2025 December - 69 articles
The primary objective of this study is to enable an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to autonomously approach the extremum of an unknown scalar field using only real-time field measurements. To this end, a source-seeking method based on timescale separ...
Quadrotor UAVs benefit from control strategies that can deliver rapid convergence and strong robustness in order to fully exploit their high agility. Finite-time control based on terminal sliding modes has been recognized as an effective alternative...
Small multi-rotor UAVs face endurance limitations during long-range missions due to high rotor energy consumption and limited battery capacity. This paper proposes a folding-wing range extender integrating a sliding-rotating two-degree-of-freedom fol...
Maize lodging poses a significant challenge to agricultural production, severely constraining yield improvement and mechanized harvesting efficiency. Under modern agricultural practices characterized by high-density planting and multi-variety intercr...
This paper explores the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot planning through multimodal reasoning, with a particular emphasis on applications to Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned platforms in general. We present...
Real-time Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) detection is a growing research field centered on advanced computer vision and deep learning algorithms. However, the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has sparked numerous concerns due to their potential...
Quantifying riverscape topography is challenging because riverscapes comprise of both wet and dry surfaces. Advances have been made in demonstrating the capability of mounting topo-bathymetric LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors on crewed, oc...
To address the issues of efficiency and robustness in UAV trajectory planning under complex environments, this paper proposes a Graph Multi-Head Attention Policy Optimization Network (G-MAPONet) algorithm that integrates Graph Attention (GAT), Multi-...
In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied urban environments, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) face significant difficulties in maintaining reliable localization due to occlusion and structural complexity. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), wi...
To address the inefficiency of collaborative scheduling of heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under resource constraints, particularly in large-scale multi-tasking scenarios, an improved Flexible Combinatorial Auction Algorithm is proposed, lever...
Urban UAV imagery presents challenges for reliable feature matching owing to complex 3D structures and depth discontinuities. Conventional 2D-based outlier rejection methods often fail to maintain geometric consistency under significant altitude vari...
Efficient last-mile delivery remains a critical challenge for rural agricultural logistics, globally, particularly in cold-climate regions with dispersed agricultural operations. Truck–drone hybrids can reduce delivery times but face payload li...
Reliable 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) using distributed drones remains challenging due to the lack of active sensing and the ambiguity in associating detections from different views. This paper presents a passive sensing framework that integrates m...
Traditional geological mapping is often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and restricted by rugged terrain. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a novel methodology for automated lithological identification in the Ququleke area of the ea...
Soil salinization is an important negative factor that reduces the fertility of irrigated arable land. The fields in southern Kazakhstan are at high risk of salinization due to the dry arid climate. In some cases, even the top layer of soil has a sig...
This paper presents an experimental and analytical investigation into the dominant noise generation mechanisms of unmanned Fixed-wing Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) propeller–wing configurations during takeoff. This paper reports the velo...
Urban air mobility operations, such as flying Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and small passenger aircraft in and around cities, will be inherently susceptible to the turbulent wind conditions in urban environments. Therefore, understanding UAM aircr...
The current study presents a holistic technology evaluation and integration methodology for enhancing the aerodynamic efficiency and performance of a tactical, fixed-wing Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) through the synergetic in...
Underwater optical docking is essential for enabling autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to maintain long-duration operations through standardized energy replenishment and data exchange. However, existing optical docking guidance still faces challe...
Precision agriculture increasingly recognizes the transformative potential of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) for crop monitoring and field assessment, yet research consistently highlights significant usability barriers as the main constraints to wide...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are playing an increasingly crucial role in large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to their high mobility and flexible deployment capabilities. To enhance network sustainability and profitability, this paper p...
Uncrewed aircraft systems are expected to revitalize traffic activities at under-utilized airports. These airports are often located in uncontrolled airspace and do not have an operating control tower to provide separation services for approaching ai...
Accurate in situ wind measurements from rotorcraft uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be impacted by the disturbed flow generated by the rotors. However, the extent of this disturbance depends on flight mode, ambient wind, and vehicle configuration,...
Securing the reintegration of outlier nodes in dynamic UAV networks is challenging. This challenge arises from the lack of time-sensitive access control in existing key management schemes. We propose the Salted Temporal Key scheme (STK), which combin...
Multi-UAV search missions for prioritized targets under constrained communications suffer from weak communication-decision integration, limited global perception synchronization, and delayed mission response. This paper formulates multi-UAV collabora...
