This study investigates the vulnerabilities of autonomous navigation and landing systems in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles. Specifically, it focuses on Trojan attacks that target deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Trojan attacks work by embedding covert triggers within a model's training data. These triggers cause specific failures under certain conditions, while the model continues to perform normally in other situations. We assessed the vulnerability of Urban Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (UAAVs) using the DroNet framework. Our experiments showed a significant drop in accuracy, from 96.4% on clean data to 73.3% on data triggered by Trojan attacks. To conduct this study, we collected a custom dataset and trained models to simulate real-world conditions. We also developed an evaluation framework designed to identify Trojan-infected models. This work demonstrates the potential security risks posed by Trojan attacks and lays the groundwork for future research on enhancing the resilience of UAM systems.

Autonomous drones must often respond to sudden events, such as alarms, faults, or unexpected changes in their environment, that require immediate and adaptive decision-making. Traditional approaches rely on safety engineers hand-coding large sets of recovery rules, but this strategy cannot anticipate the vast range of real-world contingencies and quickly becomes incomplete. Recent advances in embodied AI, powered by large visual language models, provide commonsense reasoning to assess context and generate appropriate actions in real time. We demonstrate this capability in a simulated urban benchmark in the Unreal Engine, where drones dynamically interpret their surroundings and decide on sudden maneuvers for safe landings. Our results show that embodied AI makes possible a new class of adaptive recovery and decision-making pipelines that were previously infeasible to design by hand, advancing resilience and safety in autonomous aerial systems.

The enterprises today are faced with the tough challenge of processing, storing large amounts of data in a secure, scalable manner and enabling decision makers to make quick, informed data driven decisions. This paper addresses this challenge and develops an effective enterprise data strategy in the cloud. Various components of an effective data strategy are discussed and architectures addressing security, scalability and privacy aspects are provided.

This paper presents VisLanding, a monocular 3D perception-based framework for safe UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) landing. Addressing the core challenge of autonomous UAV landing in complex and unknown environments, this study innovatively leverages the depth-normal synergy prediction capabilities of the Metric3D V2 model to construct an end-to-end safe landing zones (SLZ) estimation framework. By introducing a safe zone segmentation branch, we transform the landing zone estimation task into a binary semantic segmentation problem. The model is fine-tuned and annotated using the WildUAV dataset from a UAV perspective, while a cross-domain evaluation dataset is constructed to validate the model's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that VisLanding significantly enhances the accuracy of safe zone identification through a depth-normal joint optimization mechanism, while retaining the zero-shot generalization advantages of Metric3D V2. The proposed method exhibits superior generalization and robustness in cross-domain testing compared to other approaches. Furthermore, it enables the estimation of landing zone area by integrating predicted depth and normal information, providing critical decision-making support for practical applications.

Landing safely in crowded urban environments remains an essential yet challenging endeavor for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), especially in emergency situations. In this work, we propose a risk-aware approach that harnesses semantic segmentation to continuously evaluate potential hazards in the drone's field of view. By using a specialized deep neural network to assign pixel-level risk values and applying an algorithm based on risk maps, our method adaptively identifies a stable Safe Landing Zone (SLZ) despite moving critical obstacles such as vehicles, people, etc., and other visual challenges like shifting illumination. A control system then guides the UAV toward this low-risk region, employing altitude-dependent safety thresholds and temporal landing point stabilization to ensure robust descent trajectories. Experimental validation in diverse urban environments demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, achieving over 90% landing success rates in very challenging real scenarios, showing significant improvements in various risk metrics. Our findings suggest that risk-oriented vision methods can effectively help reduce the risk of accidents in emergency landing situations, particularly in complex, unstructured, urban scenarios, densely populated with moving risky obstacles, while potentiating the true capabilities of UAVs in complex urban operations.

Two people reportedly are injured after a Navy parachutist crash-landed during a performance in San Francisco. The accident happened Sunday at Marina Green after one of the six members of the Navy Leap Frogs parachute team appeared to miss the landing zone, according to KTVU. Footage taken of the incident shows a Navy parachutist with a banner attached to him crashing into a crowd of spectators. The mother and her child who were struck both suffered minor injuries, with the mother being taken to a hospital for further evaluation, the station added. "Our thoughts are with the individual and their family. Safety is our number one priority," the Navy told KTVU in a statement.

Autonomous identification and evaluation of safe landing zones are of paramount importance for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of aerial robots in the event of system failures, low battery, or the successful completion of specific tasks. In this paper, we present a novel approach for detection and assessment of potential landing sites for safe quadrotor landing. Our solution efficiently integrates 2D and 3D environmental information, eliminating the need for external aids such as GPS and computationally intensive elevation maps. The proposed pipeline combines semantic data derived from a Neural Network (NN), to extract environmental features, with geometric data obtained from a disparity map, to extract critical geometric attributes such as slope, flatness, and roughness. We define several cost metrics based on these attributes to evaluate safety, stability, and suitability of regions in the environments and identify the most suitable landing area. Our approach runs in real-time on quadrotors equipped with limited computational capabilities. Experimental results conducted in diverse environments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively assess and identify suitable landing areas, enabling the safe and autonomous landing of a quadrotor.

Coverage path planning (CPP) is a critical problem in robotics, where the goal is to find an efficient path that covers every point in an area of interest. This work addresses the power-constrained CPP problem with recharge for battery-limited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this problem, a notable challenge emerges from integrating recharge journeys into the overall coverage strategy, highlighting the intricate task of making strategic, long-term decisions. We propose a novel proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach with map-based observations, utilizing action masking and discount factor scheduling to optimize coverage trajectories over the entire mission horizon. We further provide the agent with a position history to handle emergent state loops caused by the recharge capability. Our approach outperforms a baseline heuristic, generalizes to different target zones and maps, with limited generalization to unseen maps. We offer valuable insights into DRL algorithm design for long-horizon problems and provide a publicly available software framework for the CPP problem.

To certify UAV operations in populated areas, risk mitigation strategies -- such as Emergency Landing (EL) -- must be in place to account for potential failures. EL aims at reducing ground risk by finding safe landing areas using on-board sensors. The first contribution of this paper is to present a new EL approach, in line with safety requirements introduced in recent research. In particular, the proposed EL pipeline includes mechanisms to monitor learning based components during execution. This way, another contribution is to study the behavior of Machine Learning Runtime Monitoring (MLRM) approaches within the context of a real-world critical system. A new evaluation methodology is introduced, and applied to assess the practical safety benefits of three MLRM mechanisms. The proposed approach is compared to a default mitigation strategy (open a parachute when a failure is detected), and appears to be much safer.

In this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning based solution to the Powered-Descent Guidance (PDG) problem, grounded in principles of nonlinear Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Feynman-Kac theory. Our algorithm solves the PDG problem by framing it as an $\mathcal{L}^1$ SOC problem for minimum fuel consumption. Additionally, it can handle practically useful control constraints, nonlinear dynamics and enforces state constraints as soft-constraints. This is achieved by building off of recent work on deep Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDEs) and differentiable non-convex optimization neural-network layers based on stochastic search. In contrast to previous approaches, our algorithm does not require convexification of the constraints or linearization of the dynamics and is empirically shown to be robust to stochastic disturbances and the initial position of the spacecraft. After training offline, our controller can be activated once the spacecraft is within a pre-specified radius of the landing zone and at a pre-specified altitude i.e., the base of an inverted cone with the tip at the landing zone. We demonstrate empirically that our controller can successfully and safely land all trajectories initialized at the base of this cone while minimizing fuel consumption.