Drone
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DRONEAUDIONET: Noise Suppression for Drone Audition-based Search and Rescue
2026-08-01 21:31:45Chitralekha Gupta, Soundarya Ramesh, Yifei Luo, Suranga NanayakkaraAbstract
Microphones mounted on UAVs enable aerial acoustic scene analysis applications such as search-and-rescue, wildlife monitoring, and industrial inspection. However, drone rotor noise often dominates the mixture signal at SNRs well below -10 dB, making source recovery extremely challenging. Existing enhancement and source separation methods are typically designed for near-balanced mixtures and degrade substantially in drone audition settings. In this work, we propose DRONEAUDIONET, a drone noise suppression method that reframes a source separation model as a drone noise estimator. To better model drone-dominant mixtures, we introduce a learnable mask-scaling mechanism that allows mask magnitudes beyond unity, together with an additive residual correction term for improved drone estimation and source recovery. We train and evaluate our model on a publicly available drone audition dataset and test generalizability on an out-of-domain dataset with unseen drone hardware and flight modes. Results show that DRONEAUDIONET consistently improves downstream sound classification performance, with the largest gains observed for human vocal sounds. Our findings demonstrate the importance of drone-specific modeling for robust aerial acoustic perception and highlight the potential of source separation methods for real-world drone-assisted search-and-rescue.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00875
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OmniAI: A Surface-Adaptive Aerial Projection Interface for Human--Drone Interaction
2026-08-01 15:41:36Nikita Kuzmin, Yuhua Jin, Georgii Demianchuk, Mariya Lezina, Fawad Mehboob, Ivan Valuev, Nikolai Lutsenko, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dzmitry TsetserukouAbstract
Drones in human environments often lack spatially grounded in- terfaces for situated communication. We present OmniAI, an em- bodied aerial agent that supports surface-adaptive interaction by switching projection between an onboard screen and nearby en- vironmental surfaces. A servo-actuated MEMS laser projector renders text-and-image responses from a web-augmented LLM pipeline. Projection surfaces are detected online using RGB-D sensing and RANSAC plane fitting, without pre-mapped geometry. OmniAI provides functionally equivalent voice and gesture con- trol for both drone motion and projected content. By combining speech, mid-air gestures, adaptive projection, and aerial mobility, OmniAI demonstrates a mobile spatial AR interface for context- aware human-drone interaction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00721
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MROPE: A Multi-Robot Safe Cooperative Strategy via combined Predictive Safety Filters and Ellipse-based Constraint Compression
2026-07-31 09:22:04Alice Rosetti, Lorenzo Pichierri, Domenico Cappello, Fabrizio Schiano, Giuseppe NotarstefanoAbstract
Deploying drone swarms to track a dynamic target in cluttered environments presents severe computational and safety challenges. We propose MROPE, a hierarchical strategy that decouples the cooperative monitoring mission from strict local safety requirements. To overcome the computational bottlenecks typical of dense spaces, our approach dynamically aggregates complex obstacle geometries into a single safe bounding ellipse for each drone. Methodologically, this architecture is realized by combining distributed aggregative optimization for high-level swarm coordination, a decentralized consensus scheme for the safe area computation, and local Predictive Safety Filters (PSF) for real-time collision avoidance. Virtual and real-world experiments validate the framework, demonstrating superior real-time efficiency and scalability compared to centralized approaches.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29203
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AdaAnchor4D: Anchor-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Feature Aggregation for Monocular UAV 4D Reconstruction
2026-07-30 14:55:06Peiyi Xu, Junpeng Zhang, Guanbin Li, Ronghua Shang, Mingtao Feng, Le Dong, Weisheng Dong, Guangming Shi, Jie FengAbstract
