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Drones, Volume 9, Issue 11

2025 November - 83 articles

Cover Story: Ensuring the safety of high-altitude solar drones is paramount, but traditional manual analysis is slow and struggles with the complexity of flight control–energy coupling. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation, generic reasoning is unreliable for such specialized, safety-critical tasks. K-EGoT is a framework that aligns an LLM’s reasoning with a verifiable, expert knowledge base. We introduce a “Safety Rationale”, an auditable link between the AI’s logic and curated safety principles. We then use a novel “thought process alignment” strategy to train the model on the quality of its reasoning, not just the final output. On a high-fidelity drone dataset, our K-EGoT model outperformed baselines, delivering a reliable and auditable solution for automated safety modeling. View this paper
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Articles (83)

  • Article
  • Open Access
648 Views
27 Pages

20 November 2025

High-reliability localization is essential for underground mining autonomous vehicle, as inaccurate positioning triggers collision risks and limits deployment in safety-critical environments. Underground mining localization faces unique challenges: k...

  • Article
  • Open Access
783 Views
20 Pages

19 November 2025

During the operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the cognitive state of operators is prone to decline, posing a risk to task performance. However, many existing cognitive state assessment methods rely directly on raw electroencephalography (E...

  • Article
  • Open Access
827 Views
18 Pages

18 November 2025

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly multirotor drones, require rigorous structural monitoring to ensure safe and reliable operation. Visual inspections are often inefficient and may miss early signs of damage. Even when faults are detected...

  • Article
  • Open Access
746 Views
42 Pages

18 November 2025

With the rise of 6G communication technology, the issue of communication coverage in mountainous areas has become increasingly prominent. These regions are characterized by complex terrain, sparse user distribution, and small-scale clustering, making...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,188 Views
37 Pages

18 November 2025

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in critical infrastructure, defense, and civilian applications, and face new cybersecurity threats. In this work, we present a novel hybrid deep learning architecture that combines Mamba, Ko...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
700 Views
22 Pages

Global and Local Context-Aware Detection for Infrared Small UAV Targets

  • Liang Zhao,
  • Yan Zhang,
  • Yongchang Li and
  • Han Zhong

18 November 2025

The widespread adoption of small unmanned aerial vehicles poses increasing challenges to public safety. Compared with visible-light sensors, infrared imaging offers excellent nighttime observation capabilities and strong robustness against interferen...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,261 Views
18 Pages

18 November 2025

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is critical for developing efficient and robust perception models for UAV and drone-based applications, where real-time small object detection and computational constraints are major challenges. Existing NAS methods,...

  • Article
  • Open Access
848 Views
18 Pages

18 November 2025

Flight safety is central to the certification process and relies on assessment methods that provide evidence acceptable to regulators. For drones operating as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) platforms, this requires an accurate representation of the comp...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,002 Views
19 Pages

17 November 2025

The employment of linear features to enhance the positioning precision and robustness of point-based VIO (visual-inertial odometry) has attracted mounting attention, especially for UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) applications where reliable 6-DoF pose...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,474 Views
26 Pages

17 November 2025

Unmanned vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft are increasingly deployed for logistics, surveillance, and urban air mobility (UAM) applications. However, the limitations of full-electric (FE) and internal combustion engine (ICE) systems in mee...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,445 Views
26 Pages

UAV Multisensor Observation of Floating Plastic Debris: Experimental Results from Lake Calore

  • Nicola Angelo Famiglietti,
  • Anna Verlanti,
  • Ludovica Di Renzo,
  • Ferdinando Nunziata,
  • Antonino Memmolo,
  • Robert Migliazza,
  • Andrea Buono,
  • Maurizio Migliaccio and
  • Annamaria Vicari

17 November 2025

This study addresses the observation of floating plastic debris in freshwater environments using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) multi-sensor strategy. An experimental campaign is described where an heterogeneous plastic assemblage, namely a plastic...

  • Article
  • Open Access
768 Views
28 Pages

Dynamic Estimation of Formation Wake Flow Fields Based on On-Board Sensing

  • Tianhui Guo,
  • Tielin Ma,
  • Haiqiao Liu,
  • Jingcheng Fu,
  • Bingchen Cheng and
  • Lulu Tao

17 November 2025

Close formation flight is a practical strategy for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. Maintaining UAVs at aerodynamically optimal positions is essential for efficient formation flight. However, aerodynamic optimization methods based on...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
3,743 Views
31 Pages

A 3D-Printed, Open-Source, Low-Cost Drone Platform for Mechatronics and STEM Education in an Academic Context

  • Avraam Chatzopoulos,
  • Antreas Kantaros,
  • Paraskevi Zacharia,
  • Theodore Ganetsos and
  • Michail Papoutsidakis

17 November 2025

This study presents the design and implementation of a low-cost, open-source, 3D-printed drone platform for university-level STEM education in mechatronics, robotics, control theory, and artificial intelligence. The platform addresses key limitations...

