Drones, Volume 9, Issue 10

Multi-UAV cooperative encirclement tasks have attracted considerable attention in areas such as military defense and target interception. Fixed-wing UAVs face substantial challenges due to intrinsic dynamic limits, including their minimum velocity an...

Temperature distribution inside the vacuum chamber of the TRX 2000(A) near space environment simulation test system (NSESTS) was investigated through both experimentation and computational fluid dynamics simulation. Comparison between the experimenta...

Fixed-time coordination is critical for networked unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems to accomplish time-sensitive missions such as rapid target encirclement, cooperative search, and emergency response. However, dynamic topology variations, caused...

This manuscript presents a robust formation and collision-free containment control system designed for a quadrotor fleet operating under turbulent wind conditions. Emphasizing collision avoidance, we introduce a two-layer strategy in which a virtual...

Addressing the challenge of high-precision time-coordinated path planning for manned and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) clusters operating in complex dynamic environments during missions like high-level autonomous coordination, this paper proposes a r...

Target assignment for UAV swarms represents a pivotal and formidable endeavor, characterized by intricate combinatorial optimization and complex constraints. This study introduces an innovative and sophisticated constraint-handling method that adeptl...

Block-based hybrid video coders typically use inter-prediction and bidirectionally coded (B) frames to improve compression efficiency. For this purpose, they employ look-ahead buffers, perform out-of-sequence frame coding, and implement similarity se...

This paper explores the physical layer security performance of collaborative drone fleets enabled by visible light communication (VLC) in a multi-eavesdropper scenario, where multiple drones leverage VLC to serve terrestrial users. To strengthen syst...

This paper presents a dual-objective Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The framework was designed with two goals in mind: improving longitudinal motion control and optimizing the flight trajector...

In order to enhance the wind-resistance capability and achieve a lightweight design of high-altitude unmanned airships, this study proposes a rapid optimization method for a heterogeneous propeller propulsion system. This system integrates contra-rot...

The integration of machine learning (ML) techniques with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery holds strong potential for improving yield prediction in agriculture. However, few studies have combined biophysical field variables with UAV-derived spect...

Urban heritage documentation often separates 3D data acquisition from immersive interaction, limiting both accuracy and user impact. This study develops and validates an end-to-end workflow that integrates UAV photogrammetry with terrestrial LiDAR an...

This study focuses on the cooperative formation control problem of six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under constraints of limited communication resources and strict time requirements. The core innovation of the...

Error in Figure/Table [...]

In this paper, an underwater salvage robot is developed to retrieve foreign objects scattered in nuclear reactor pools. The robot mainly consists of an ROV platform and a 3-DOF Delta robotic arm. Utilizing fused IMU and LED beacon visual data for loc...

With the rapid proliferation of drone applications, multi-UAV formation flights are becoming increasingly prevalent. While most existing studies focus on the aerodynamics of a single drone, aerodynamic interactions within UAV formations—particu...

Cooperative longitudinal–lateral trajectory optimization is essential for unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) platoons to improve safety, capacity, and efficiency. However, existing approaches often face unstable formation under low penetration rates...

The cooperative flight of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (MAV/UAVs) has recently become a focus in the research of civilian and humanitarian fields, in which formation control is crucial. This paper takes the improvement of convergence performan...

In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relying on Vision-Based Navigation (VBN) in high-altitude, mountainous terrain face severe challenges due to geometric distortions in aerial imagery. Th...

Urban drone operations are exposed to unpredictable risks, including engine failure and deliberate signal interference. A recent and ongoing disruption in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has seen widespread GPS spoofing that misleads devices by hundreds of kil...

The rapid evolution of UAV technology has increased the demand for lightweight airborne perception systems. This study introduces ADG-YOLO, an optimized model for real-time target detection and ranging on UAV platforms. Building on YOLOv11n, we integ...

Micro-Shell Resonator Gyroscopes have obvious SWaP (Size, Weight and Power) advantages and applicable accuracy for the autonomous navigation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), especially under GNSS-denied environments. When the Micro-Shell Resonator...

Due to the complexity of the marine environment and the uncertainty of ship movements, altitude control of UAV is particularly important when approaching and landing on the deck of a ship. This paper focuses on unmanned helicopters as its research su...

UAV accident investigation is essential for safeguarding the fast-growing low-altitude airspace. While near-daily incidents are reported, they were rarely analyzed in depth as current inquiries remain expert-dependent and time-consuming. Because most...

