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This robot dog was made to save soldiers' lives as US races into new era of autonomous warfare

FOX News

Drones, counter-drone weapons and a robot dog dominated the AUSA show floor as the Army races to incorporate autonomous systems and lessons from Ukraine.


Under the Gun: Understanding America's Defense Spending Paradox

TIME - Tech

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G7 leaders to boost Ukraine air defences, tighten sanctions on Russia

Al Jazeera

Could Israel sabotage the deal? Leaders of the G7 have pledged at a summit in France to strengthen Ukraine's air defences and increase pressure on Moscow's war economy, including by tightening sanctions on the Russian oil and gas sectors. "We, the Leaders of the G7, stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity," a statement released on Wednesday said. They added that the bloc, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, was "ready to consider extending to Ukraine the benefit of licenses to allow for an increase in Ukraine's military production". President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who joined the summit on Tuesday and also held bilateral talks with US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has been pressing allies for more than a year to allow Ukraine to produce its own interceptors because of a shortage of US anti-ballistic systems and interceptors.


Russia's Putin vows retaliation after accusing Ukraine of hitting student dormitory

BBC News

Russia's Putin vows retaliation after accusing Ukraine of hitting student dormitory Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised retaliation after accusing Ukraine of carrying out a deadly attack on a student dormitory in an occupied part of eastern Ukraine. Six people were killed and 39 injured in the overnight strike in the town of Starobilsk, Luhansk region, Putin said. Another 15 people were missing. Ukraine's military said it hit the headquarters of Russia's elite Rubicon drone military unit in Starobilsk. It did not say whether it was the same building as the one identified by Russia.


From AI to interceptors, Ukraine is trying to drone-proof its skies

BBC News

This week, with air raid warnings wailing in the distance, Kyiv held a funeral for two sisters. They had already lost their father who had been fighting on the front line. Their grieving mother is now the family's sole survivor. This is the human cost of the largest sustained Russian aerial assault so far - with 1,500 drones and 56 missiles fired at Ukraine within 48 hours. But the loss of life could have been even higher.


Many-vs-Many Missile Guidance via Virtual Targets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a novel approach to many-vs-many missile guidance using virtual targets (VTs) generated by a Normalizing Flows-based trajectory predictor. Rather than assigning n interceptors directly to m physical targets through conventional weapon target assignment algorithms, we propose a centralized strategy that constructs n VT trajectories representing probabilistic predictions of maneuvering target behavior. Each interceptor is guided toward its assigned VT using Zero-Effort-Miss guidance during midcourse flight, transitioning to Proportional Navigation guidance for terminal interception. This approach treats many-vs-many engagements as many-vs-distribution scenarios, exploiting numerical superiority (n > m) by distributing interceptors across diverse trajectory hypotheses rather than pursuing identical deterministic predictions. Monte Carlo simulations across various target-interceptor configurations (1-6 targets, 1-8 interceptors) demonstrate that the VT method matches or exceeds baseline straight-line prediction performance by 0-4.1% when n = m, with improvements increasing to 5.8-14.4% when n > m. The results confirm that probabilistic VTs enable effective exploitation of numerical superiority, significantly increasing interception probability in many-vs-many scenarios.


On Robustness of Consensus over Pseudo-Undirected Path Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Consensus over networked agents is typically studied using undirected or directed communication graphs. Undirected graphs enforce symmetry in information exchange, leading to convergence to the average of initial states, while directed graphs permit asymmetry but make consensus dependent on root nodes and their influence. Both paradigms impose inherent restrictions on achievable consensus values and network robustness. This paper introduces a theoretical framework for achieving consensus over a class of network topologies, termed pseudo-undirected graphs, which retains bidirectional connectivity between node pairs but allows the corresponding edge weights to differ, including the possibility of negative values under bounded conditions. The resulting Laplacian is generally non-symmetric, yet it guarantees consensus under connectivity assumptions, to expand the solution space, which enables the system to achieve a stable consensus value that can lie outside the convex hull of the initial state set. We derive admissibility bounds for negative weights for a pseudo-undirected path graph, and show an application in the simultaneous interception of a moving target.


Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. Can Anyone Stop Him?

WIRED

Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. With SpaceX and Starlink, Elon Musk controls more than half the world's rocket launches and thousands of internet satellites. Just off the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel's rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume glowing bright, about 12 miles due north up the Banana River. The "Iron Man" riff starts to blast. When we hear the thud of the sonic boom, most everyone lets out some kind of hoot. This is SpaceX's 95th launch of the year, one nearly every other day. That's more liftoffs than the rest of the world gets into space, combined. For our politics issue, WIRED examines the state of tech's influence on governmental power--and the people who will change everything in the future. On this particular night, this Falcon 9 took 28 Starlink internet satellites to orbit. Starlink, of course, is another Musk space venture that dominates its competitors.


Nonlinear Cooperative Salvo Guidance with Seeker-Limited Interceptors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--This paper presents a cooperative guidance strategy for the simultaneous interception of a constant-velocity, non-maneuvering target, addressing the realistic scenario where only a subset of interceptors are equipped with onboard seekers. T o overcome the resulting heterogeneity in target observability, a fixed-time distributed observer is employed, enabling seeker-less interceptors to estimate the target state using information from seeker-equipped agents and local neighbors over a directed communication topology. Departing from conventional strategies that approximate time-to-go via linearization or small-angle assumptions, the proposed approach leverages deviated pursuit guidance where the time-to-go expression is exact for such a target. Moreover, a higher-order sliding mode consensus protocol is utilized to establish time-to-go consensus within a finite time. The effectiveness of the proposed guidance and estimation architecture is demonstrated through simulations.


Will Patriots promised by Trump boost Ukraine's defence against Russia?

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Heavy thuds that resemble fast hip-hop beats fill the night air when MIM-104 Patriots, air defence systems made in the United States, get to work. Each Patriot surface-to-air launcher can shoot up to 32 missiles within seconds – and hit Russian ballistic missiles closing in on their targets. The missiles fly at supersonic speeds, and the collision triggers a bright, split-second blast followed by a thunderous shock-wave. "That's the kind of explosion that makes me feel safe," Ihor Lysenko, a 17-year-old in the capital Kyiv told Al Jazeera. He believes that the "technology is pretty reliable".