  • Article
  • Open Access
856 Views
24 Pages

17 November 2025

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a transformative paradigm that delivers ubiquitous communication and computing services for next-generation wireless networks. By incorporating a reconfigurable pinching anten...

  • Article
  • Open Access
442 Views
25 Pages

15 November 2025

This work is devoted a particular trajectory tracking problem of underactuated unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) with model reduced to five degrees of freedom (DOF). Such a model is quite widespread in the literature and used to describe the dynami...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
861 Views
20 Pages

14 November 2025

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an increasingly vital role in maritime search and rescue (SAR) because they can be deployed quickly, cover large ocean areas, and operate without exposing human crews to risk. Compared with single platforms, multi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,106 Views
25 Pages

14 November 2025

Autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in unknown complex environments requires safe, fast and efficient path planning algorithms. Currently, the two-stage framework of “front-end search and back-end optimization” is wid...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,145 Views
27 Pages

13 November 2025

Efficient and reliable inventory management remains a challenge in modern warehouses, where manual counting is time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. We present an autonomous aerial–ground system for warehouse inventory data capture that oper...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,445 Views
19 Pages

Hybrid CFD-Deep Learning Approach for Urban Wind Flow Predictions and Risk-Aware UAV Path Planning

  • Gonzalo Veiga-Piñeiro,
  • Enrique Aldao-Pensado and
  • Elena Martín-Ortega

12 November 2025

We present a CFD-driven surrogate modeling framework that integrates a Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE) with a Deep Neural Network (DNN) for the rapid prediction of urban wind environments and their subsequent use in UAV trajectory planning. A Reynold...

  • Review
  • Open Access
1,644 Views
26 Pages

Review of Research on Cooperative Path Planning Algorithms for AUV Clusters

  • Jianhao Wu,
  • Chang Liu,
  • Vladimir Filaretov,
  • Dmitry Yukhimets,
  • Rongjie Cai,
  • Ao Zheng and
  • Alexander Zuev

12 November 2025

Cooperative path planning is recognized as a critical technology for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) clusters to execute complex marine operations. Through multi-AUV cooperative decision-making, perception limitations of individual robots can be...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,218 Views
47 Pages

12 November 2025

This work presents the structural analysis and validation of a sub-250 g FPV drone chassis, emphasizing both theoretical rigor and practical applicability. The novelty of this contribution lies in four complementary aspects. First, the structural phi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,104 Views
26 Pages

12 November 2025

Heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms are becoming critical components of next-generation non-terrestrial networks, enabling tasks such as communication relay, spectrum monitoring, cooperative sensing, and navigation. Yet, their heteroge...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,017 Views
25 Pages

UAV-Mounted Base Station Coverage and Trajectory Optimization Using LSTM-A2C with Attention

  • Yonatan M. Worku,
  • Christos Christodoulou and
  • Michael Devetsikiotis

12 November 2025

In disaster relief operations, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with base stations (UAV-BS) are vital for re-establishing communication networks where conventional infrastructure has been compromised. Optimizing their trajectories and coverag...

  • Article
  • Open Access
643 Views
21 Pages

Yield Estimation of Longline Aquaculture by the Shadows of Buoys Based on UAV Orthophoto Image

  • Dongxu Yang,
  • Shengmao Zhang,
  • Xirui Xu,
  • Qi Wu,
  • Wei Fan,
  • Leilei Zhang,
  • Siyao Wu and
  • Fei Wang

12 November 2025

Yield prediction in longline aquaculture is essential for evaluating environmental impacts, facilitating risk assessment, and promoting sustainable management in fisheries. However, since cultured organisms in longline aquaculture are submerged and c...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,044 Views
18 Pages

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Based Methane Quantification Method for Oil and Gas Sites

  • Degang Xu,
  • Chen Wang,
  • Tao Gu,
  • Zi Long,
  • Hui Luan,
  • Zhihe Tang,
  • Xuan Wang and
  • Yinfei Liu

11 November 2025

This study presents a novel top-down approach to quantify diffuse methane (CH4) emissions at oil and gas well sites. It uses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a scanning–sampling tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS)...

