The world we live in is full of technology and with each passing day the advancement and usage of UAVs increases efficiently. As a result of the many application scenarios, there are some missions where the UAVs are vulnerable to external disruptions, such as a ground station's loss of connectivity, security missions, safety concerns, and delivery-related missions. Therefore, depending on the scenario, this could affect the operations and result in the safe landing of UAVs. Hence, this paper presents a heuristic approach towards safe landing of multi-rotor UAVs in the dynamic environments. The aim of this approach is to detect safe potential landing zones - PLZ, and find out the best one to land in. The PLZ is initially, detected by processing an image through the canny edge algorithm, and then the diameter-area estimation is applied for each region with minimal edges. The spots that have a higher area than the vehicle's clearance are labeled as safe PLZ. Onto the second phase of this approach, the velocities of dynamic obstacles that are moving towards the PLZs are calculated and their time to reach the zones are taken into consideration. The ETA of the UAV is calculated and during the descending of UAV, the dynamic obstacle avoidance is executed. The approach tested on the real-world environments have shown better results from existing work.

Decentralized state estimation is one of the most fundamental components of autonomous aerial swarm systems in GPS-denied areas yet it still remains a highly challenging research topic. Omni-swarm, a decentralized omnidirectional visual-inertial-UWB state estimation system for aerial swarms, is proposed in this paper to address this research niche. To solve the issues of observability, complicated initialization, insufficient accuracy, and lack of global consistency, we introduce an omnidirectional perception front-end in Omni-swarm. It consists of stereo wide-FoV cameras and ultra-wideband sensors, visual-inertial odometry, multi-drone map-based localization, and visual drone tracking algorithms. The measurements from the front-end are fused with graph-based optimization in the back-end. The proposed method achieves centimeter-level relative state estimation accuracy while guaranteeing global consistency in the aerial swarm, as evidenced by the experimental results. Moreover, supported by Omni-swarm, inter-drone collision avoidance can be accomplished without any external devices, demonstrating the potential of Omni-swarm as the foundation of autonomous aerial swarms.

KHERSON REGION, Ukraine – The pontoon bridge had been in place for barely a day. The Ukrainian army rushed to move troops and equipment across. Then the soldiers watched on a drone video feed as the Russians blew up their bridge, yet again. "Yes, they hit the bridge," the drone pilot said matter-of-factly, peering at images beamed in from a safe distance, a mile or so away. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

There is a substantial market foreseen for autonomous UAVs including the delivery business where a number of startups are beginning to establish themselves [1]. As son as a number of such aircraft inhabit the airspace, autonomous operation with in-flight correction, rather than direct control, is expected to be the operational modus of choice. In the European airspace the SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment) process, whilst designed to enable, or at least not to hinder innovation in this market, are explicit on the safety demands on UAVs [2]. As a result, adhering to these specifications comes at considerable cost. Roughly broken down, an autonomous UAV consists of an airframe, propulsion and base station and flight controllers. Whereas airframe and propulsion require a certain co-design/co-specification effort, Figure 1: HORUS Mounted on a small Drone. Two of the three GPS under the SORA regime, at least for aircraft of similar weight antennas are visible. HORUS itself is the small, credit-card sized class, flight controllers for out-of-sight operation can be PCB on the bottom.

Since Russia's invasion began, Ukraine's allies have been sending UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) assistance. A crucial component of the war, the usage of drones is complex in legal and technical terms. But as UAVs have continued to change modern warfare, humanitarian drones carry out vital missions in Ukraine to save lives. When the war started on February 24, the non-profit Revived Soldiers Ukraine (RSU) contacted DraganFly, a North American-based drone company, to supply its cutting-edge technology. The base rate for a Draganfly drone is $35,000, but add-ons such as thermal cameras can push costs upward of $80,000.