The stability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during propulsion failure remains a critical safety challenge. This study presents a center-of-mass (CoM) correction device, a compact, under-slung, and dual-axis prismatic stage, which can reposition...
The autonomous operation of unmanned gyroplanes is constrained by the limited fidelity of aerodynamic models and control challenges posed by unique flight characteristics. To address these issues, a comprehensive methodology for unmanned gyroplane mo...
Feeding unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in aquaculture face critical challenges due to time-varying mass, strong coupling, and environmental disturbances, which hinder the effectiveness of conventional control strategies. This paper proposes a robust...
Addressing the technical challenges in detecting Low-Slow-Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (LSS-UAV) cluster targets, such as weak signals and complex environmental interference coupling with strong features, this paper proposes a visible-infrared multi...
Energy optimization is crucial for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning, particularly in complex wind-field environments. Most existing path-planning algorithms rely on simplified energy consumption models, which often fail to adequately captu...
This study presents the development of a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) employing cardboard as the primary structural material and integrating affordable avionics. The wing spar was constructed entirely from cardboard, and its structural perf...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are regarded as a novel mode for urban air mobility, earning increasing attention on many commercial and civil applications. The risk of UAVs to people on the ground is heightened by airspace range and operational risk...
Planning trajectories for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) actively tracking a moving target poses a significant challenge. This paper introduces a motion planning system utilizing UAVs to track a dynamic target actively. The system can handle complex...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized across civilian and defense sectors due to their versatility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. However, their operational endurance remains constrained by limited onboard energy storage. Re...
Autonomous multi-UAV formation control in cluttered urban environments remains challenging due to partial observability, dense and dynamic obstacles, and conflicting objectives (task efficiency, energy use, and safety). Yet many MARL-based approaches...
Autonomous exploration is essential for various mapping tasks, including data collection, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue operations. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), owing to their low cost and high maneuverability, have become key e...
As a classical disturbance observation method, the extended state observer (ESO) is commonly used in controllers for disturbance estimation and feedback control. However, the ESO relies mainly on input–output signals and does not fully utilize...
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is emerging as a transformative solution to urban traffic congestion and inefficient ground travel. This paper presents the UAM development of Shenzhen, a pioneering city of low-altitude economy in China. It focuses on eVTOL...
Human–autonomy teams (HATs) incorporating uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) play critical roles in a variety of safety-critical systems. Increased autonomy in HATs in beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) UAS operations introduces new mission, safet...
Quadrotors have been under development for over a century. The first quadrotors were large, heavy, and difficult to control aircraft operated by a single pilot. The first quadrotors remained in the prototype stage due to accidents, budget cuts, and f...
To address the issues of structural diversity, modeling complexity, and the lack of evaluation methods in drone swarm command and control (C2) networks, this paper proposes a complex network-based quality evaluation method for drone swarm C2 networks...
(1) Background: The structural integrity of key components in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission systems is crucial for achieving performance goals. The installation environment of military and civilian UAV wing pylons is very complex, as they are...
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, equipped for distributed sensing and rapid response, can form coalitions to undertake complex missions such as post-disaster relief, communication support, and payload delivery. However, typical coalition formati...
This paper presents a Gaussian Process (GP)-based Funnel Model Predictive Control (MPC) for docking control of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The control method employs a Gaussian Process regression to learn the residual dynamics, which compens...
This work addresses the critical need for documentation and validation of structural flight loads for Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE) Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). Despite the increasing prevalence of these aircraft, the industrial and researc...
Reliable navigation in cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks requires adaptively managing measurement degradations within Kalman-filter-based estimation frameworks. This paper introduces a learning-based Kalman approach for real-time det...
In public safety scenarios, such as large-scale event security and urban crowd management, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serve as a vital tool for crowd localization, offering high mobility and broad coverage. However, UAV-based overhead localizati...
This paper proposes an online human-aware behavior planning method to enable Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to dynamically satisfy high-level linear temporal logic (LTL) task descriptions from human collaborators. The proposed method has the potenti...
Path planning is a critical capability for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in complex 2D environments such as agricultural fields or indoor facilities—scenarios where flight altitude is often constrained and safe, smooth trajectories...
As precision agriculture advances, UAV-based aerial image object detection has emerged as a pivotal technology for maize-phenotyping perception operations. Complex backgrounds reduce the model’s performance in extracting features of maize tasse...
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