Abstract--Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as powerful enablers for autonomous reasoning and natural-language coordination in unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V) swarms operating within Internet of Things (IoT) environments. However, existing LLM-driven UA V systems typically process sensor data, mission descriptions, and control outputs in plaintext, exposing sensitive operational information to privacy and security risks. This work introduces PrivLLMSwarm, a privacy-preserving framework that performs secure LLM inference for UA V swarm coordination through Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). The framework incorporates MPC-optimized transformer components, including efficient approximations of nonlinear activations and communication-aware attention mechanisms, enabling practical encrypted inference on resource-constrained aerial platforms. A fine-tuned GPT -based command generator, further enhanced through reinforcement learning in a realistic simulation environment, provides reliable natural-language instructions while maintaining end-to-end confidentiality. Experimental evaluation in an urban-scale simulation demonstrates that PrivLLMSwarm achieves high semantic accuracy, low encrypted inference latency, stable formation control, and robust obstacle-avoidance behavior under privacy constraints. Comparative analysis shows that PrivLLMSwarm offers a more favorable privacy-utility balance than differential privacy, federated learning, and plaintext baselines. PrivLLMSwarm establishes a practical foundation for secure, LLM-enabled UA V swarms in privacy-sensitive IoT applications including smart-city monitoring, emergency response, and critical infrastructure protection.

Dynamic soaring is a flying technique to exploit the energy available in wind shear layers, enabling potentially unlimited flight without the need for internal energy sources. We propose a framework for autonomous dynamic soaring with a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The framework makes use of an explicit representation of the wind field and a classical approach for guidance and control of the UAV. Robustness to wind field estimation error is achieved by constructing point-wise robust reference paths for dynamic soaring and the development of a robust path following controller for the fixed-wing UAV. The framework is evaluated in dynamic soaring scenarios in simulation and real flight tests. In simulation, we demonstrate robust dynamic soaring flight subject to varied wind conditions, estimation errors and disturbances. Critical components of the framework, including energy predictions and path-following robustness, are further validated in real flights to assure small sim-to-real gap. Together, our results strongly indicate the ability of the proposed framework to achieve autonomous dynamic soaring flight in wind shear.

Abstract--Visual traversability estimation is critical for autonomous navigation, but existing VLM-based methods rely on hand-crafted prompts, generalize poorly across embodiments, and output only traversability maps, leaving trajectory generation to slow external planners. We propose SwarmDiffusion, a lightweight end-to-end diffusion model that jointly predicts traversability and generates a feasible trajectory from a single RGB image. T o remove the need for annotated or planner-produced paths, we introduce a planner-free trajectory construction pipeline based on randomized way-point sampling, B ezier smoothing, and regularization enforcing connectivity, safety, directionality, and path thinness. This enables learning stable motion priors without demonstrations. SwarmDiffusion leverages VLM-derived supervision without prompt engineering and conditions the diffusion process on a compact embodiment state, producing physically consistent, traversable paths that transfer across different robot platforms. Across indoor environments and two embodiments (quadruped and aerial), the method achieves 80-100% navigation success and 0.09s inference, and adapts to a new robot using only 500 additional visual samples. ELIABLE indoor navigation is fundamental to a wide range of robotic applications, including warehouse automation [1], industrial inspection [2], search and rescue, and autonomous logistics. In these settings, robots must continuously reason about where they can safely move and how to plan a feasible trajectory through cluttered, unstructured, and dynamic spaces.

With the rapid advancement of low-altitude remote sensing and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Embodied Agents based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have shown significant potential in autonomous tasks. However, current evaluation methods for UAV-Embodied Agents (UAV-EAs) remain constrained by the lack of standardized benchmarks, diverse testing scenarios and open system interfaces. To address these challenges, we propose BEDI (Benchmark for Embodied Drone Intelligence), a systematic and standardized benchmark designed for evaluating UAV-EAs. Specifically, we introduce a novel Dynamic Chain-of-Embodied-Task paradigm based on the perception-decision-action loop, which decomposes complex UAV tasks into standardized, measurable subtasks. Building on this paradigm, we design a unified evaluation framework encompassing six core sub-skills: semantic perception, spatial perception, motion control, tool utilization, task planning and action generation. Furthermore, we develop a hybrid testing platform that incorporates a wide range of both virtual and real-world scenarios, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of UAV-EAs across diverse contexts. The platform also offers open and standardized interfaces, allowing researchers to customize tasks and extend scenarios, thereby enhancing flexibility and scalability in the evaluation process. Finally, through empirical evaluations of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs, we reveal their limitations in embodied UAV tasks, underscoring the critical role of the BEDI benchmark in advancing embodied intelligence research and model optimization. By filling the gap in systematic and standardized evaluation within this field, BEDI facilitates objective model comparison and lays a robust foundation for future development in this field. Our benchmark is now publicly available at https://github.com/lostwolves/BEDI.

