Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as Drones, are one of 21st century most transformative technologies. Emerging first for military use, advancements in materials, electronics, and software have catapulted drones into multipurpose tools for a wide range of industries. In this paper, we have covered the history, taxonomy, architecture, navigation systems and branched activities for the same. It explores important future trends like autonomous navigation, AI integration, and obstacle avoidance systems, emphasizing how they contribute to improving the efficiency and versatility of drones. It also looks at the major challenges like technical, environmental, economic, regulatory and ethical, that limit the actual take-up of drones, as well as trends that are likely to mitigate these obstacles in the future. This work offers a structured synthesis of existing studies and perspectives that enable insights about how drones will transform agriculture, logistics, healthcare, disaster management, and other areas, while also identifying new opportunities for innovation and development.

The rapid development of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology has spawned a wide variety of applications, such as emergency communications, regional surveillance, and disaster relief. Due to their limited battery capacity and processing power, multiple UAVs are often required for complex tasks. In such cases, a control center is crucial for coordinating their activities, which fits well with the federated learning (FL) framework. However, conventional FL approaches often focus on a single task, ignoring the potential of training multiple related tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted multi-task federated learning scheme, in which data collected by multiple UAVs can be used to train multiple related tasks concurrently. The scheme facilitates the training process by sharing feature extractors across related tasks and introduces a task attention mechanism to balance task performance and encourage knowledge sharing. To provide an analytical description of training performance, the convergence analysis of the proposed scheme is performed. Additionally, the optimal bandwidth allocation for UAVs under limited bandwidth conditions is derived to minimize communication time. Meanwhile, a UAV-EV association strategy based on coalition formation game is proposed. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in enhancing multi-task performance and training speed.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly essential in various fields such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and telecommunications. This study aims to develop a learning algorithm for the path planning of UAV wireless communication relays, which can reduce storage requirements and accelerate Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) convergence. Assuming the system possesses terrain maps of the area and can estimate user locations using localization algorithms or direct GPS reporting, it can input these parameters into the learning algorithms to achieve optimized path planning performance. However, higher resolution terrain maps are necessary to extract topological information such as terrain height, object distances, and signal blockages. This requirement increases memory and storage demands on UAVs while also lengthening convergence times in DRL algorithms. Similarly, defining the telecommunication coverage map in UAV wireless communication relays using these terrain maps and user position estimations demands higher memory and storage utilization for the learning path planning algorithms. Our approach reduces path planning training time by applying a dimensionality reduction technique based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), sample combination, Prioritized Experience Replay (PER), and the combination of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) loss calculations in the coverage map estimates, thereby enhancing a Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm. The proposed solution reduces the convergence episodes needed for basic training by approximately four times compared to the traditional TD3.

In this article, we present a framework for deploying an aerial multi-agent system in large-scale subterranean environments with minimal infrastructure for supporting multi-agent operations. The multi-agent objective is to optimally and reactively allocate and execute inspection tasks in a mine, which are entered by a mine operator onthe-fly. The assignment of currently available tasks to the team of agents is accomplished through an auction-based system, where the agents bid for available tasks, which are used by a central auctioneer to optimally assigns tasks to agents. A mobile Wi-Fi mesh supports inter-agent communication and bi-directional communication between the agents and the task allocator, while the task execution is performed completely infrastructure-free. Given a task to be accomplished, a reliable and modular agent behavior is synthesized by generating behavior trees from a pool of agent capabilities, using a back-chaining approach. The auction system in the proposed framework is reactive and supports addition of new operator-specified tasks on-the-go, at any point through a user-friendly operator interface. The framework has been validated in a real underground mining environment using three aerial agents, with several inspection locations spread in an environment of almost 200 meters. The proposed framework can be utilized for missions involving rapid inspection, gas detection, distributed sensing and mapping etc. in a subterranean environment. The proposed framework and its field deployment contributes towards furthering reliable automation in large-scale subterranean environments to offload both routine and dangerous tasks from human operators to autonomous aerial robots. The use of autonomous robotic platforms in industrial production facilities is on the rise, both to increase profitability and to increase safety for human operators [1]. Specifically, in deep underground mining, where the fundamental risk of accidents is high, the industry is focusing on creating a safer environment for humans by deploying robotic systems to either execute dangerous tasks or verify the safety before authorizing human entry. Through efforts in the mining industry, human workers have already been moved to safer locations in several critical operations via, for instance, teleoperation of heavy machinery.

