Drones
Human-LLM Synergy in Context-Aware Adaptive Architecture for Scalable Drone Swarm Operation
Sadik, Ahmed R., Ashfaq, Muhammad, Mäkitalo, Niko, Mikkonen, Tommi
Traditional fixed architectures struggle to cope with dynamic and unpredictable environments, leading to inefficiencies in energy consumption and connectivity. This paper addresses this gap by proposing an adaptive architecture for drone swarms, leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically select the optimal architecture--centralized, hierarchical, or holonic--based on real-time mission parameters such as task complexity, swarm size, and communication stability. Our system addresses the challenges of scalability, adaptability, and robustness, ensuring efficient energy consumption and maintaining connectivity under varying conditions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our adaptive architecture outperforms traditional static models in terms of scalability, energy efficiency, and connectivity. These results highlight the potential of our approach to provide a scalable, adaptable, and resilient solution for real-world disaster response scenarios.
Ground-Aware Octree-A* Hybrid Path Planning for Memory-Efficient 3D Navigation of Ground Vehicles
Ham, Byeong-Il, Kim, Hyun-Bin, Kim, Kyung-Soo
In this paper, we propose a 3D path planning method that integrates the A* algorithm with the octree structure. Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and legged robots have been extensively studied, enabling locomotion across a variety of terrains. Advances in mobility have enabled obstacles to be regarded not only as hindrances to be avoided, but also as navigational aids when beneficial. A modified 3D A* algorithm generates an optimal path by leveraging obstacles during the planning process. By incorporating a height-based penalty into the cost function, the algorithm enables the use of traversable obstacles to aid locomotion while avoiding those that are impassable, resulting in more efficient and realistic path generation. The octree-based 3D grid map achieves compression by merging high-resolution nodes into larger blocks, especially in obstacle-free or sparsely populated areas. This reduces the number of nodes explored by the A* algorithm, thereby improving computational efficiency and memory usage, and supporting real-time path planning in practical environments. Benchmark results demonstrate that the use of octree structure ensures an optimal path while significantly reducing memory usage and computation time.
UAV-Based Intelligent Traffic Surveillance System: Real-Time Vehicle Detection, Classification, Tracking, and Behavioral Analysis
Khanpour, Ali, Wang, Tianyi, Vahidi-Shams, Afra, Ectors, Wim, Nakhaie, Farzam, Taheri, Amirhossein, Claudel, Christian
Traffic congestion and violations pose significant challenges for urban mobility and road safety. Traditional traffic monitoring systems, such as fixed cameras and sensor-based methods, are often constrained by limited coverage, low adaptability, and poor scalability. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based traffic surveillance system capable of accurate vehicle detection, classification, tracking, and behavioral analysis in real-world, unconstrained urban environments. The system leverages multi-scale and multi-angle template matching, Kalman filtering, and homography-based calibration to process aerial video data collected from altitudes of approximately 200 meters. A case study in urban area demonstrates robust performance, achieving a detection precision of 91.8%, an F1-score of 90.5%, and tracking metrics (MOTA/MOTP) of 92.1% and 93.7%, respectively. Beyond precise detection, the system classifies five vehicle types and automatically detects critical traffic violations, including unsafe lane changes, illegal double parking, and crosswalk obstructions, through the fusion of geofencing, motion filtering, and trajectory deviation analysis. The integrated analytics module supports origin-destination tracking, vehicle count visualization, inter-class correlation analysis, and heatmap-based congestion modeling. Additionally, the system enables entry-exit trajectory profiling, vehicle density estimation across road segments, and movement direction logging, supporting comprehensive multi-scale urban mobility analytics. Experimental results confirms the system's scalability, accuracy, and practical relevance, highlighting its potential as an enforcement-aware, infrastructure-independent traffic monitoring solution for next-generation smart cities.
PRREACH: Probabilistic Risk Assessment Using Reachability for UAV Control
Fronda, Nicole, Narayanan, Hariharan, Ananna, Sadia Afrin, Weber, Steven, Abbas, Houssam
We present a new approach for designing risk-bounded controllers for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Existing frameworks for assessing risk of UAV operations rely on knowing the conditional probability of an incident occurring given different causes. Limited data for computing these probabilities makes real-world implementation of these frameworks difficult. Furthermore, existing frameworks do not include control methods for risk mitigation. Our approach relies on UAV dynamics, and employs reachability analysis for a probabilistic risk assessment over all feasible UAV trajectories. We use this holistic risk assessment to formulate a control optimization problem that minimally changes a UAV's existing control law to be bounded by an accepted risk threshold. We call our approach PRReach. Public and readily available UAV dynamics models and open source spatial data for mapping hazard outcomes enables practical implementation of PRReach for both offline pre-flight and online in-flight risk assessment and mitigation. We evaluate PRReach through simulation experiments on real-world data. Results show that PRReach controllers reduce risk by up to 24% offline, and up to 53% online from classical controllers.
Ukraine proves America's secret weapon works -- now we must double down on it
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume explains why President Donald Trump should not remove himself from the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and more on'Special Report.' When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, many experts predicted Kyiv's quick fall. When Ukraine pushed back overextended Russian forces, the same experts confidently said that Russia's mass -- a population almost four times larger than Ukraine -- would certainly grind Ukraine down. Triumph for Putin was inevitable. But, an odd thing happened on the way to Russia's victory parade: Ukraine is outfighting Russia.
Russian attacks on Ukraine's Kyiv kill at least 3, strike gov't building
At least three people have been killed, 18 wounded, and dozens of buildings set on fire in Kyiv, including the seat of the government, following a Russian drone and missile attack in Ukraine's capital, according to officials and local news reports. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko was initially quoted by Reuters news agency as saying that the attack early on Sunday killed an infant and a young woman, and sparked fires at several high-rise apartment buildings in the city's west and east. Medics were called to the leafy Darnytskyi district to the east of the Dnipro River, where a four-storey apartment building caught fire from the debris of drones destroyed in the overnight attack, Klitschko added. The Ukrainian news website Kyiv Independent also reported that an elderly woman also died in a shelter in the city's Darnytskyi district following the attack, although the cause of of her death was not immediately clear. The State Emergency Service confirmed at least one fatality in Kyiv and at least 18 injured.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,291
Explosions were heard in cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro, late on Saturday, as Russian forces launched another large-scale drone attack on the country, the Kyiv Independent reported, citing officials. A Russian strike in the town of Putyvl in Ukraine's northeastern Sumy region killed one person and wounded several others, regional Governor Oleh Hryhorov said. A nine-year-old child was among those injured. A separate Russian drone attack in Zaporizhia in the southeast also wounded at least 15 people, four of whom were hospitalised, said Ivan Fedorov, the head of the military administration in the region, which is partially occupied by Russia. Authorities in Ukraine's Chernihiv said a Russian drone dropped leaflets in the form of 100 Hryvnia bills, offering residents real money in exchange for coordinates to help Russia target Ukrainian forces.
'It is a war of drones now': the ever-evolving tech dominating the frontline in Ukraine
"It's more exhausting," says Afer, a deputy commander of the "Da Vinci Wolves", describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide. Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is costly – "in the last 24 hours we killed 11," Afer says – but the assaults that previously might have happened once or twice a day are now relentless. To the Da Vinci commander it seems that the Russians are terrified of their own officers, which is why they follow near suicidal orders.