-- Recent advances in multi - agent systems manipulation have demonstrated a rising demand for the implementation of multi - UAV systems in urban areas, which are always subjected to the presence of static and dynamic obstacles. Inspired by the collective behavior of tilapia fish and pigeons, the focus of the presented research is on the introduction of a nature - inspired collision - free formation control for a multi - UAV system, considering the obstacle avoidance maneuvers. The developed framework in this study utilizes a semi - distributed control approach, in which, based on a probabilistic Lloyd's algorithm, a centralized guidance algorithm works for optimal positioning of the UAVs, while a distributed control approach has been used for the intervehicle collision and obstacle avoidance. Further, the presented framework has been extended to the 3D space with a novel definition of 3D maneuvers. Collision Avoidance, Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation, Distributed Control, Formation Control, Multi - Agent System, Obstacle Avoidance . From an engineering perspective, swarm intelligence shows how decentralized systems, composed of numerous simple agents, can achieve complex collective behaviors.

Robotic simulators play a crucial role in the development and testing of autonomous systems, particularly in the realm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV). However, existing simulators often lack high-level autonomy, hindering their immediate applicability to complex tasks such as autonomous navigation in unknown environments. This limitation stems from the challenge of integrating realistic physics, photorealistic rendering, and diverse sensor modalities into a single simulation environment. At the same time, the existing photorealistic UAV simulators use mostly hand-crafted environments with limited environment sizes, which prevents the testing of long-range missions. This restricts the usage of existing simulators to only low-level tasks such as control and collision avoidance. To this end, we propose the novel FlightForge UAV open-source simulator. FlightForge offers advanced rendering capabilities, diverse control modalities, and, foremost, procedural generation of environments. Moreover, the simulator is already integrated with a fully autonomous UAV system capable of long-range flights in cluttered unknown environments. The key innovation lies in novel procedural environment generation and seamless integration of high-level autonomy into the simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate superior sensor rendering capability compared to existing simulators, and also the ability of autonomous navigation in almost infinite environments.

Safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as quadrotor UAVs, are particularly prone to cyber attacks, which can result in significant consequences if not detected promptly and accurately. During outdoor operations, the nonlinear dynamics of UAV systems, combined with non-Gaussian noise, pose challenges to the effectiveness of conventional statistical and machine learning methods. To overcome these limitations, we present QUADFormer, an advanced attack detection framework for quadrotor UAVs leveraging a transformer-based architecture. This framework features a residue generator that produces sequences sensitive to anomalies, which are then analyzed by the transformer to capture statistical patterns for detection and classification. Furthermore, an alert mechanism ensures UAVs can operate safely even when under attack. Extensive simulations and experimental evaluations highlight that QUADFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in detection accuracy.

This paper explores the critical issue of enhancing cybersecurity measures for low-cost, Wi-Fi-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In the current work, we have explored three variants of DDoS attacks, namely Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), and TCP + ICMP flooding attacks, and developed a detection mechanism that runs on the companion computer of the UAV system. As a part of the detection mechanism, we have evaluated various machine learning, and deep learning algorithms, such as XGBoost, Isolation Forest, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional-LSTM (Bi-LSTM), LSTM with attention, Bi-LSTM with attention, and Time Series Transformer (TST) in terms of various classification metrics. Our evaluation reveals that algorithms with attention mechanisms outperform their counterparts in general, and TST stands out as the most efficient model with a run time of 0.1 seconds. TST has demonstrated an F1 score of 0.999, 0.997, and 0.943 for TCP, ICMP, and TCP + ICMP flooding attacks respectively. In this work, we present the necessary steps required to build an on-board DDoS detection mechanism. Further, we also present the ablation study to identify the best TST hyperparameters for DDoS detection, and we have also underscored the advantage of adapting learnable positional embeddings in TST for DDoS detection with an improvement in F1 score from 0.94 to 0.99.

Safety-critical intelligent cyber-physical systems, such as quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are vulnerable to different types of cyber attacks, and the absence of timely and accurate attack detection can lead to severe consequences. When UAVs are engaged in large outdoor maneuvering flights, their system constitutes highly nonlinear dynamics that include non-Gaussian noises. Therefore, the commonly employed traditional statistics-based and emerging learning-based attack detection methods do not yield satisfactory results. In response to the above challenges, we propose QUADFormer, a novel Quadrotor UAV Attack Detection framework with transFormer-based architecture. This framework includes a residue generator designed to generate a residue sequence sensitive to anomalies. Subsequently, this sequence is fed into a transformer structure with disparity in correlation to specifically learn its statistical characteristics for the purpose of classification and attack detection. Finally, we design an alert module to ensure the safe execution of tasks by UAVs under attack conditions. We conduct extensive simulations and real-world experiments, and the results show that our method has achieved superior detection performance compared with many state-of-the-art methods.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), previously favored by enthusiasts, have evolved into indispensable tools for effectively managing disasters and responding to emergencies. For example, one of their most critical applications is to provide seamless wireless communication services in remote rural areas. Thus, it is substantial to identify and consider the different security challenges in the research and development associated with advanced UAV-based B5G/6G architectures. Following this requirement, the present study thoroughly examines the security considerations about UAVs in relation to the architectural framework of the 5G/6G system, the technologies that facilitate its operation, and the concerns surrounding privacy. It exhibits security integration at all the protocol stack layers and analyzes the existing mechanisms to secure UAV-based B5G/6G communications and its energy and power optimization factors. Last, this article also summarizes modern technological trends for establishing security and protecting UAV-based systems, along with the open challenges and strategies for future research work.

Crops are key for a sustainable food production and we face several challenges in crop production. First, we need to feed a growing world population. Second, our society demands high-quality foods. Third, we have to reduce the amount agrochemicals that we apply to our fields as it directly affects our ecosystem. Precision farming techniques offer a great potential to address these challenges, but we have to acquire and provide the relevant information about the field status to the farmers such that specific actions can be taken.