Kherson, Ukraine – In late November, Maria, a 22-year-old from Ponyativka in southern Ukraine, gave birth to a boy. She named her second child Ivan, after his father who had been dreaming about a son since he joined the army in 2023. Baby Ivan was the only child born that day in the district maternity hospital in Kherson, a city where more people die than are born and more decide to leave than stay. According to the local administration, just 15 babies were born in December while 256 people died and 311 fled. As Kherson dies out, its 83,000 residents – down from a population of more than 320,000 before the war – are focusing on how to survive relentless shelling by Russia and what locals have nicknamed "human safaris".

Ukraine's air force claimed that Russia hit its western part with 43 cruise and ballistic missiles as well as 74 drones. Russian authorities confirmed the attack, saying it was in response to Kyiv's aerial attack on Russian army factories and energy hubs with US ATACMS missiles and UK-made Storm Shadow missiles. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned Russia's latest strikes on the country's energy sector, calling for more security assistance from foreign allies and for Kyiv to be allowed to use nearly 250bn of seized Russian assets to buy weapons. Russia's regional Governor Alexander Gusev said falling debris from destroyed Ukrainian drones triggered a fire at an oil storage facility in southern Russia. Ukraine's air force claimed that Russia hit its western part with 43 cruise and ballistic missiles as well as 74 drones.

Accurate and reliable positioning is crucial for perception, decision-making, and other high-level applications in autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, and intelligent robots. Given the inherent limitations of standalone sensors, integrating heterogeneous sensors with complementary capabilities is one of the most effective approaches to achieving this goal. In this paper, we propose a filtering-based, tightly coupled global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-visual-inertial positioning framework with a pose-only formulation applied to the visual-inertial system (VINS), termed PO-GVINS. Specifically, multiple-view imaging used in current VINS requires a priori of 3D feature, then jointly estimate camera poses and 3D feature position, which inevitably introduces linearization error of the feature as well as facing dimensional explosion. However, the pose-only (PO) formulation, which is demonstrated to be equivalent to the multiple-view imaging and has been applied in visual reconstruction, represent feature depth using two camera poses and thus 3D feature position is removed from state vector avoiding aforementioned difficulties. Inspired by this, we first apply PO formulation in our VINS, i.e., PO-VINS. GNSS raw measurements are then incorporated with integer ambiguity resolved to achieve accurate and drift-free estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PO-VINS significantly outperforms the multi-state constrained Kalman filter (MSCKF). By incorporating GNSS measurements, PO-GVINS achieves accurate, drift-free state estimation, making it a robust solution for positioning in challenging environments.

This work addresses the path planning problem for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maintain a desired formation during operation. Our approach formulates the problem as an optimization task by defining a set of fitness functions that not only ensure the formation but also include constraints for optimal and safe UAV operation. To optimize the fitness function and obtain a suboptimal path, we employ the teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm and then further enhance it with mechanisms such as mutation, elite strategy, and multi-subject combination. A number of simulations and experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the algorithm successfully generates valid paths for the UAVs to fly in a triangular formation for an inspection task.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are efficient tools for diverse tasks such as electronic reconnaissance, agricultural operations and disaster relief. In the complex three-dimensional (3D) environments, the path planning with obstacle avoidance for UAVs is a significant issue for security assurance. In this paper, we construct a comprehensive 3D scenario with obstacles and no-fly zones for dynamic UAV trajectory. Moreover, a novel artificial potential field algorithm coupled with simulated annealing (APF-SA) is proposed to tackle the robust path planning problem. APF-SA modifies the attractive and repulsive potential functions and leverages simulated annealing to escape local minimum and converge to globally optimal solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of APF-SA, enabling efficient autonomous path planning for UAVs with obstacle avoidance.

This week DJI, the world's leading drone manufacturer, announced a new policy removing enforcement of its "No Fly Zone" geofences in restricted areas. The sudden shift may lead to more drones hovering where they shouldn't, which could worsen a lingering national panic over flying objects in the sky. DJI, the China-based drone giant, says it will no longer enforce geofence barriers that prevent its products from flying over restricted areas like airports, wildfires, and government buildings. Though the company says these changes are intended to empower its users, they come amid a surge in drone sightings, some around critical infrastructure, that have stoked fears and fueled a growing tide of conspiracy theories. DJI's changes mean operators will have one less guardrail preventing them from flying into risky areas.