Swarm-based UAV cooperative ground target detection faces critical challenges including sensitivity to small targets, susceptibility to occlusion, and data heterogeneity across distributed platforms. To address these issues, we propose FedGTD-UAVs&md...

With the rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the associated rise in security concerns, there is a growing demand for robust detection and identification systems capable of operating reliably in complex electromagnetic environme...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer high mobility, cost-effectiveness and flexible deployment, but their limited computing and battery resources constrain their development. Mobile edge computing (MEC) can alleviate these constraints by computation...

In recent years, there has been an ever increasing interest in UxVs and the technology surrounding them. A more recent area of interest within the UxV ecosystem is the development of UxV swarms. In these systems, multiple UxVs synchronize, continuous...

This paper investigates actuator fault-tolerant cooperative control of multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-QUAVs) under restricted communication conditions, where only relative output measurements are available. By appropriately transf...

This study presents a loop-shaping methodology for the attitude control of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The proposed controller design focuses on achieving desired frequency–domain characteristics—such as specified phase an...

The accurate localization of radio frequency (RF) emitters plays a critical role in spectrum monitoring, public safety, and defense applications, particularly in environments where global navigation satellite systems are limited. This study investiga...

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) pose significant security challenges due to their low detectability in infrared imagery, particularly when appearing as small, low-contrast targets against complex backgrounds. This paper presents a novel infrare...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry technique offers significant potential for generating highly detailed digital surface models (DSM) of gullies. However, different flight schemes can considerably influence measurement accuracy. The objecti...

In the field of drone-to-drone detection tasks, the issue of fusing temporal information with infrared and visible light data for detection has been rarely studied. This paper presents the first temporal misaligned rgb-thermal dataset for drone-to-dr...

This paper presents a certificateless group signature scheme designed specifically for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communications in resource-constrained environments. The scheme leverages Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and elliptic curve cry...

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has the potential to revolutionize urban transportation, largely with the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones. After an initial stage focused on technology requirements, research is now shi...

Automated Road defect detection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has emerged as an efficient and safe solution for large-scale infrastructure inspection. However, object detection in aerial imagery poses unique challenges, including the prevalen...

A collectible rotor hybrid aircraft (CRHA) represents a novel type of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft configuration, combining the typical rotor and transmission systems of helicopters with the wing and propulsion systems of fix...

Thrust vectoring technology significantly improves the manoeuvrability and environmental adaptability of unmanned aerial vehicles by dynamically regulating the direction and magnitude of thrust. In this paper, the principles and applications of mecha...

To address the challenges of frequent path conflicts and prolonged computation times in path planning for large-scale multi-UAV operations within urban low-altitude airspace, this study proposes a conflict-free path planning method integrating 3D Jum...

Emergency medical services confront significant challenges in delivering timely patient assessments within geographically isolated or disaster-impacted regions. While drones (unmanned aircraft systems, UAS) show transformative potential in healthcare...

Addressing the challenge of acquiring high-precision leader Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) pose information in real time for communication-denied leader–follower formations, this study proposed Pillar-Bin, a 3D object detection algorithm based o...

The rapid advancement of kinetic pursuit technologies has significantly increased the difficulty of evasion for high-speed UAVs (HSUAVs), particularly in scenarios where two collaboratively operating pursuers approach from the same direction with opt...

With the increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires driven by climate change and human activities, efficient detection and rapid response have become critical for forest fire prevention. Effective fire detection, swift response, and timely re...

Crop canopy height is a key structural indicator that is strongly associated with crop development, biomass accumulation, and crop health. To overcome the limitations of time-consuming and labor-intensive traditional field measurements, Unmanned Aeri...

The diverse usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) across commercial, military, and civil domains has significantly heightened the need for robust cybersecurity mechanisms. Given their reliance on wireless communications, real-time control systems,...

Multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems have attracted considerable research interest due to their broad applications, such as formation control. However, decentralized UAV formation faces challenges stemming from limited local observations, w...

During the automatic leveling process of small low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) after airdrop, their state parameters and control surface efficiency undergo drastic changes. It is difficult to achieve good control effects using controllers wi...

Ducted fan flying robots with robotic arms can perform physical interaction tasks in complex environments such as indoors. However, the coupling effects between the aerial platform, the robotic arm, and physical environment pose significant challenge...

With the development of drone technology in recent years, many studies have discussed how to leverage drones equipped with sensors and cameras to conduct inspections under bridges. To address positioning challenges caused by the lack of GPS signals u...