2026 September - 78 articles
In sudden disaster scenarios, the rapid strategy-driven task-chain construction of rescue task chains in UAV-assisted heterogeneous emergency rescue systems is critical for an effective emergency response. Such systems usually involve multiple types...
Human detection in drone imagery is an important capability for applications that require information on the location and number of people, including search and rescue, urban pedestrian-flow analysis, crowd-density assessment, and public-space safety...
Recent autonomous exploration systems for unmanned platforms have improved motion efficiency, trajectory smoothness, and replanning continuity, but thorough coverage remains difficult in confined environments with short branches and partially resolve...
Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) systems are critical visual aids for supporting flight crews during the final approach phase by providing visual information on the aircraft’s vertical position relative to the desired glide path. Their...
Accurate identification of pavement distress in UAV imagery is crucial for road safety but is hindered by scale disparities, background noise, and isotropic extraction constraints that neglect highly directional distress textures. This paper proposes...
Reliable local three-dimensional (3D) wind estimates are important for fixed-wing UAV flight under wind disturbances, but low-cost platforms lack direct 3D flow sensing. We propose PIRNN-AKF, which combines a physics-informed gated recurrent unit (PI...
Most unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) research in cetacean monitoring has shown that drones can acquire high-resolution imagery, but the conditions under which such imagery becomes auditable ecological evidence remain less clearly defined. A structure...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for airflow measurements because they enable sensing where traditional instrumentation is difficult to deploy. However, most existing approaches rely on hovering or predefined trajectories, which...
Radio frequency (RF)-based drone identification enables passive low-altitude sensing, but its performance degrades under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and long-range propagation. Existing deep models mainly learn spectrogram amplitude textures and...
Natural-language interfaces now influence mission generation in UAV planning pipelines, where a feasible plan may still rest on unsupported completions, unauthorized relaxations, or consequence-changing repairs. We present EAMSR, an evidence-carrying...
Cooperative path planning in complex coastal mountainous environments near the shore is a knowledge-intensive engineering task crucial for demanding multi-UAV operations such as disaster rescue, environmental monitoring, and coastal emergency respons...
Aquatic vegetation is critical for maintaining water quality, dissolved oxygen levels, and suitable habitats for crabs in aquaculture ponds. However, traditional manual surveys for monitoring aquatic plant growth and identifying invasive weeds are in...
With the widespread application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across various domains, the reliability and lifespan prediction of their core power units—the engines—has become a critical research focus. This study addresses the degrad...
Large unmanned cargo airships may support heavy-lift logistics in regions without runway infrastructure, but payload release produces a rapid buoyancy surplus and changes the vehicle mass properties. This study develops a simulation framework couplin...
Pan–tilt–zoom (PTZ) cameras are central to visual counter-UAV surveillance: they steer the optical axis to keep a small, agile target centered and adequately resolved, which tightly couples perception with camera control in a closed loop....
Low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need environmental evidence for perception and navigation, yet dedicated onboard sensing and prior maps may be unavailable. Existing cellular infrastructure offers persistent signals of opportunity, but a...
Low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles operating in mountainous environments require continuous spatial reference paths that satisfy terrain-clearance, altitude, pitch, and curvature constraints. Conventional sampling-based planners can efficiently di...
Computing services can be extended to infrastructure-limited areas through unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC). However, service provision continues to be challenging when spatially clustered ground users (GUs) are init...
Traditional UAVs often suffer severe structural damage during high-speed collisions. Recent research has explored sensing, control, and design strategies to enhance collision resilience. This work presents fully passive, soft continuum-lattice arms t...
Urban low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) planning is inherently spatiotemporal because route feasibility and cost depend on segment arrival times. Search-stage surrogates may therefore favor paths that fail execution-level checks as moving ob...
Terahertz (THz) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a pivotal paradigm for enabling high-rate, ultra-reliable air-to-ground (A2G) connectivity in sixth-generation (6G) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. From a physical propagation and...
This paper addresses low-altitude navigation of multiple UAVs through a shared two-dimensional environment with narrow passages, blocked cells, and predicted moving obstacles while preserving an assigned task order. The planner receives ordered task...
The journal retracts the article titled “A Multimodal Data Fusion Algorithm for Urban Low-Altitude UAV Perception” [...]
As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions expand from aerial inspection and environmental sensing to physical interaction and autonomous manipulation, rotary-wing UAVs equipped with flexible manipulators offer a promising platform for contact-rich op...
The nonlinear nature of quadrotor dynamics requires high-fidelity reconstruction of vehicle position and attitude. In order to mitigate singularities associated with global three-parameter representations—such as Euler angles—the quadroto...