Monocular UAV videos provide valuable observations for dynamic reconstruction of complex urban scenes. However, such scenes exhibit pronounced spatiotemporal heterogeneity: different regions follow distinct temporal activity patterns, while the motion states of some dynamic regions may further evolve over time. Although dynamic Gaussian methods based on decomposed shared spatiotemporal feature fields have achieved efficient and accurate reconstruction in object-centric or relatively compact scenes, their commonly adopted fixed plane-wise feature combination mechanisms are less suited to the heterogeneous local dynamics of UAV scenes, often leading to ghosting artifacts and blurred dynamic details. To address this challenge, we propose AdaAnchor4D, an adaptive anchor deformation framework for monocular UAV dynamic scene reconstruction. At its core, Anchor-Conditioned Feature Aggregation (ACFA) adaptively aggregates shared spatiotemporal features using anchor-specific aggregation embeddings and temporal information, allowing different local units to obtain dynamic representations tailored to their local and temporal states. Decoupled Local Geometry Deformation (DLGD) separates anchor-state deformation from local Gaussian geometry deformation, while Density-Adaptive Coordinate Warping (DACW) reparameterizes feature-query coordinates according to the axis-wise anchor distributions, alleviating the mismatch between non-uniform geometric sampling and uniform grid parameterization. Experiments on UAV-Arc4D, VisDrone, and UAVDT show that AdaAnchor4D achieves higher rendering quality than representative dynamic Gaussian methods while maintaining real-time rendering performance. The code will be made publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28320
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CoRE-UIR: Prior-guided common and residual experts for efficient all-in-one remote sensing image restoration
2026-07-30 09:14:08Zaiyan Zhang, Qiangqiang Yuan, Jie Li, Ziyang Lihe, Yu Wan, Yuzeng Chen, Xin Su, Liangpei ZhangAbstract
Remote sensing images acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites are often degraded by adverse weather, illumination variation, and imaging artifacts, which may co-occur and jointly induce global distribution shifts and local structural corruption. Although All-in-One image restoration offers an appealing unified alternative to task-specific pipelines, existing methods still suffer from weak or implicit degradation cues and parameter redundancy caused by full-rank multi-expert designs with overlapping restoration behaviors. We propose CoRE-UIR (Common and Residual Experts for Universal Image Restoration), a prior-guided global-local framework centered on the Common-and-Residual Expert Block (CoRE). CoRE explicitly decomposes restoration capacity into a common dense expert for degradation-invariant restoration and low-rank residual experts for degradation-specific compensation, enabling adaptive specialization without redundant expert replication. Built on this design, Degradation Prior Embedding (DPE) adapts frozen CLIP features into an explicit restoration-oriented prior, while Global Feature Modulation (GFM) aligns global feature statistics before local residual compensation. We also construct MDVD-108K (Multi-Degradation VisDrone), a large-scale UAV restoration dataset covering both single and compound degradations, together with a real-world test set. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that CoRE-UIR improves the overall average PSNR by 1.05 dB while running 11.83$\times$ faster and reducing peak memory by 85.3% relative to the strongest baseline, BaryIR, thereby maintaining a favorable quality-efficiency trade-off. Evaluations on downstream tasks and unseen degradation also validate the generalizability of CoRE-UIR. The code and dataset will be released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27898
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Learning to Understand Body Language from Flight through Robust 3D Avatar Placing
2026-07-30 08:40:32Dragos Costea, Alina Marcu, Cristina Lazar, Marius LeordeanuAbstract
Perceiving human motion and intent at long range is a prerequisite for socially intelligent aerial robots, yet the data to learn it barely exists. We introduce Drones2BodyLanguage, a dataset grounding human motion in real UAV footage: avatars manifesting ten communicative intents are placed into unmodified 4K drone scenes with metrically correct position, scale and orientation, maintained over hundreds of frames of camera motion. Enabling it is a lightweight geometric world model of the local scene - semantically selected anchors lifted to 3D through streaming monocular depth - in which a placement point is predicted as an affine anchor combination with provably rigid-invariant weights, and re-rendered under an SVD-fitted ground rotation. Across twelve architectures on scene- and motion-disjoint splits, training on placed data lifts mean intent accuracy by a wide margin for real, retargeted and generated motion alike, with gains confirmed on two in-the-wild scenes.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27865
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FleetScape: A Mixed Reality Sandtable for Spatial Supervision and Control of Scalable Drone Fleets
2026-07-29 03:09:10Peisen Xu, J\'er\'emie Garcia, Peter Cleveland, Ooi Wei Tsang, Christophe JouffraisAbstract