Abstract--Unlike traditional multi-agent coordination frameworks, which assume a fixed number of agents, UAS traffic management (UTM) requires a platform that enables Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) to freely enter or exit constrained low-altitude airspace. Consequently, the number of UAS operating in a given region is time-varying, with vehicles dynamically joining or leaving even in dense, obstacle-laden environments. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a computationally efficient management system that maximizes airspace usability while ensuring safety and efficiency. T o achieve this, we first introduce physics-informed methods to structure fixed skyroads across multiple altitude layers of urban airspace, with the directionality of each skyroad designed to guarantee full reachability. We then present a novel Continuous UTM (C-UTM) framework that optimally allocates skyroads to UAS requests while accounting for the time-varying capacity of the airspace. Collectively, the proposed model addresses the key challenges of low-altitude UTM by providing a scalable, safe, and efficient solution for urban airspace usability.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Firefighters evacuated residents and their pets from a nine-storey apartment building in Ukraine's Sumy region after a Russian drone strike. The strikes come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London to discuss the US peace plan.

Abstract--This article presents a novel coordination and task-planning framework to enable the simultaneous conflict-free collaboration of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) for aerial 3D printing. The proposed framework formulates an optimization problem that takes a construction mission divided into sub-tasks and a team of autonomous UA Vs, along with limited volume and battery. It generates an optimal mission plan comprising task assignments and scheduling, while accounting for task dependencies arising from the geometric and structural requirements of the 3D design, inter-UA V safety constraints, material usage and total flight time of each UA V. The potential conflicts occurring during the simultaneous operation of the UA Vs are addressed at a segment-level by dynamically selecting the starting time and location of each task to guarantee collision-free parallel execution. An importance prioritization is proposed to accelerate the computation by guiding the solution towards more important tasks. Additionally, a utility maximization formulation is proposed to dynamically determine the optimal number of UA Vs required for a given mission, balancing the trade-off between minimizing makespan and the deployment of excess agents. The proposed framework's effectiveness is evaluated through a Gazebo-based simulation setup, where agents are coordinated by a mission control module allocating the printing tasks based on the generated optimal scheduling plan while remaining within the material and battery constraints of each UA V. A video of the whole mission is available in the following link: https://youtu.be/b4jwhkNPT Note to Practitioners--This framework addresses the critical need for efficiency and safety in planning and scheduling multiple aerial robots for parallel aerial 3D printing. Existing approaches lack safety guarantees for UA Vs during parallel construction. This work tackles these challenges by ensuring safety during parallel operations and effectively managing task dependencies.

Recent advances in Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their promising capabilities of generating robot operation code to enable LLM-driven robots. To enhance the reliability of operation code generated by LLMs, corrective designs with feedback from the observation of executing code have been increasingly adopted in existing research. However, the code execution in these designs relies on either a physical experiment or a customized simulation environment, which limits their deployment due to the high configuration effort of the environment and the potential long execution time. In this paper, we explore the possibility of directly leveraging LLM to enable static simulation of robot operation code, and then leverage it to design a new reliable LLM-driven corrective robot operation code generation framework. Our framework configures the LLM as a static simulator with enhanced capabilities that reliably simulate robot code execution by interpreting actions, reasoning over state transitions, analyzing execution outcomes, and generating semantic observations that accurately capture trajectory dynamics. To validate the performance of our framework, we performed experiments on various operation tasks for different robots, including UAVs and small ground vehicles. The experiment results not only demonstrated the high accuracy of our static text-based simulation but also the reliable code generation of our LLM-driven corrective framework, which achieves a comparable performance with state-of-the-art research while does not rely on dynamic code execution using physical experiments or simulators.

Ramzan Kadyrov vows retaliation against Ukraine following drone attack on Grozny building, while Ukrainian officials say Zelenskyy remains unafraid of threats.

Chernobyl radiation shield'lost safety function' after drone strike, UN watchdog says A protective shield covering the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine can no longer provide its main containment function following a drone strike earlier this year, according to a UN watchdog. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors found that the massive structure, built over the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, had lost its primary safety functions including the confinement capability. In February, Ukraine accused Russia of targeting the power plant - a claim the Kremlin denied. The IAEA said repairs were essential to prevent further degradation of the nuclear shelter. However environmental expert Jim Smith told the BBC: It is not something to panic about.