Image disturbances caused by platform ego-motion are coupled with true target motion under the dynamic viewpoints of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), resulting in trajectory-prediction drift, association mismatches, and persistent contamination of id...
To address the challenge of dynamic target allocation in multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial games, this paper proposes a hierarchical solution method that combines matrix game dimensionality reduction with the Eigen-Crossover Differential Evo...
Satellite downlinks reliably connect remote unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, but broad coverage exposes information-bearing signals to unauthorized receivers. This paper proposes a multi-beam cooperative time-varying directional modulation (TVDM...
This article addresses real-time local conflict resolution for a self-planning UAV operating in a three-dimensional dynamic environment with surrounding UAVs. To this end, we develop an SBA–DWA hybrid planning framework in which an improved sti...
In disaster response and other infrastructure-limited settings, UAV-mounted access points can rapidly restore service availability for mobile ground users as demand and fleet availability evolve. Existing single-slot coverage formulations, however, c...
In the complex problem of air-to-ground mission planning, multi-UAV systems face significant challenges such as system complexity and heterogeneity, insufficient target observability, and difficulties in collaborating information sharing. To address...
This study proposes Uncertainty-Aware Staged Trust-Adaptive Residual Physics-Informed Machine Learning (U-STAR-PIML), a recursive one-step dynamics model for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, evaluated with the JSBSim C172x as a surrogate simulati...
Reliable localization without GPS is a prerequisite for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating inside warehouses, where a lightweight monocular camera paired with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and onboard computer are the minimal s...
This study addresses dynamic multi-UAV task allocation under online task release, static obstacles, deadlines, limited energy, and vehicle failures. We propose an event-triggered path-based bid assignment method (ET-PBBA). At each mission event, an A...
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms increasingly operate in GNSS-denied environments, where cooperative localization provides relative positioning by fusing onboard odometry with inter-agent range measurements, for which ultra-wideband (UWB) two-way...
Reliable short-term position forecasting may provide anticipatory state information for collision-risk assessment, communication management, and prediction-assisted control in Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); these do...
To address the coexistence of random measurement delays and intermittent data loss in multi-UAV cooperative navigation under weak communication scenarios, an adaptive cooperative localization method based on online diagnosis is proposed. A timestamp-...
Autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) operating in narrow and restricted waterways must follow a planned path while avoiding nearby static hazards and maintaining safe clearance from boundaries. This paper presents a LiDAR-based deep reinforcement learni...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become essential platforms for remote sensing in challenging environments such as high-dynamic-range (HDR) scenes and low-texture areas. However, conventional frame-based visual–inertial simultaneous localiz...
While there are evident advantages to deploying UAVs for structural inspection applications within reinforced-concrete structures where human access may be hazardous or restricted, UAV deployment is still inhibited within structures due to a lack of...
Variable-rate pesticide spraying and fertilizer application require coordinated operation of heterogeneous agricultural machines, particularly in irregular fields where task demands, vehicle mobility, payload capacity, energy consumption, and resuppl...
The cooperative tracking of multiple ground targets by multiple UAVs remains challenging under partial observability, limited communication, and obstacle constraints, owing to complex target association, difficult task handover, strong coupling among...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as unmanned aerial pesticide application systems (UAPASs), are increasingly used for crop protection applications because of their operational efficiency and precision. However, UAV spraying is typica...
Fully actuated multirotor UAVs (FA-mUAVs) have attracted attention for aerial physical interaction because they generate translational forces without tilting the vehicle, thereby supporting interaction precision and payload-transportation stability....
The U.S. Geological Survey collects remote sensing data to support national scientific assessments of natural resources, hazards, and landscape change. Spectrometers and spectroradiometers are essential for gathering point-based spectral measurements...
RF-based UAV recognition is important for low-altitude security because it enables passive sensing from electromagnetic emissions without requiring target visibility or illumination. Compared with active sensing, passive RF sensing offers a wider obs...
This study presents the design and flight demonstration of an aerobatic RC aircraft equipped with a morphing-wing using a compliant mechanism-based flexible structure. Unlike conventional hinged control surfaces, the proposed morphing wing provides a...
To address time-varying communication topology, actuator response delay, and limited inter-UAV communication resources in the multi-UAV approach of a maneuvering target, this paper proposes a cooperative rendezvous/tracking control law combining a pr...
Deployable autonomy remains a key challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in open-ended missions. Large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants, which can process visual and other sensory inputs, have introduced new capab...
Existing RF-based UAV detection methods achieve high accuracy in identifying UAV presence and model type, yet they largely characterize UAVs through static signal attributes, offering limited insight into what an identified UAV is actually doing. Thi...
of 2