As autonomous drone deployments scale from individual units to coordinated swarms, the human operator's role shifts from direct piloting to high-level supervision. Current interfaces often treat multi-drone control as a scaled-up version of single-drone operation. We instead investigate how reframing fleet supervision as spatial interaction can better support the spatial, temporal, and safety demands of complex missions. We present FleetScape, a Mixed Reality (MR) sandtable system that externalizes layered real-time mission, safety, and environmental data while enabling fluid transitions between manual intervention and autonomous supervision. We developed a high-fidelity building inspection simulation that generates and streams synchronized multi-drone and environmental data for MR visualizations. We used this prototype to conduct a user study with six experienced drone pilots managing fleets of up to 15 drones. Our findings show that FleetScape supports situational awareness through layered spatial representations and clarifies control mode transitions. However, a limit to situational awareness was observed as fleet size increases, leading to different supervisory strategies. Finally, we derive design implications for supporting scalable drone fleet supervision.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26423
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GeoMFD: Continual Drone-View Geo-Localization with Geometry-Aware Adapter and Margin-Field Distillation
2026-07-28 14:41:38Zhongwei Chen, Hai-jun Rong, Tao Zhang, Xianfeng Nie, Xiangbao Zhang, Guoqi Li, Zhao-Xu YangAbstract
Existing drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) methods are mainly developed under a static training paradigm, where models are optimized for fixed environments with all training data available in advance. However, this paradigm is difficult to extend to real-world deployment, where drones may encounter diverse environments and require multiple environment-specific models, resulting in additional storage and model-selection costs. Directly adapting a single model to new environments also risks distorting previously learned cross-view embedding geometry and causing forgetting. To address these challenges, we formalize the continual drone-view geo-localization (C-DVGL) setting and propose GeoMFD, a geometry-aware continual adaptation method for DVGL. GeoMFD combines a cold-start bootstrapping strategy (CBS), a geometry-aware adapter (Geo-Adapter), and margin-field distillation (MFD) to balance adaptation and cross-view geometry preservation. CBS initializes a stable embedding space, Geo-Adapter enables environment adaptation through controlled residual corrections, and MFD preserves similarity margins between positive pairs and hard negatives to alleviate cross-view geometry forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoMFD effectively mitigates forgetting and achieves competitive performance with environment-specific DVGL methods using a single continuously updated model.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25788
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A Unified Benchmark and Modality-Adaptive Network for Day-and-Night Drone-View Geo-Localization
2026-07-28 14:34:57Songtianhao Xu, Zhongwei Chen, Zhao-Xu Yang, Weifeng WangAbstract
Most existing drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) benchmarks contain drone imagery captured under a single illumination condition and lack geographically aligned visible drone images, infrared drone images, and satellite images from the same locations. To evaluate the generalization capability of DVGL methods under challenging illumination conditions, some methods train models on a visible benchmark and test them on an independent infrared benchmark. This protocol essentially constitutes transfer between datasets, which makes it difficult to systematically evaluate DVGL across daytime and nighttime conditions within a unified benchmark. To address this limitation, we construct IRCHN,a real-world DVGL benchmark designed for localization across different illumination conditions. IRCHN contains 26,460 images collected from 8,820 geographic locations across four representative scene categories, including farmland, coastline, forest, and urban areas. Each location provides one visible drone image, one infrared drone image, and one corresponding satellite image, which enables unified evaluation of DVGL methods across different illumination conditions and sensing modalities. We further propose the Modality-Adaptive State-Space Transport Relation Network (MASTR-Net), a DVGL framework tailored to localization under varying illumination conditions. MASTR-Net integrates modality-adaptive feature enhancement, bidirectional selective state-space relation modeling, and soft optimal transport relation alignment to jointly reduce modality gaps and view-induced structural discrepancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MASTR-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on IRCHN for localization under varying illumination conditions and achieves competitive performance on two infrared benchmarks, IR-VL328 and CVGL-RGBT. Code: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25778
