UAV Applications and Optimization

Neueste Paper

• Communication-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Decentralized Cooperative UAV Deployment

  Enguang Fan, Yifan Chen, Zihan Shan, Klara Nahrstedt, Matthew Caesar, Jae Kim · 7. August 2026

  Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms are increasingly used as rapidly deployable aerial relays and sensing platforms, yet practical deployments must operate under partial observability and intermittent peer-to-peer connectivity. We present a graph-based multi-agent reinforcement learning …

• Joint UAV Flight and Opportunistic Routing under Reinforcement Learning for Delay-Tolerant Networks

  Xiao Wang, Shun-Ren Yang · 6. August 2026

  The growing deployment of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) has made store-carry-forward (SCF) communication indispensable under sparse connectivity. However, intermittent contacts, finite buffers, and limited message time-to-live (TTL) often give rise to sparse delivery and congestion, leading to su…

• CoNav-UAV: Cooperative Dual-Altitude Aerial Navigation via Stackelberg Learning

  Junru Song, Wenhao Zhang, Yang Yang, Xuekai Qiu, Feifei Wang, Weien Zhou, Tingsong Jiang, Ying Wen, Yang Li, Wen Yao · 4. August 2026

  Target-oriented vision-and-language navigation (VLN) on aerial platforms is attracting growing attention for missions such as disaster rescue, infrastructure inspection, and security patrol. In this task, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) needs to locate targets given only a concise description of th…

• ARMOR: Robust Reinforcement Learning-based Control for UAVs under Physical Attacks

  Pritam Dash, Ethan Chan, Nathan P. Lawrence, Karthik Pattabiraman · 4. August 2026

  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) depend on onboard sensors for perception, navigation, and control. However, these sensors are susceptible to physical attacks, such as GPS spoofing, that can corrupt state estimates and lead to unsafe behavior. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers adaptive control…

• MA-HEAD-Net: Adaptive Rule-Guided Multi-Agent DRL for AoI Minimization in UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

  Yixin Zhang, Zhuohui Yao, Wenchi Cheng, Walid Saad · 4. August 2026

  In post-disaster scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical for establishing emergency communication networks. For time-critical rescue missions, information freshness is crucial because decisions based on outdated data may lead to ineffective control actions. This paper investigates ag…

• Shared Voxel-Map-Based Cooperative Indoor UAV Guidance with a Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic Controller

  Thomas Hickling, Dylan Wynne, Yu Su, Nabil Aouf · 29. Juli 2026

  This paper presents a cooperative indoor UAV guidance framework that combines a shared voxel-map world model with a multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) controller. Multiple drones fuse 360 LiDAR observations into a common world-frame occupancy map, which is converted into a compact bird's-eye-view…

• TRUAV: Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Trajectory Planning and Routing Enhancement in UAV-Aided IoT-Enabled VANETs

  Muhammad Umar Farooq Qaisar, Lin Zhang, Zhen Chen, Wajdy Othman, Shehzad Ashraf Chaudhry, Chang Liu · 28. Juli 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a key enabler of next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, offering flexible aerial relaying to extend connectivity across dynamic vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in smart city environments. However, conventional centralized approaches fo…

• CRB-Driven Beamforming and Trajectory Optimization for UAV-assisted ISAC System

  Yi Yang, Qianqian Zhang, Huaxia Wang · 23. Juli 2026

  In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a UAV enhances the sensing capability of a base station (BS) towards a target while ensuring reliable communication towards a downlink user. This architecture is practically at…

• Reinforcement Learning for Delivery Drone-Based Participatory Sensing in Dynamic Environments

  Xin Ouyang, Songxin Lei, Xusen Guo, Yutian Jiang, Sijie Ruan, Yuxuan Liang · 22. Juli 2026

  Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for urban sensing has emerged as a powerful paradigm to monitor the status of the city, e.g., air quality and noise levels, through agile aerial crowdsourcing. Despite this potential, existing UAV-based sensing approaches overlook environmental disturbances like w…

• Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing

  Kevin Butler, Christopher Stewart, Nils Aschenbruck, Alina Gerall, Weisong Shi, Deborah Silver, Ufuk Topcu · 22. Juli 2026

  The report envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Potential applications include natural disaster detection drones that spot wildfire sources within minutes, me…

• Intelligent Multi-UAV Navigation in ITNTNs: A Hierarchical LLM Approach

  Zijiang Yan, Hao Zhou, Wael Jaafar, Jianhua Pei, Ping Wang, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Hina Tabassum · 22. Juli 2026

  The deployment of high-speed Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 3D aerial highways necessitates robust coordination of physical flight kinematics and multi-tier network handovers. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers rapid tactical control, it lacks the zero-shot strategic reasoning requir…

• Compact convolutional neural networks for AI-based drone detection system

  G\'abor Farkas, G\'abor Fazekas, Karakai Patrik, Andr\'as N\'emeth, G\'abor Farkas · 21. Juli 2026

  The increasing use of first-person-view drones in modern conflicts has created a demand for compact and reliable detection systems capable of operating in complex electromagnetic environments. These drones continuously transmit video signals through onboard video transmitters, generating radio-frequ…

• RT-SHCUA: Real-Time Self-Hosted Computer-Use Agent for UAV Control

  Di Lu, Bo Zhang, Xiyuan Li, Yongzhi Liao, Xuewen Dong, Yulong Shen, Zhiquan Liu, Jianfeng Ma · 21. Juli 2026

