Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a transformative technology across diverse sectors, offering adaptable solutions to complex challenges in both military and civilian domains. Their expanding capabilities present a platform for further advancement by integrating cutting-edge computational tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. These advancements have significantly impacted various facets of human life, fostering an era of unparalleled efficiency and convenience. Large Language Models (LLMs), a key component of AI, exhibit remarkable learning and adaptation capabilities within deployed environments, demonstrating an evolving form of intelligence with the potential to approach human-level proficiency. This work explores the significant potential of integrating UAVs and LLMs to propel the development of autonomous systems. We comprehensively review LLM architectures, evaluating their suitability for UAV integration. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art LLM-based UAV architectures and identify novel opportunities for LLM embedding within UAV frameworks. Notably, we focus on leveraging LLMs to refine data analysis and decision-making processes, specifically for enhanced spectral sensing and sharing in UAV applications. Furthermore, we investigate how LLM integration expands the scope of existing UAV applications, enabling autonomous data processing, improved decision-making, and faster response times in emergency scenarios like disaster response and network restoration. Finally, we highlight crucial areas for future research that are critical for facilitating the effective integration of LLMs and UAVs.

Months of relentless Russian artillery pounding have devastated a strategic city in eastern Ukraine, new drone footage obtained by The Associated Press shows, with barely a building left intact, homes and municipal offices charred and a town that once had a population of 12,000 now all but deserted. The footage shows Chasiv Yar -- set amid green fields and woodland -- pounded into an apocalyptic vista. The destruction is reminiscent of the cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, which Ukraine yielded after months of bombardment and huge losses for both sides. The strategically important city has been under attack by Russian forces for months. Capturing it would give Russia control of a hilltop from which it can attack other cities that form the backbone of Ukraine's eastern defenses.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A Portuguese-flagged container ship came under attack by a drone in the far reaches of the Arabian Sea, corresponding with a claim by Yemen's Houthi rebels that they assaulted the ship there, authorities said Tuesday. The attack on the MSC Orion, occurring some 375 miles off the coast of Yemen, appeared to be the first confirmed deep-sea assault claimed by the Houthis since they began targeting ships in November. It suggests the Houthis -- or potentially their main benefactor Iran -- may have the ability to strike into the distances of the Indian Ocean as the rebels previously threatened in their ongoing campaign over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A suspected missile attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels damaged a ship in the Red Sea on Monday, authorities said, the latest assault in their campaign against international shipping in the crucial maritime route. The attack happened off the coast of Mokha, Yemen, the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said. The ship sustained damage in the attack, the UKMTO said, though its crew was safe and heading to its next port of call.

Traditional aerial vehicles have specific characteristics to perform specific tasks but designing a versatile vehicle that can adapt depending on the task is still a challenge. Based on modularity, we propose an aerial robotic system that can increase its payload capacity and actuated degrees of freedom by reconfiguring heterogeneous modules to adapt to different task specifications. The system consists of cuboid modules propelled by quadrotors with tilted rotors. We present two module designs with different actuation properties. By assembling different types of modules, H-ModQuad can increase its actuated degrees of freedom from 4 to 5 and 6 depending on its configuration. By extending the concept of actuation ellipsoids, we find the body frame of a vehicle with which the controller can maximize the maximum thrust. We use polytopes to represent the actuation capability of the vehicles and examine them against task requirements. We derive the modular vehicles' dynamics and propose a general control strategy that applies for all possible numbers of actuated degrees of freedom. The design is validated with simulations and experiments using actual robots, showing that the modular vehicles provide different actuation properties.

Ukraine's top commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskii said Kyiv's troops fell back to new positions west of three villages on the eastern front, as the situation on the front line worsened. Syrskii said the "most difficult" areas were west of Russian-occupied Maryinka and northwest of Avdiivka, the town captured by Russian forces in February. Syrskii also said his forces were closely monitoring an increase in the number of Russian troops in the area of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city and just 30km (19 miles) from the Russian border. "In the most threatening directions, our troops have been reinforced by artillery and tank units," he said. Russia's Ministry of Defence said its troops had captured the village of Novobakhmutivka in the Donetsk region, about 10km (six miles) north of Avdiivka.

This paper presents field results and lessons learned from the deployment of aerial robots inside ship ballast tanks. Vessel tanks including ballast tanks and cargo holds present dark, dusty environments having simultaneously very narrow openings and wide open spaces that create several challenges for autonomous navigation and inspection operations. We present a system for vessel tank inspection using an aerial robot along with its autonomy modules. We show the results of autonomous exploration and visual inspection in 3 ships spanning across 7 distinct types of sections of the ballast tanks. Additionally, we comment on the lessons learned from the field and possible directions for future work. Finally, we release a dataset consisting of the data from these missions along with data collected with a handheld sensor stick.

Multi-drone cooperative transport (CT) problem has been widely studied in the literature. However, limited work exists on control of such systems in the presence of time-varying uncertainties, such as the time-varying center of gravity (CG). This paper presents a leader-follower approach for the control of a multi-drone CT system with time-varying CG. The leader uses a traditional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller, and in contrast, the follower uses a deep reinforcement learning (RL) controller using only local information and minimal leader information. Extensive simulation results are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method over a previously developed adaptive controller and for variations in the mass of the objects being transported and CG speeds. Preliminary experimental work also demonstrates ball balance (depicting moving CG) on a stick/rod lifted by two Crazyflie drones cooperatively.

A decentralized swarm approach for the fast cooperative flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in feature-poor environments without any external localization and communication is introduced in this paper. A novel model of a UAV neighborhood is proposed to achieve robust onboard mutual perception and flocking state feedback control, which is designed to decrease the inter-agent oscillations common in standard reactive swarm models employed in fast collective motion. The novel swarming methodology is supplemented with an enhanced Multi-Robot State Estimation (MRSE) strategy to increase the reliability of the purely onboard localization, which may be unreliable in real environments. Although MRSE and the neighborhood model may rely on information exchange between agents, we introduce a communication-less version of the swarming framework based on estimating communicated states to decrease dependence on the often unreliable communication networks of large swarms. The proposed solution has been verified by a set of complex real-world experiments to demonstrate its overall capability in different conditions, including a UAV interception-motivated task with a group velocity reaching the physical limits of the individual hardware platforms.

The city government of Ishigaki, Okinawa Prefecture, has conducted its third marine survey around the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, with Jiji Press and other reporters allowed to board its survey ship. During the survey, which lasted from Thursday to Saturday, Chinese coast guard vessels entered Japanese waters around the islands and attempted to interfere with the city's ship, but Japan Coast Guard vessels blocked the move. The city survey ship's journey to the area was the first since January last year. The latest survey was joined by Ishigaki Mayor Yoshitaka Nakayama and some lawmakers, including former Defense Minister Tomomi Inada. The Japanese government did not allow the survey participants to land on the islands.