The United States has imposed sanctions on an Iranian company it accused of coordinating military flights to transport Iranian drones to Russia and three other companies it said were involved in the production of Iranian drones. The United States accuses Iran of supplying drones to Russia for use in its war in Ukraine, which Tehran has denied. The US Treasury Department, in a statement on Thursday, said it designated Tehran-based Safiran Airport Services, accusing it of coordinating Russian military flights between Iran and Russia, including those associated with transporting drones, personnel and related equipment. The Treasury also designated Paravar Pars Company, Design and Manufacturing of Aircraft Engines and Baharestan Kish Company, accusing them of being involved in the research, development, production and procurement of Iranian drones. The Treasury singled out Paravar Pars Company for involvement in the reverse engineering of US and Israeli-made drones, without specifying which models.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have various advantages, but their practical applications are influenced by their limited energy. Therefore, it is important to manage their power consumption and also important to establish corresponding power consumption models. However, most of existing works either establish theoretical power consumption models for fixed-wing UAVs and single-rotor UAVs, or provide heuristic power consumption models for multi-rotor UAVs without rigorous mathematical derivations. This paper aims to establish theoretical power consumption models for multi-rotor UAVs. To be specific, the closed-form power consumption models for a multi-rotor UAV in three flight statuses, i.e., forward flight, vertical ascent and vertical descent, are derived by leveraging the relationship between single-rotor UAVs and multi-rotor UAVs in terms of power consumptions. On this basis, a generic flight power consumption model for the UAV in a three-dimensional (3-D) scenario is obtained. Extensive experiments are conducted by using DJI M210 and a mobile app made by DJI Mobile SDK in real scenarios, and confirm the correctness and effectiveness of these models; in addition, simulations are performed to further investigate the effect of the rotor numbers on the power consumption for the UAV. The proposed power consumption models not only reveal how the power consumption of multi-rotor UAVs are affected by various factors, but also pave the way for introducing other novel applications.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology, which is moving towards full autonomous flight, requires operation under uncertainties due to dynamic environments, interaction with humans, system faults, and even malicious cyber attacks. Ensuring security and safety is the first step to making the solutions using such systems certifiable and scalable. In this paper, we introduce an autopilot framework called "Multi-level Adaptive Safety Control" (MASC) for the resilient control of autonomous UAVs under large uncertainties and employ it for engine-out automatic landing under severe weather conditions. A. MASC Architecture In 2009, an Airbus A320 passenger plane (US Airways flight 1549) lost both engines minutes after take-off from LaGuardia airport in New York City due to severe bird strikes [1]. Captain Sullenberger safely landed the plane in the nearby Hudson River. Inspired by this story, we aim to equip UAVs with the capability of human pilots to determine if the current mission is still possible after a severe system failure. If not, the mission is re-planned so that it can be accomplished using the remaining capabilities. This is achieved by the proposed autopilot framework, MASC, which is capable of performing safe maneuvers that are traditionally reserved for human pilots.

The analysis and control of large-population systems is of great interest to diverse areas of research and engineering, ranging from epidemiology over robotic swarms to economics and finance. An increasingly popular and effective approach to realizing sequential decision-making in multi-agent systems is through multi-agent reinforcement learning, as it allows for an automatic and model-free analysis of highly complex systems. However, the key issue of scalability complicates the design of control and reinforcement learning algorithms particularly in systems with large populations of agents. While reinforcement learning has found resounding empirical success in many scenarios with few agents, problems with many agents quickly become intractable and necessitate special consideration. In this survey, we will shed light on current approaches to tractably understanding and analyzing large-population systems, both through multi-agent reinforcement learning and through adjacent areas of research such as mean-field games, collective intelligence, or complex network theory. These classically independent subject areas offer a variety of approaches to understanding or modeling large-population systems, which may be of great use for the formulation of tractable MARL algorithms in the future. Finally, we survey potential areas of application for large-scale control and identify fruitful future applications of learning algorithms in practical systems. We hope that our survey could provide insight and future directions to junior and senior researchers in theoretical and applied sciences alike.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are crucial for autonomous robots (e.g., self-driving cars, autonomous drones), 3D mapping systems, and AR/VR applications. This work proposed a novel LiDAR-inertial-visual fusion framework termed R$^3$LIVE++ to achieve robust and accurate state estimation while simultaneously reconstructing the radiance map on the fly. R$^3$LIVE++ consists of a LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) and a visual-inertial odometry (VIO), both running in real-time. The LIO subsystem utilizes the measurements from a LiDAR for reconstructing the geometric structure (i.e., the positions of 3D points), while the VIO subsystem simultaneously recovers the radiance information of the geometric structure from the input images. R$^3$LIVE++ is developed based on R$^3$LIVE and further improves the accuracy in localization and mapping by accounting for the camera photometric calibration (e.g., non-linear response function and lens vignetting) and the online estimation of camera exposure time. We conduct more extensive experiments on both public and our private datasets to compare our proposed system against other state-of-the-art SLAM systems. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our proposed system has significant improvements over others in both accuracy and robustness. In addition, to demonstrate the extendability of our work, {we developed several applications based on our reconstructed radiance maps, such as high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, virtual environment exploration, and 3D video gaming.} Lastly, to share our findings and make contributions to the community, we make our codes, hardware design, and dataset publicly available on our Github: github.com/hku-mars/r3live