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Shared Voxel-Map-Based Cooperative Indoor UAV Guidance with a Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic Controller
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This paper presents a cooperative indoor UAV guidance framework that combines a shared voxel-map world model with a multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) controller. Multiple drones fuse 360 LiDAR observations into a common world-frame occupancy map, which is converted into a compact bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and provided to each agent as an ego-aligned local crop. This integrate-in-world, act-in- ego design enables consistent multi-UAV spatial fusion whilst retaining decentralised continuous control. The policy combines BEV map features, near-field obstacle observations, and compact goal and peer-state information within a centralised-training, decentralised-execution framework. In simulation, the learned controller achieves a 90.3% success rate in corridor navigation, outperforming Astar planning, an artificial potential field controller, and a prior guidance method. To address residual sim-to-real mismatch, the simulation-trained policy is further adapted using offline imitation fine-tuning from real-world data. Real-world experiments in GNSS-denied indoor environments demonstrate stable two-UAV cooperative operation across increasingly chal- lenging obstacle layouts. The results show that shared voxel-map representations provide an effective and scalable spatial substrate for learned cooperative indoor UAV guidance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25728
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ReLATE: Reliability-Guided Evidence Fusion for Robust UAV--Satellite cross-view Geo-Localization
2026-07-28 10:07:18Haochen Jiang, Jialei Pan, Yuzhe Sun, Zhe Dong, Lecheng Ren, Yanfeng Gu, Tianzhu LiuAbstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite cross-view geo-localization matches UAV images against satellite imagery and has achieved impressive accuracy on clean (non-degraded) image benchmarks. In real-world flights, however, UAV observations are frequently affected by adverse weather, illumination changes, platform motion, sensor noise, and compression, while the robustness of existing methods under such degradations remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we present UAVSat-Deg, a large-scale robustness benchmark for degraded UAV-satellite geo-localization, comprising University-1652-Deg and SUES-200-Deg. UAVSat-Deg covers 27 corruption types, including 19 core and 8 compound corruptions, at three severity levels, supports bidirectional drone-to-satellite and satellite-to-drone retrieval as well as multi-height UAV acquisition, and contains more than 11.7 million pre-generated corrupted test images. Benchmarking representative methods under this protocol reveals substantial robustness gaps, particularly under severe and compound corruptions. To address this problem, we propose ReLATE, a Reliable Evidence Learning framework with Adaptive Token Evidence Regulation, which realizes reliability-adaptive feature fusion during descriptor construction. ReLATE estimates a structure-smoothed reliability field over visual tokens, aggregates trustworthy local evidence, and adaptively integrates it into query-derived representations; the regulated query representations are then combined with the CLS-token and GeM-pooled branches to form the final cross-view descriptor. Across both test sets and retrieval directions, ReLATE achieves the best average corrupted-test performance among the compared methods while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean images. The code and dataset will be available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25524
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Co-planning of Flight Corridors and Communication Infrastructure for Urban Drone Logistics Networks
2026-07-27 04:34:23Yingjie He, Yikang Wang, Zhenyu GaoAbstract
Reliable wireless connectivity is essential for urban air mobility (UAM) networks in dense urban environments. It is therefore imperative to carefully plan the supporting communication infrastructure for UAM flight corridors. Most existing works optimize communication infrastructure and UAV flight paths independently, often leading to unnecessary base station (BS) deployment or excessive flight detours. This paper studies the joint optimization of BS deployment and UAV flight corridors in complex urban environments, aiming to minimize both infrastructure investment and flight distance while satisfying communication quality constraints. We propose CR-CMAB, a channel reciprocity-guided combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework. The framework constructs high-fidelity radio maps using 3D ray tracing, selects BS combinations via coverage-aware CMAB search, and dynamically expands the search space by identifying promising BS locations through channel reciprocity. Experimental results from a detailed case study demonstrate that CR-CMAB outperforms baseline methods with moderate computational time, yielding more strategically positioned BSs and shorter flight corridors. This study offers a practical planning perspective for cost-effective and communication-reliable UAM deployment in future smart cities.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23989
