A trial involving thousands of flights between the US and Europe has found that planes produce fewer contrails if they follow flight paths recommended by an artificial intelligence to reduce their global warming impact. The streaks of condensation triggered by soot particles produced by aircraft engines are thought to cause more warming than the carbon dioxide that planes emit. Research has also shown that some ice-rich regions of the upper atmosphere are more likely to form contrails when a plane passes through them, and that AI can predict where these regions will be using detailed weather forecasts. We're finally solving the puzzle of how clouds will affect our climate There have been small-scale trials showing that planes rerouted through these regions will produce fewer contrails, but the practice has yet to be applied to commercial flights at scale. Now, Dinesh Sanekommu at Google and his colleagues have used an AI contrail-forecasting tool to give routing advice in a randomised control trial of more than 2400 real American Airlines flights.

A trial involving thousands of flights between the US and Europe has found that planes produce fewer contrails if they follow flight paths recommended by an artificial intelligence to reduce their global warming impact. The streaks of condensation triggered by soot particles produced by aircraft engines are thought to cause more warming than the carbon dioxide that planes emit. Research has also shown that some ice-rich regions of the upper atmosphere are more likely to form contrails when a plane passes through them, and that AI can predict where these regions will be using detailed weather forecasts. We're finally solving the puzzle of how clouds will affect our climate There have been small-scale trials showing that planes bypassing these regions will produce fewer contrails, but the practice has yet to be applied to commercial flights at scale. Now, Dinesh Sanekommu at Google and his colleagues have used an AI contrail-forecasting tool to give routing advice in a randomised control trial of more than 2400 real American Airlines flights.

Obstacle avoidance path planning for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is rarely addressed in most flight path planning schemes, despite obstacles being a realistic condition. Obstacle avoidance can also be energy-intensive, making it a critical factor in efficient point-to-point drone flights. To address these gaps, we propose EcoFlight, an energy-efficient pathfinding algorithm that determines the lowest-energy route in 3D space with obstacles. The algorithm models energy consumption based on the drone propulsion system and flight dynamics. We conduct extensive evaluations, comparing EcoFlight with direct-flight and shortest-distance schemes. The simulation results across various obstacle densities show that EcoFlight consistently finds paths with lower energy consumption than comparable algorithms, particularly in high-density environments. We also demonstrate that a suitable flying speed can further enhance energy savings.

Abstract-- We propose SketchPlan, a diffusion-based planner that interprets 2D hand-drawn sketches over depth images to generate 3D flight paths for drone navigation. SketchPlan comprises two components: a SketchAdapter that learns to map the human sketches to projected 2D paths, and DiffPath, a diffusion model that infers 3D trajectories from 2D projections and a first person view depth image. Our model achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, generating accurate and safe flight paths in previously unseen real-world environments. T o train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 32k flight paths using a diverse set of photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes. We automatically label the data by computing 2D projections of the 3D flight paths onto the camera plane, and use this to train the DiffPath diffusion model. However, since real human 2D sketches differ significantly from ideal 2D projections, we additionally label 872 of the 3D flight paths with real human sketches and use this to train the SketchAdapter to infer the 2D projection from the human sketch. We demonstrate SketchPlan's effectiveness in both simulated and real-world experiments, and show through ablations that training on a mix of human labeled and auto-labeled data together with a modular design significantly boosts its capabilities to correctly interpret human intent and infer 3D paths. In real-world drone tests, SketchPlan achieved 100% success in low/medium clutter and 40% in unseen high-clutter environments, outperforming key ablations by 20-60% in task completion.

This paper presents an adaptive path planner for object search in agricultural fields using UAVs. The path planner uses a high-altitude coverage flight path and plans additional low-altitude inspections when the detection network is uncertain. The path planner was evaluated in an offline simulation environment containing real-world images. We trained a YOLOv8 detection network to detect artificial plants placed in grass fields to showcase the potential of our path planner. We evaluated the effect of different detection certainty measures, optimized the path planning parameters, investigated the effects of localization errors, and different numbers of objects in the field. The YOLOv8 detection confidence worked best to differentiate between true and false positive detections and was therefore used in the adaptive planner. The optimal parameters of the path planner depended on the distribution of objects in the field. When the objects were uniformly distributed, more low-altitude inspections were needed compared to a non-uniform distribution of objects, resulting in a longer path length. The adaptive planner proved to be robust against localization uncertainty. When increasing the number of objects, the flight path length increased, especially when the objects were uniformly distributed. When the objects were non-uniformly distributed, the adaptive path planner yielded a shorter path than a low-altitude coverage path, even with a high number of objects. Overall, the presented adaptive path planner allowed finding non-uniformly distributed objects in a field faster than a coverage path planner and resulted in a compatible detection accuracy. The path planner is made available at https://github.com/wur-abe/uav_adaptive_planner.

