UAV Applications and Optimization

Latest papers

• Threat-Aware Energy-Efficient Deployment for Dynamic UAV Networks: A Multi-Agent RL Approach

  Faisal Al-Kamali, Hussein A. Ammar, Francois Chan, James H. Bayes, Yasser Gadallah, Mohamed H. Ahmed · 28 September 2026

  Ensuring operational safety in threat-prone environments remains a critical challenge for multi-UAV networks serving as aerial base stations. This paper proposes an efficient framework to maximize global energy efficiency (EE) while promoting safe operation through threat-aware clustering and reward…

• DroneGround: Open-Vocabulary Drone Payload Characterization Using Synthetic Data and Grounded Vision-Language Models

  Ami Pandat, Rajasekhar Punna, Gopika Vinod, Rohit Shukla · 22 September 2026

  Automated drone surveillance has become increasingly important for public safety, critical infrastructure protection,and restricted airspace monitoring. While existing vision-based systems achieve strong performance for drone detection and tracking, reliable payload characterization remains highly c…

• General Collaborative Intelligence: Architecting Cognition for Resilient Multi-Agent Ecosystems

  Lei Zhang, Chun Ye, Le Yang, Zhaozhong Wang, Deng-Ping Fan, Hang Dai, Binglu Wang · 22 September 2026

  Multi-agent unmanned systems are moving from isolated, ego-centric sensing toward collaborative intelligence, in which distributed agents exchange compact features to overcome a local observation trap that no single agent can escape: occlusions, finite sensor range, and environmental degradation. Th…

• ASGARD: Action-Space Guard for UAV Resilience via Reinforcement Learning

  Mohsen Salehi, Karthik Pattabiraman · 21 September 2026

  Reinforcement learning (RL) controllers have been recently adopted for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) navigation and control. However, they are susceptible to action-space attacks that overwrite the action commands after the policy generates them and before the actuators execute them. While most exi…

• Neuro-Symbolic Agentic AI for Networked Low-Altitude UAVs

  Yuqi Ping, Tianhao Liang, Nanchi Su, Guangyu Lei, Junwei Wu, Qinyu Zhang, Tingting Zhang · 18 September 2026

  Networked low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need reliable and adaptive decision-making capabilities to operate under uncertain observations, dynamic environments, and intermittent connectivity, while many existing agentic systems remain limited by hallucination risks, data dependence, and…

• Agentic AI Networking for Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Systems in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

  Nguyen Duc Minh Quang, Chang Liu, Shuangyang Li, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng · 18 September 2026

  Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs) are emerging as a key infrastructure for heterogeneous unmanned aerial systems that support concurrent services within a shared three-dimensional airspace. Their coexistence creates strong coupling among mobility, connectivity, and shared network resources, whi…

• AeroWeaver: An Embodied-Agent Harness for Weaving Aerial Skills into Distributed, Adaptive Swarm Execution

  Jiabin Lou, Yirong Yang, Haopeng Wang, Xuxin Lv, Xinyu Liu, Diyuan Hou, Xuehong Liu, Rongye Shi, Wenjun Wu · 17 September 2026

  Collective intelligence is a collaborative autonomy paradigm in which multiple agents pursue shared objectives through local perception, information exchange, and coordinated action. UAV swarms embody this paradigm by coordinating multiple vehicles in tasks such as search, inspection, and tracking. …

• Learning to Fly: Stable Vision-Guided UAV Servoing with Compact Target-Centric Cues and Reinforcement Learning

  Saurbh Singh Jamwal, Nived Chebrolu · 10 September 2026

  Vision-guided reinforcement learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) remains challenging due to unstable policy optimisation, aggressive exploration, and the cost of high-dimensional visual perception. In this work, we investigate long-horizon UAV visual servoing using compact target-centric cue…

• Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation via Shared Bird's-Eye Maps

  Shuning Zhang, Liang Li, Yunheng Wang, Tao Wang, Yihang Kang, Renjing Xu · 4 September 2026

  Air-ground collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) pairs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a global bird's-eye view and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a local first-person view, yet the setting remains largely unexplored: existing training-free methods solve single-agent tasks …

• AERIS: Offline Policy Improvement for Multi-UAV Integrated Sensing and Communication

  Ziyuan Wang (Steven), Yifan Sui (Steven), Wei Wei (Steven), Wenjie Xin (Steven), Zekai Zhang (Steven), Xiangwang Hou (Steven), Xiao-Ping (Steven), Zhang · 27 August 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising 6G paradigm, but dynamic multi-UAV ISAC control must jointly balance communication quality, sensing reliability, and flight safety under stochastic mobility. Existing optimization methods often require r…

• Place, Slice and Schedule: Hierarchical O-RAN Control of a Tethered mmWave UAV-gNB

  Alireza Mohammadhosseini, Fatemeh Afghah · 26 August 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted 5G New Radio base stations (gNBs) can augment terrestrial networks with an on-demand, repositionable Frequency Range 2 (FR2) capacity layer. This flexibility, however, couples the physical network topology with radio-resource management: UAV movement reshapes bl…

• RACO: Reliability-Aware Coarse-Goal Optimization for Inspection-Oriented UAV Vision-Language Navigation

  Sen Wang, Yiming Sun, Jiaxuan He, Pengfei Zhu · 25 August 2026

  UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) is commonly evaluated as goal reaching, but inspection-oriented deployment requires the agent to stop within a valid inspection region and avoid falsely confirming visually or semantically similar distractors. This requirement exposes a key weakness in existi…

• A 360-Degree Vision Dataset for Learning Yaw Control on GPS-Denied Micro-UAVs in Disaster-Response-Relevant Environments

  Niklas Voigt, Hartmut Surmann · 21 August 2026

  This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to camera-based autonomy for micro-drones in GPS-denied, radio-challenging indoor environments. The target application is disaster and emergency response, where micro-UAVs can provide rapid situational awareness in hazardous settings such as firefight…

• WONDER: A Radio World Model-based Negotiation Framework for Multi-Agent UAV Coverage Optimization

  Jiahao Huang, Rongpeng Li, Zhifeng Zhao, Guoru Ding, Honggang Zhang · 18 August 2026

  Post-disaster damage to terrestrial infrastructure can disrupt wireless coverage,while Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms provide a promising solution for rapid restoration.However, due to the limitations in local geometry observations hidden radio impact,and inter-UAV communication,there exists a…

• Beyond Clear Skies: Synthetic Seasonal and Weather Variations for Real-World Drone Detection

  Tamara R. Lenhard, Andreas Weinmann, Tobias Koch · 18 August 2026

  Reliable drone detection under real-world deployment conditions requires training data that spans the full operational design domain, including adverse weather and seasonal appearance variation. However, acquiring and annotating such data at scale remains highly resource-intensive, as adverse-weathe…

• Graph Neural Assisted Actor-Critic for Latency-Efficient Edge Vision System

  Alam Noor, Luis Almeida, Kai Li, Jiyan Wu, Miguel Gutiérrez Gaitán, Eduardo Tovar · 18 August 2026

  UAV on-board vision systems are widely used for different activities, including monitoring in no-fly zones. In this case, the vision-equipped UAV streams a video to a ground server where an operator assists its activities. The latency of video transmission has a profound impact on the effectiveness …

• Sensor-Driven Mission Synthesis for UAV/UGV Swarms: A TB-CSPN Coordination Architecture with Hardware-Enforced Safety

  Uwe M. Borghoff, Paolo Bottoni, Remo Pareschi · 17 August 2026

  This paper presents a coordination architecture for heterogeneous UAV/UGV swarms that synthesises mission actions from uncertain, multi-modal sensor evidence while preserving hardware-enforced safety at the actuation boundary. The approach combines radar, RF, acoustic, and visual observations with T…

• Drone-Assisted UAV-UGV Collaboration for Autonomous Navigation in Snow-Covered Terrain

  Shreyam Gupta, P. Agrawal, Priyam Gupta, R. Gautam · 11 August 2026

  This paper presents a collaborative UAV-UGV navigation framework for high-altitude, snow-covered terrain, where reduced visibility and unstable ground render conventional methods ineffective. We introduce a custom efficient U-Net architecture that falls under the computational constraints for real-t…

• When Efficiency Becomes Fragility: Exploiting Dynamic Routing Vulnerabilities in Adaptive UAV Tracking

  Shaofeng Liang, Runwei Guan, Wenshuo Chen, Jiemin Wu, Bowen Tian, Haozhe Jia, Kaishen Yuan, Songning Lai, Daizong Liu, Yutao Yue · 11 August 2026

  Resource constraints on UAV platforms have driven a paradigm shift in aerial tracking, from pursuing performance toward balancing accuracy with efficiency. Adaptive Transformer Trackers, which leverage an input-dependent dynamic routing architecture, have emerged as a representative solution to this…

• RecoverFly: A Failure-Aware Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

  Boxiong Wang, Hui Kang, Geng Sun, Jiahui Li, Chao Yu, Daxin Tian · 11 August 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments. Although recent end-to-end UAV vision-language-action (UAV-VLA) policies reduce reliance on separately designe…

• Organizational and Socio-Technical Challenges in UAV Incidents: Evidence from a Practitioner Focus Group

  George Grispos, Joel Elson, Austin Doctor, Suat Cubukcu · 10 August 2026

  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are now widely used across business, government, and recreational contexts, creating new challenges for incident response and digital forensics. While previous forensics research has largely focused on the extraction of technical data from UAV systems, minimal empirical work…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…