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BC-NMPC: Battery-Constrained NMPC with Propulsion Prediction and Replanning for High-Speed Flight
2026-07-26 22:16:36Parakh M. Gupta, Matej Mihulka, Matej Novosad, Robert Penicka, Martin SaskaAbstract
Trajectory tracking performance of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) degrades during high-speed and agile flight due to the depletion of the battery and subsequent loss of maximum available thrust. In applications such as drone racing, the consequent trajectory tracking error leads to a collision with obstacles and a subsequent failure to complete the race. In this paper, we present a novel method for integrating battery and propulsion system models into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) framework to enable real-time prediction of the voltage, consumed current, power, and maximum available thrust of the platform. This enables our approach to account for the dynamic variations in the maximum available thrust of the UAV caused by battery discharge, allowing it to plan for the depleting thrust and improve trajectory tracking performance. A trajectory planning algorithm is implemented to replan the trajectory in-flight based on evolving thrust limits. The accuracy of the proposed model is verified in real-world flight experiments, while the effectiveness of the replanning algorithm is evaluated in simulation. Compared to an uncompensated flight, our novel approach demonstrates achieves a collision-free flight to achieve a 6-fold decrease in tracking Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), a 46 % increase in flight distance, and a 100 % increase in flight time in an obstacle-ridden environment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23867
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Flight-Ready LiDAR-Inertial Odometry for Embedded Drone Platforms
2026-07-24 09:44:29Alvaro J. Gaona, David Perez-Saura, Francisco J. Anguita, Pascual CampoyAbstract
Open-source LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) systems have achieved remarkable benchmark accuracy, yet current state-of-the-art implementations are primarily optimized for evaluation performance rather than the requirements of real-time closed-loop aerial control. When deployed onboard UAVs, this can introduce limitations that degrade flight performance. In this work, we identify five architectural deficiencies in a representative tightly coupled IESKF-based LIO implementation: odometry publishing tied to the LiDAR rate (10 Hz instead of the IMU's 200 Hz), missing velocity outputs, execution bottlenecks that block IMU processing, mutex contention, and synchronization race conditions. We introduce corresponding modifications including IMU-rate forward propagation, direct body-frame velocity publishing, SLERP-based smoothing, dual-executor isolation, and explicit synchronization protection. The resulting system increases odometry output from ~10 Hz to a stable 200 Hz, provides a complete Twist state at every IMU sample, and preserves continuity during transient LiDAR loss. Experiments on a Livox Mid-360 / Pixhawk 4 Mini autonomous UAV with motion-capture ground truth validate the approach. Since the underlying estimator (IESKF + ikd-Tree) remains unchanged, the proposed improvements can be directly applied to FAST-LIO2-derived implementations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22145
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Multi-Domain Physics-Based MDO of Multirotor UAVs: A Deterministic Framework for Discrete COTS Sizing
2026-07-24 03:52:36Akshay Gupta Burela, P. B. SujitAbstract
Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) design is governed by a tightly coupled system of non-linear equations spanning structural mechanics, electrochemistry, aerodynamics, and kinematics. Solved sequentially, a miscalibrated sub-model coefficient triggers a mass-compounding cascade failure--the Mass Snowball effect. This paper presents AeroEval, a physics-based, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) engine that simultaneously resolves all subsystem couplings and maps continuous sizing optima to physically purchasable, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The MDO engine is validated under a strict calibrate/test protocol that eliminates circularity: three structural/packaging coefficients are fitted on a held-out cohort of 20 do-it-yourself (DIY) and legacy platforms, then frozen and evaluated blind on 19 modern commercial drone platforms spanning 377 g to 76 kg. On the commercial test cohort the engine predicts Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW) within 7.2% Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), with a mean complexity factor $k \approx 1.05 \pm 0.08$ and $\text{RMSE}_{\text{MTOW}} = 1.59$ kg; the DIY calibration cohort, characterized by high build variability, yields 26.1% MAPE. Battery mass is predicted within 7.9% on single-pack platforms, with a disclosed systematic underprediction on redundant multi-battery enterprise platforms. A 14-parameter sensitivity suite of >300 simulations quantifies partial derivatives of takeoff mass and flight time; forward velocity diverges beyond 25.5 m/s due to cubic parasite power growth. The path-dependent mass-shedding model for agricultural and delivery roles reduces structural frame mass by up to 40.6% and energy capacity by 33.7% relative to static baselines. Typical solver convergence requires 25-50 iterations, completing in under 50 ms on a standard desktop CPU.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22768
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Declarative Problem Solving in UAM Strategic Deconfliction
2026-07-23 11:18:34Gioacchino Sterlicchio (DMMM, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy), Angelo Oddi (ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy), Riccardo Rasconi (ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy), Francesca Alessandra Lisi (DIB,CILA, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy)Abstract
The growing demand for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) introduces significant challenges in airspace management, particularly within densely populated metropolitan regions. As the number of aerial vehicles-such as drones, air taxis, and helicopters-continues to rise, so does the risk of mid-air collisions and conflicts with existing air traffic and obstacles. Ensuring safe and efficient UAM operations requires robust strategic deconfliction mechanisms. We propose an Answer Set Programming (ASP) based approach for strategic deconfliction, focusing on time synchronization and route optimization for conflict-free flight plans. The solution is benchmarked against Constraint Programming (CP), emphasizing scalability and resource use. Results show that ASP offers faster execution and better scalability for small to medium cases, while CP maintains stable memory but degrades with complexity.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21197
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Safe and Scalable Multi-Drone Payload Transport via CBF-based Reinforcement Learning with Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer
2026-07-22 19:01:57Jaeyoun Choi, Oswin So, Songyuan Zhang, Cooper Taylor, Chuchu FanAbstract
Multi-drone payload transportation has emerged as a promising research paradigm with potential applications in construction, logistics, and disaster response. However, the complex coupled dynamics among drones, cables, and payloads pose significant challenges, and existing approaches remain limited in safety and scalability, particularly in dynamic and unstructured environments. In this work, we propose a learning-based framework for safe and scalable multi-drone cooperative payload transport. We introduce a minimal 2D abstraction that preserves the task-relevant drone-payload coupling required for coordination and safety, while remaining computationally efficient for large-scale learning. Using domain randomization over team size and physical parameters, we train a fully distributed policy via Discrete Graph Control Barrier Function Proximal Policy Optimization (DGPPO), enabling robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer without fine-tuning. Extensive real-world evaluations demonstrate that a single learned policy generalizes across varying team sizes and task scenarios. Furthermore, multi-group hardware experiments show that the same policy can safely operate in dynamic environments, where other drone teams act as moving obstacles. These results indicate that the proposed framework enables efficient, safe, and scalable multi-drone payload transportation with strong generalization to complex real-world conditions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20665
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Memory-Augmented Multimodal Large Language Models for Small Object Understanding in Streaming Aerial Videos
2026-07-22 07:45:50Penglei Sun, Yehua Huang, Zhuoli Tao, Xiang Li, Runwei Guan, Yaoxian Song, Kaiyong Zhao, Henghui Ding, Bo Han, Yang Yang, Xiaowen ChuAbstract