  • Review
  • Open Access
3 Citations
2,907 Views
49 Pages

11 November 2025

Underwater drones such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are revolutionizing underwater operations and are essential for advanced marine applications like environmental monitoring, deep-sea exploration, an...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,302 Views
25 Pages

Collaborative Vehicle-Mounted Multi-UAV Routing and Scheduling Optimization for Remote Sensing Observations

  • Bing Du,
  • Anqi Tang,
  • Huping Ye,
  • Huanyin Yue,
  • Chenchen Xu,
  • Lina Hao,
  • Hongbo He and
  • Xiaohan Liao

11 November 2025

Vehicle-mounted multi-UAV (VM-UAV) systems offer enhanced flexibility and rapid deployment for large-scale remote sensing tasks such as disaster response and land surveys. However, maximizing their operational efficiency remains challenging, as it re...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
1,403 Views
33 Pages

10 November 2025

Urban logistics in smart cities are increasingly challenged by congestion, sustainability pressures, and the growing demand for resilient delivery systems. To address these challenges, this study introduces the Multi-Visit Time-Dependent Truck–...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,080 Views
16 Pages

Using Drone Footage to Analyze the Effect of Diver Presence on Juvenile Manta Ray Behavior

  • Miguel de Jesús Gómez-García,
  • Amanda L. O’Brien and
  • Jessica H. Pate

10 November 2025

Manta ray tourism has become a multi-million-dollar industry proposed as a conservation tool in recent decades; however, its impacts remain unclear. We use drones and Markov models to quantify the effects of diver presence on a juvenile population of...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
3,464 Views
30 Pages

LLM-LCSA: LLM for Collaborative Control and Decision Optimization in UAV Cluster Security

  • Hua Song,
  • Zheng Yang,
  • Haitao Du,
  • Yuting Zhang,
  • Jie Zeng and
  • Xinxin He

9 November 2025

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, multimachine collaborative operations have become the core model for increasing mission effectiveness. However, large-scale UAV clusters face challenges such as dynamic security threat...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,319 Views
31 Pages

9 November 2025

As the application of high-altitude solar drones expands, ensuring their safety is paramount. Traditional safety modeling, which relies on manual expert analysis, struggles to keep pace with rapid development cycles. While Large Language Models (LLMs...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,011 Views
20 Pages

Cross-Layer Optimized OLSR Protocol for FANETs in Interference-Intensive Environments

  • Jinyue Liu,
  • Peng Gong,
  • Haowei Yang,
  • Siqi Li and
  • Xiang Gao

8 November 2025

The conventional OLSR protocol faces substantial challenges in highly dynamic and interference-intensive UAV environments, including high mobility, frequent topology changes, and insufficient adaptability to electromagnetic interference. This paper p...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,131 Views
34 Pages

8 November 2025

In this paper, we propose a cooperative security method for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) based on the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) algorithm to address the scenario of unauthorized rog...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,170 Views
25 Pages

Assessment of GNSS Performance and Error Bounding for SAIL III UAS Operations

  • L. M. González-deSantos,
  • J. Bruzual,
  • Damián Socías,
  • E. Lacarra,
  • M. Santos,
  • R. González,
  • E. Gil,
  • G. Moreno López,
  • Stefan Hristozov and
  • S. R. Bellingham
  • + 4 authors

7 November 2025

The growing use of UASs in complex operations, including Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations and missions over populated areas, has increased the need for robust navigation integrity. Within this framework, a GNSS is often used as the prim...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,671 Views
19 Pages

From Drone-Based 3D Model to a Web-Based VR Solution Supporting Cultural Heritage Accessibility

  • Francesca Savini,
  • Alessio Cordisco,
  • Giovanni Fabbrocino,
  • Marco Giallonardo,
  • Ilaria Trizio and
  • Adriana Marra

7 November 2025

The safeguarding and enhancement of historic buildings and artifacts in Italy’s inner areas are essential to protect their outstanding cultural value. However, these territories often face complex orographic and environmental conditions that ma...

  • Article
  • Open Access
831 Views
19 Pages

7 November 2025

In this paper, we present a Unified Framework for cross-domain Space drone Pose Estimation (UF-SPE), addressing the simulation-to-reality gap that limits the deployment of deep learning models in real space missions. The proposed UF-SPE framework int...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
657 Views
22 Pages

A Two-Stage Segment-Then-Classify Strategy for Accurate Ginkgo Tree Identification from UAV Imagery

  • Mengyuan Chen,
  • Wenwen Kong,
  • Yongqi Sun,
  • Jie Jiao,
  • Yunpeng Zhao and
  • Fei Liu