Drones are promising for data collection in precision agriculture, however, they are limited by their battery capacity. Efficient path planners are therefore required. This paper presents a drone path planner trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL) on an abstract simulation that uses object detections and uncertain prior knowledge. The RL agent controls the flight direction and can terminate the flight. By using the agent in combination with the drone's flight controller and a detection network to process camera images, it is possible to evaluate the performance of the agent on real-world data. In simulation, the agent yielded on average a 78% shorter flight path compared to a full coverage planner, at the cost of a 14% lower recall. On real-world data, the agent showed a 72% shorter flight path compared to a full coverage planner, however, at the cost of a 25% lower recall. The lower performance on real-world data was attributed to the real-world object distribution and the lower accuracy of prior knowledge, and shows potential for improvement. Overall, we concluded that for applications where it is not crucial to find all objects, such as weed detection, the learned-based path planner is suitable and efficient.

In modern air traffic management, generating synthetic flight trajectories has emerged as a promising solution for addressing data scarcity, protecting sensitive information, and supporting large-scale analyses. In this paper, we propose a novel method for trajectory synthesis by adapting the Time-Based Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (TimeVQVAE). Our approach leverages time-frequency domain processing, vector quantization, and transformer-based priors to capture both global and local dynamics in flight data. By discretizing the latent space and integrating transformer priors, the model learns long-range spatiotemporal dependencies and preserves coherence across entire flight paths. We evaluate the adapted TimeVQVAE using an extensive suite of quality, statistical, and distributional metrics, as well as a flyability assessment conducted in an open-source air traffic simulator. Results indicate that TimeVQVAE outperforms a temporal convolutional VAE baseline, generating synthetic trajectories that mirror real flight data in terms of spatial accuracy, temporal consistency, and statistical properties. Furthermore, the simulator-based assessment shows that most generated trajectories maintain operational feasibility, although occasional outliers underscore the potential need for additional domain-specific constraints. Overall, our findings underscore the importance of multi-scale representation learning for capturing complex flight behaviors and demonstrate the promise of TimeVQVAE in producing representative synthetic trajectories for downstream tasks such as model training, airspace design, and air traffic forecasting.

--Simulation-based testing provides a safe and cost-effective environment for verifying the safety of Uncrewed Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs). However, simulation can be resource-consuming, especially when High-Fidelity Simulators (HFS) are used. T o optimise simulation resources, we propose a pseudo-random test generator that uses a Low-Fidelity Simulator (LFS) to estimate UA V flight paths. T est cases predicted to cause safety violations in the LFS are subsequently validated using the HFS. This paper presents PRGenUA V -LFS, a test generation tool that participated in the UA V Testing Competition organised by the Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT 2025) workshop [3].

The paper investigates the problem of path planning techniques for multi-copter uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) cooperation in a formation shape to examine surrounding surfaces. We first describe the problem as a joint objective cost for planning a path of the formation centroid working in a complicated space. The path planning algorithm, named the generalized particle swarm optimization algorithm, is then presented to construct an optimal, flyable path while avoiding obstacles and ensuring the flying mission requirements. A path-development scheme is then incorporated to generate a relevant path for each drone to maintain its position in the formation configuration. Simulation, comparison, and experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed approach. Results show the feasibility of the proposed path-planning algorithm with GEPSO.

Path planning is essential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as it determines the path that the UAV needs to follow to complete a task. This work addresses this problem by introducing a new algorithm called navigation variable-based multi-objective particle swarm optimization (NMOPSO). It first models path planning as an optimization problem via the definition of a set of objective functions that include optimality and safety requirements for UAV operation. The NMOPSO is then used to minimize those functions through Pareto optimal solutions. The algorithm features a new path representation based on navigation variables to include kinematic constraints and exploit the maneuverable characteristics of the UAV. It also includes an adaptive mutation mechanism to enhance the diversity of the swarm for better solutions. Comparisons with various algorithms have been carried out to benchmark the proposed approach. The results indicate that the NMOPSO performs better than not only other particle swarm optimization variants but also other state-of-the-art multi-objective and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. Experiments have also been conducted with real UAVs to confirm the validity of the approach for practical flights. The source code of the algorithm is available at https://github.com/ngandng/NMOPSO.