Language-guided aerial perception aims to understand user-specified tiny targets in complex unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scenes. In real UAV deployment, the UAV must respond while it flies, so such perception runs in an online streaming manner, where frames arrive sequentially and the model responds to each one without access to future frames. However, applying current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to this setting raises two challenges. First, targets viewed from the air are often tiny, yet the visual compression in existing MLLMs treats all regions equally and discards their fine-grained details. Second, understanding a continuous stream requires past-frame context, yet retaining the entire history is infeasible on resource-constrained onboard hardware, whereas discarding it causes the target to drift or disappear. We address the tiny object and streaming challenges from both data and method perspectives. From the data perspective, we present \textbf{DroneEyes}, the \textbf{first} pixel-level and open-vocabulary referring-segmentation dataset for tiny aerial targets, comprising $2,140$ high-definition videos and $176,623$ pairs across Object Description and Referring Expression tasks, with dense per-frame masks. From the method perspective, we propose \textbf{SkyAnchor}, an MLLM with two designs to the above challenges: a Semantics-Aware Token Router that preserves small-target under a reduced visual-token budget, and a Hierarchical Memory Bank that keeps the target consistently understood on streams.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19857
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Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing
2026-07-21 15:42:35Kevin Butler, Christopher Stewart, Nils Aschenbruck, Alina Gerall, Weisong Shi, Deborah Silver, Ufuk TopcuAbstract
The report envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Potential applications include natural disaster detection drones that spot wildfire sources within minutes, medical supply chains that bypass ground congestion to reach rural hospitals, and nationwide fleets that continuously inspect bridges and power lines. Realizing this future, however, requires closing what report authors call a "capability gap," where hardware and aspirations are outpacing the software and systems needed to operate safely at scale. The report identifies twelve technical challenges that must be addressed to realize the transformative potential of drone technology: Scaling to millions of drones; AI intelligence and assurance; Edge-cloud continuum and real-time coordination; AI autonomy and agentic systems; Data, training, and validation infrastructure; Critical infrastructure protection; Building reliable fleets from non-deterministic agents; Trust, security, and distributed authentication; Next-generation drone networks; Human-AI partnership and scalable insight; Standards, certification, and regulation; and Workforce development and education. These twelve challenges and proposed approaches to them form the basis of the report, laying out a multifaceted path forward for the evolution of done technology.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19213
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CGMap: A Geospatially Aware Deep Learning Framework for Crop Gap Mapping Using UAV
2026-07-21 07:01:01Karan Sharma, Rajiv Ranjan, Dinesh Kumar, Shashank TamaskarAbstract
In India, crop germination is primarily monitored by visual inspection and manual counting, which are prone to errors, despite their crucial role in determining eventual yield potential. This paper highlights a deep learning based pipeline which uses object detection methods and drone imagery to assess and provide a precise count of sugarcane germination in fields. The approch uses a pre-trained AI model to find germinated plant sampling and identify gaps, also known as ``bald spots'', which restricts field productivity. The techniques used here relies on the YOLOV8 architecture, which was trained on a carefully selected dataset of UAV photos taken in various agroclimatic zones of India. Here, we bring upon a novel orientation-normalization technique that uses minimum Spanning Trees (MST) to account for variations in planting geometry, allowing for dependable row and column extraction across a variety of field layouts. By converting detected seedlings into spatial point clouds, emergence gaps can be inferred from the anticipated spacing between plants. A geospatial germination map exported in Well-Known Text (WKT) format is the end result, and it can be easily incorporated into GIS platforms used by sugar mills and agronomists to direct transplant initiatives. Timely interventions based on the insights provided by the algorithm can significantly increase yield, resulting in higher profits. Hence, support proper allocation of resources, avoid wastage, and enhance long-term sustainability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18779
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