "President Trump is looking forward to welcoming President Nawrocki to the White House, who recently won a historic election in Poland," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a Tuesday statement to Fox News Digital. The "spectacular flyover will honor the memory of a brave Polish fighter pilot whose life was tragically taken too soon and capture the special relationship between our two countries." Four F-16 fighter jets are slated to perform a missing man formation Wednesday to honor a Polish Army F-16 pilot who died in an August crash during a rehearsal for an airshow in Radom, Poland.

China also showed off its GJ-11 stealth attack drone, dubbed the "loyal wingman", which can fly alongside a manned fighter jet and aid it in its attacks. Besides an array of conventional aerial drones, there were also "robotic wolves". Experts say these could be used for a variety of tasks from reconnaissance and sweeping for mines, to hunting down enemy soldiers. The drone display shows a clear direction that China wants to take with its military strategy, where it "not only wants to augment, but replace traditional structures". It has clearly taken lessons from the Ukraine war, where one can "just throw drones at the enemy" to wear down their defences, Dr Raska notes.

Russian drone attacks and shelling killed three people and injured five others in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on Telegram. Two people were killed in Russian attacks on the Polohivskyi district, as Russian forces launched 578 attacks on 18 settlements in Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, Governor Ivan Fedorov said. Separate Russian attacks also killed one person in Kherson, one person in the Kyiv region and one person in Donetsk, local officials reported, according to the Kyiv Independent news outlet. A Ukrainian drone injured three people in the village of Proletarsky, in Russia's Belgorod region, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Russian forces seized the Ukrainian settlement of Fedorivka in the Donetsk region, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing the Russian Ministry of Defence.

Intelligent control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) swarms has emerged as a critical research focus, and it typically requires the swarm to navigate effectively while avoiding obstacles and achieving continuous coverage over multiple mission targets. Although traditional Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approaches offer dynamic adaptability, they are hindered by the semantic gap in numerical communication and the rigidity of homogeneous role structures, resulting in poor generalization and limited task scalability. Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM)-based control frameworks demonstrate strong semantic reasoning capabilities by leveraging extensive prior knowledge. However, due to the lack of online learning and over-reliance on static priors, these works often struggle with effective exploration, leading to reduced individual potential and overall system performance. To address these limitations, we propose a Role-Adaptive LLM-Driven Yoked navigation algorithm RALLY. Specifically, we first develop an LLM-driven semantic decision framework that uses structured natural language for efficient semantic communication and collaborative reasoning. Afterward, we introduce a dynamic role-heterogeneity mechanism for adaptive role switching and personalized decision-making. Furthermore, we propose a Role-value Mixing Network (RMIX)-based assignment strategy that integrates LLM offline priors with MARL online policies to enable semi-offline training of role selection strategies. Experiments in the Multi-Agent Particle Environment (MPE) environment and a Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) platform demonstrate that RALLY outperforms conventional approaches in terms of task coverage, convergence speed, and generalization, highlighting its strong potential for collaborative navigation in agentic multi-UAV systems.