  Natural-language control offers a promising interface for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but directly applying self-hosted computer-use agents (SHCUAs) to UAV control introduces a structural mismatch. SHCUAs are designed for interactive host-side tool use, where delayed agent iterations are often …

• PRIME: Plasticity Recovery in Multi-Agent Environments for UAV-Assisted Emergency Communication Networks

  Wen Qiu, Zhiqiang He, Wei Zhao, Hiroshi Masui · 21. Juli 2026

  Most reinforcement learning controllers for these networks assume stationary conditions, and the few that handle change react to the external environment while leaving the network's internal state unexamined. We show that sustained non-stationarity damages this internal state directly: as objectives…

• Autonomous UAV Route Planning for Coverage Maximization in Environmental Monitoring: A Systematic Literature Review

  Sebastian Jouannet-Contreras, Carola Figueroa-Flores · 16. Juli 2026

  Environmental monitoring with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires route planning methods that maximize covered area while handling energy limits, operational constraints, and geometric complexity. This paper reports the protocol and preliminary results of an ongoing systematic literature review…

• End-to-End Real-Time Drone-Based Person Detection Framework Using Deep Learning

  Payel Sarmah, Ayush Ranjan, Piyush Kaushik Bhattacharyya, Anil Kr. Shaw, Pradip Kr. Das · 14. Juli 2026

  In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones have gained rapid response in terms of security, search and rescue (SAR), border surveillance, etc. Existing monitoring frameworks often struggle to maintain detection consistency when targets undergo significant scale variations due to alti…

• How Much Do RF Drone Benchmarks Overstate? A Controlled Study and Theory of Data Leakage in UAV Signal Identification

  David Shulman · 2. Juli 2026

  Radio-frequency (RF) sensing is a central modality for counter-unmanned-aerial-system (counter-UAS) defence because it exploits the control, telemetry, and video links between a drone and its operator. Reported accuracies for RF-based drone detection and identification are often very high, but many …

• Locker-based Truck-Drone Routing with Integrated Considerations of Pickups, Deliveries, and No-Fly Zones

  Xuanyu Liu, Hui Hu, Jiao Zhao, Ziliang Wang, Zhengbing He · 1. Juli 2026

  Truck-drone delivery is an emerging last-mile logistics mode combining the long-haul capacity of trucks with the flexible service capability of drones. In locker-based operations, smart lockers serve not only as temporary parcel storage facilities but also as automated drone docking and service node…

• Rate-Aware Quantum-Inspired Trajectory Learning for Interference-Limited Multi-UAV Networks

  Khaoula Khaled, Muhammad Afaq, Ali Arshad Nasir, Zeeshan Kaleem · 25. Juni 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can provide on-demand, high-capacity connectivity in disaster and normal situation. However, it faces a challenge of curse of dimensionality in trajectory optimization, where interference-limited environments and vast search spaces make real-time coordination computatio…

• CKM-Driven Communication-Aware UAV Intelligent Trajectory Optimization for Urban Inspection

  Yang Xiaomeng, Jia Ziye, Zhu Qiuming, Wu Qihui · 25. Juni 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in urban inspection tasks, where reliable communication is critical but challenging due to the severe spatial channel heterogeneity. To address the issue, in this paper, we focus on the communication-aware path planning for multi-UAV tasks, a…

• Adaptive Machine Learning Framework for UAV Trajectory Optimization in O-RAN

  Chenrui Sun, Swarna Bindu Chetty, Gianluca Fontanesi, Mahnaz Arvaneh, Walid Saad, Hamed Ahmadi · 24. Juni 2026

  The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as open radio units (O-RUs) in 6G cellular systems presents a promising opportunity to achieve scalable and adaptive network coverage. However, optimizing UAV trajectories in dynamic and unfamiliar environments remains a critical challenge, particular…

• AI-Empowered UAV-Assisted Backscatter Localization and ISAC for Zero-Energy IoT: A Comprehensive Survey

  Ruhul Amin Khalil · 23. Juni 2026

  Zero-energy Internet of Things (IoT) enables passive or near-passive devices to operate on harvested energy rather than batteries. Backscatter communication (BackCom) supports this vision by enabling tags to transmit data via reflection and modulation of incident RF signals, but it suffers from weak…

• Distributed Model Predictive Control with Adaptive Safety Zones for Multi-Fleet Drone Operations

  Linda M\"umken, Diyar Altinses, Michael Schwung, Stefan Lier, Andreas Schwung · 23. Juni 2026

  Autonomous drone swarms in space-constrained environments such as warehouses, inspection corridors, and urban delivery routes must share limited airspace safely at high vehicle density. Existing approaches rely on fixed safety zones sized for worst-case velocity, which wastes airspace in congested s…

• Graph neural networks at war: integrating cybersecurity and drone intelligence in the Israeli-Iranian conflict

  Sozan Sulaiman Maghdid, Tarik Ahmed Rashid, Shavan Askar · 17. Juni 2026

  Physical cyber systems have brought about new threats and challenges in detection and immediate response. This study examines how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be used to aid cybersecurity and drone management in a physical cyber system comprising of cyber intrusions and unmanned aerial vehicles …

• Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

  Taewoo Park, Kyeonghyun Yoo, Seunghyun Yoo, Hwangnam Kim · 15. Juni 2026

  Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful…