UAV Applications and Optimization

Latest papers

• DRL-Enabled Trajectory Planing for UAV-Assisted VLC: Optimal Altitude and Reward Design

  Tian-Tian Lin, Yi Liu, Xiao-Wei Tang, Yunmei Shi, Yi Huang, Zhongxiang Wei, Qingqing Wu, Yuhan Dong · 2 February 2026

  Recently, the integration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and visible light communication (VLC) technologies has emerged as a promising solution to offer flexible communication and efficient lighting. This letter investigates the three-dimensional trajectory planning in a UAV-assisted VLC system, w…

• Hierarchical Multi-Agent DRL Based Dynamic Cluster Reconfiguration for UAV Mobility Management

  Irshad A. Meer, Karl-Ludwig Besser, Mustafa Ozger, Dominic Schupke, H. Vincent Poor, Cicek Cavdar · 29 January 2026

  Multi-connectivity involves dynamic cluster formation among distributed access points (APs) and coordinated resource allocation from these APs, highlighting the need for efficient mobility management strategies for users with multi-connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel mobility management …

• CoBA: Integrated Deep Learning Model for Reliable Low-Altitude UAV Classification in mmWave Radio Networks

  Junaid Sajid, Ivo M\"u\"ursepp, Luca Reggiani, Davide Scazzoli, Federico Francesco Luigi Mariani, Maurizio Magarini, Rizwan Ahmad, Muhammad Mahtab Alam · 29 January 2026

  Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in civilian and industrial applications, making secure low-altitude operations crucial. In dense mmWave environments, accurately classifying low-altitude UAVs as either inside authorized or restricted airspaces remains challenging, requiring mode…

• $\alpha^3$-SecBench: A Large-Scale Evaluation Suite of Security, Resilience, and Trust for LLM-based UAV Agents over 6G Networks

  Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Abderrahmane Lakas, Merouane Debbah · 27 January 2026

  Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical, networked environments where they must operate reliably in the presence of malicious adversaries. While recent benchmarks have evaluated large language model (LLM)-based UAV agents in reasoning, navigation…

• Online parameter estimation for the Crazyflie quadcopter through an EM algorithm

  Yanhua Zhao · 27 January 2026

  Drones are becoming more and more popular nowadays. They are small in size, low in cost, and reliable in operation. They contain a variety of sensors and can perform a variety of flight tasks, reaching places that are difficult or inaccessible for humans. Earthquakes damage a lot of infrastructure, …

• Agentic AI Meets Edge Computing in Autonomous UAV Swarms

  Thuan Minh Nguyen, Vu Tuan Truong, Long Bao Le · 22 January 2026

  The integration of agentic AI, powered by large language models (LLMs) with autonomous reasoning, planning, and execution, into unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms opens new operational possibilities and brings the vision of the Internet of Drones closer to reality. However, infrastructure constrai…

• Cross-reality Location Privacy Protection in 6G-enabled Vehicular Metaverses: An LLM-enhanced Hybrid Generative Diffusion Model-based Approach

  Xiaofeng Luo, Jiayi He, Jiawen Kang, Ruichen Zhang, Zhaoshui He, Ekram Hossain, Dong In Kim · 21 January 2026

  The emergence of 6G-enabled vehicular metaverses enables Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to operate across physical and virtual spaces through space-air-ground-sea integrated networks. The AVs can deploy AI agents powered by large AI models as personalized assistants, on edge servers to support intelligen…

• Optimizing Energy and Data Collection in UAV-aided IoT Networks using Attention-based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

  Babacar Toure, Dimitrios Tsilimantos, Omid Esrafilian, Marios Kountouris · 21 January 2026

  Due to their adaptability and mobility, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly essential for wireless network services, particularly for data harvesting tasks. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches have gained significant attention for addressing UAV path …

• Large AI Model-Enabled Secure Communications in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks: Concepts, Perspectives and Case Study

  Chuang Zhang, Geng Sun, Yijing Lin, Weijie Yuan, Sinem Coleri, Dusit Niyato · 21 January 2026

  Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs) have the potential to revolutionize communications by supporting a range of applications, including urban parcel delivery, aerial inspections and air taxis. However, compared with traditional wireless networks, LAWNs face unique security challenges due to low-a…

• Visual Marker Search for Autonomous Drone Landing in Diverse Urban Environments

  Jiaohong Yao, Linfeng Liang, Yao Deng, Xi Zheng, Richard Han, Yuankai Qi · 19 January 2026

  Marker-based landing is widely used in drone delivery and return-to-base systems for its simplicity and reliability. However, most approaches assume idealized landing site visibility and sensor performance, limiting robustness in complex urban settings. We present a simulation-based evaluation suite…

• Hybrid Distillation with CoT Guidance for Edge-Drone Control Code Generation

  Yizhan Feng, Hichem Snoussi, Yuhang Wang, Jing Teng, Abel Cherouat, Tian Wang · 14 January 2026

  With large language models demonstrating significant potential in code generation tasks, their application to onboard control of resource-constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has emerged as an important research direction. However, a notable contradiction exists between the high resource consumption…

• Integrating Symbolic RL Planning into a BDI-based Autonomous UAV Framework: System Integration and SIL Validation

  Sangwoo Jeon, Juchul Shin, YeonJe Cho, Gyeong-Tae Kim, Seongwoo Kim · 13 January 2026

  Modern autonomous drone missions increasingly require software frameworks capable of seamlessly integrating structured symbolic planning with adaptive reinforcement learning (RL). Although traditional rule-based architectures offer robust structured reasoning for drone autonomy, their capabilities f…

• Deep Q-Network Based Resilient Drone Communication:Neutralizing First-Order Markov Jammers

  Andrii Grekhov, Volodymyr Kharchenko, Vasyl Kondratiuk · 13 January 2026

  Deep Reinforcement Learning based solution for jamming communications using Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technology in a 16 channel radio environment is presented. Deep Q Network based transmitter continuously selects the next frequency hopping channel while facing first order reactive jamming,…

• SynDroneVision: A Synthetic Dataset for Image-Based Drone Detection

  Tamara R. Lenhard, Andreas Weinmann, Kai Franke, Tobias Koch · 9 January 2026

  Developing robust drone detection systems is often constrained by the limited availability of large-scale annotated training data and the high costs associated with real-world data collection. However, leveraging synthetic data generated via game engine-based simulations provides a promising and cos…

• Weather-Aware Transformer for Real-Time Route Optimization in Drone-as-a-Service Operations

  Kamal Mohamed, Lillian Wassim, Ali Hamdi, Khaled Shaban · 8 January 2026

  This paper presents a novel framework to accelerate route prediction in Drone-as-a-Service operations through weather-aware deep learning models. While classical path-planning algorithms, such as A* and Dijkstra, provide optimal solutions, their computational complexity limits real-time applicabilit…

• PIKAN: Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Explainable UAV Channel Modelling

  K\"ur\c{s}at Tekb{\i}y{\i}k, G\"une\c{s} Karabulut Kurt, Antoine Lesage-Landry · 6 January 2026

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications demand accurate yet interpretable air-to-ground (A2G) channel models that can adapt to nonstationary propagation environments. While deterministic models offer interpretability and deep learning (DL) models provide accuracy, both approaches suffer from ei…

• Next Generation Intelligent Low-Altitude Economy Deployments: The O-RAN Perspective

  Aly Sabri Abdalla, Vuk Marojevic · 5 January 2026

  Despite the growing interest in low-altitude economy (LAE) applications, including UAV-based logistics and emergency response, fundamental challenges remain in orchestrating such missions over complex, signal-constrained environments. These include the absence of real-time, resilient, and context-aw…

• Empower Low-Altitude Economy: A Reliability-Aware Dynamic Weighting Allocation for Multi-modal UAV Beam Prediction

  Haojin Li, Anbang Zhang, Chen Sun, Chenyuan Feng, Kaiqian Qu, Tony Q. S. Quek, Haijun Zhang · 1 January 2026

  The low-altitude economy (LAE) is rapidly expanding driven by urban air mobility, logistics drones, and aerial sensing, while fast and accurate beam prediction in uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications is crucial for achieving reliable connectivity. Current research is shifting from single-s…

• Real-World Adversarial Attacks on RF-Based Drone Detectors

  Omer Gazit, Yael Itzhakev, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai · 25 December 2025

  Radio frequency (RF) based systems are increasingly used to detect drones by analyzing their RF signal patterns, converting them into spectrogram images which are processed by object detection models. Existing RF attacks against image based models alter digital features, making over-the-air (OTA) im…

• Quantum-Inspired Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Exploration Exploitation Optimization in UAV-Assisted 6G Network Deployment

  Mazyar Taghavi, Javad Vahidi · 25 December 2025

  This study introduces a quantum inspired framework for optimizing the exploration exploitation tradeoff in multiagent reinforcement learning, applied to UAVassisted 6G network deployment. We consider a cooperative scenario where ten intelligent UAVs autonomously coordinate to maximize signal coverag…

• AUDRON: A Deep Learning Framework with Fused Acoustic Signatures for Drone Type Recognition

  Rajdeep Chatterjee, Sudip Chakrabarty, Trishaani Acharjee, Deepanjali Mishra · 24 December 2025

  Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are increasingly used across diverse domains, including logistics, agriculture, surveillance, and defense. While these systems provide numerous benefits, their misuse raises safety and security concerns, making effective detection mechanisms…

• A Time-efficient Prioritised Scheduling Algorithm to Optimise Initial Flock Formation of Drones

  Sujan Warnakulasooriya, Andreas Willig, Xiaobing Wu · 24 December 2025

  Drone applications continue to expand across various domains, with flocking offering enhanced cooperative capabilities but introducing significant challenges during initial formation. Existing flocking algorithms often struggle with efficiency and scalability, particularly when potential collisions …

• Large Model Enabled Embodied Intelligence for 6G Integrated Perception, Communication, and Computation Network

  Zhuoran Li, Zhen Gao, Xinhua Liu, Zheng Wang, Xiaotian Zhou, Lei Liu, Yongpeng Wu, Wei Feng, Yongming Huang · 19 December 2025

  The advent of sixth-generation (6G) places intelligence at the core of wireless architecture, fusing perception, communication, and computation into a single closed-loop. This paper argues that large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) can endow base stations with perception, reasoning, and acting…

• QoS-Aware Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Joint Link Selection and Trajectory Optimization in SAGIN-Supported UAV Mobility Management

  Jiayang Wan, Ke He, Yafei Wang, Fan Liu, Wenjin Wang, Shi Jin · 18 December 2025

  Due to the significant variations in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) altitude and horizontal mobility, it becomes difficult for any single network to ensure continuous and reliable threedimensional coverage. Towards that end, the space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) has emerged as an essential …

• Joint Hybrid Beamforming and Artificial Noise Design for Secure Multi-UAV ISAC Networks

  Runze Dong, Buhong Wang, Cunqian Feng, Jiang Weng, Chen Han, Jiwei Tian · 16 December 2025

  Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) emerges as a key enabler for next-generation applications such as smart cities and autonomous systems. Its integration with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) unlocks new potentials for reliable communication and precise sensing in dynamic aerial environments…