7 November 2025

Ginkgo biloba L. plays an important role in biodiversity conservation. Accurate identification of Ginkgo in forest environments remains challenging due to its visual similarity to other broad-leaved species during the green-leaf period and to species...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
2,050 Views
31 Pages

7 November 2025

The paradigm of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communications assisted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is poised to revolutionize the future of sixth-generation (6G) intelligent transportation systems, as outlined by the international mobi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
677 Views
17 Pages

7 November 2025

Ice accretion alters the airfoil profile of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), degrading the aerodynamic performance and potentially triggering safety incidents. The computation of droplet impingement characteristics is the primary task for ice accre...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,178 Views
31 Pages

Multi-UAV Dynamic Target Search Based on Multi-Potential-Field Fusion Reward Shaping MAPPO

  • Xiaotong Hong,
  • Zhengjie Wang,
  • Yue Wang,
  • Chao Xue and
  • Yang Gao

7 November 2025

In the cooperative search for dynamic targets by multiple UAVs, target uncertainty and system complexity pose significant challenges to cooperative decision-making. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) technology can be used for cooperative poli...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,979 Views
39 Pages

A Transformer-Based Self-Organizing UAV Swarm for Assisting an Emergency Communications System

  • Isaac López-Villegas,
  • Kevin Javier Medina-Gómez,
  • Javier Izquierdo-Reyes,
  • Daniel Colin-García,
  • Hugo Gustavo González-Hernández and
  • Rogelio Bustamante-Bello

7 November 2025

Natural disasters often compromise telecommunications infrastructure, leading to unstable services or complete communication blackouts that hinder rescue operations and exacerbate victims’ distress. Rapidly deployable alternatives are, therefor...

  • Article
  • Open Access
655 Views
21 Pages

6 November 2025

Drones are increasingly being used in maritime engineering for ship maintenance, emergency rescue, and safety monitoring tasks. In these tasks, action recognition is important for human–drone interaction and for detecting abnormal situations su...

  • Article
  • Open Access
935 Views
41 Pages

6 November 2025

Existing research has made significant strides in UAV formation control, particularly in active localization and certain passive methods. However, these approaches face substantial limitations in electromagnetically silent environments, often relying...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,360 Views
40 Pages

6 November 2025

This paper addresses the structural adaptability and dynamic stability challenges faced by unmanned aerial underwater vehicle (UAUV) during the transition between air and water. To overcome these issues, this paper innovatively proposes a UAUV that u...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,461 Views
24 Pages

Long-Duration Inspection of GNSS-Denied Environments with a Tethered UAV-UGV Marsupial System

  • Simón Martínez-Rozas,
  • David Alejo,
  • José Javier Carpio,
  • Fernando Caballero and
  • Luis Merino

5 November 2025

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become essential tools in inspection and emergency response operations due to their high maneuverability and ability to access hard-to-reach areas. However, their limited battery life significantly restricts their...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,204 Views
15 Pages

Depth-Based Safe Landing for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environment

  • Miguel Angel Cerda,
  • Jonathan Flores,
  • Sergio Salazar,
  • Iván González-Hernández and
  • Rogelio Lozano

5 November 2025

This paper presents a safe landing methodology for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) when the GPS-based navigation system fails or is denied or unavailable. The approach relies on the estimation of a flat landing area when landing is required in an unk...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,649 Views
22 Pages

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Object-Based Crop Classification Using Multispectral Imagery

  • Madjebi Collela Be,
  • Antsa Sarobidy Randrianantenaina,
  • James E. Kanneh,
  • Yingchun Han,
  • Yaping Lei,
  • Xiaoyu Zhi,
  • Shiwu Xiong,
  • Yahui Jiao,
  • Shilong Shang and
  • Yabing Li
  • + 3 authors

5 November 2025

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer enhanced spatial and temporal resolution for agricultural remote sensing, surpassing traditional satellite-based methods. Given the abundance of evolving machine-learning methods for crop recognition, this study...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
1,027 Views
25 Pages

Task Planning and Optimization for Multi-Region Multi-UAV Cooperative Inspection

  • Yangyilei Xiong,
  • Haoyu Tian,
  • Jianing Tang,
  • Jie Jin and
  • Xiaoning Shen

4 November 2025

To improve the efficiency of multi-region multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection, this paper proposes a composite task planning strategy integrating the K-Means++ genetic algorithm (KMGA) and the multi-neighborhood iterative dynamic programmi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,124 Views
19 Pages

3 November 2025

Accurate nearshore bathymetry is an essential dataset for coastal modelling and coastal hazard management, but traditional surveys are expensive and dangerous to conduct in energetic surf zones. Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) offer a flexible way to...

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Drones - ISSN 2504-446X