Towards Autonomous UAV Visual Object Search in City Space: Benchmark and Agentic Methodology

Aerial Visual Object Search (AVOS) tasks in urban environments require Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously search for and identify target objects using visual and textual cues without external guidance. Existing approaches struggle in complex urban environments due to redundant semantic processing, similar object distinction, and the exploration-exploitation dilemma. To bridge this gap and support the AVOS task, we introduce CityAVOS, the first benchmark dataset for autonomous search of common urban objects. This dataset comprises 2,420 tasks across six object categories with varying difficulty levels, enabling comprehensive evaluation of UAV agents' search capabilities. To solve the AVOS tasks, we also propose PRPSearcher (Perception-Reasoning-Planning Searcher), a novel agentic method powered by multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) that mimics human three-tier cognition. Specifically, PRPSearcher constructs three specialized maps: an object-centric dynamic semantic map enhancing spatial perception, a 3D cognitive map based on semantic attraction values for target reasoning, and a 3D uncertainty map for balanced exploration-exploitation search. Also, our approach incorporates a denoising mechanism to mitigate interference from similar objects and utilizes an Inspiration Promote Thought (IPT) prompting mechanism for adaptive action planning. Experimental results on CityAVOS demonstrate that PRPSearcher surpasses existing baselines in both success rate and search efficiency (on average: +37.69% SR, +28.96% SPL, -30.69% MSS, and -46.40% NE). While promising, the performance gap compared to humans highlights the need for better semantic reasoning and spatial exploration capabilities in AVOS tasks. This work establishes a foundation for future advances in embodied target search. Dataset and source code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CityAVOS-3DF8.

Conversational Crowdsensing: A Parallel Intelligence Powered Novel Sensing Approach

The transition from CPS-based Industry 4.0 to CPSS-based Industry 5.0 brings new requirements and opportunities to current sensing approaches, especially in light of recent progress in Chatbots and Large Language Models (LLMs). Therefore, the advancement of parallel intelligence-powered Crowdsensing Intelligence (CSI) is witnessed, which is currently advancing towards linguistic intelligence. In this paper, we propose a novel sensing paradigm, namely conversational crowdsensing, for Industry 5.0. It can alleviate workload and professional requirements of individuals and promote the organization and operation of diverse workforce, thereby facilitating faster response and wider popularization of crowdsensing systems. Specifically, we design the architecture of conversational crowdsensing to effectively organize three types of participants (biological, robotic, and digital) from diverse communities. Through three levels of effective conversation (i.e., inter-human, human-AI, and inter-AI), complex interactions and service functionalities of different workers can be achieved to accomplish various tasks across three sensing phases (i.e., requesting, scheduling, and executing). Moreover, we explore the foundational technologies for realizing conversational crowdsensing, encompassing LLM-based multi-agent systems, scenarios engineering and conversational human-AI cooperation. Finally, we present potential industrial applications of conversational crowdsensing and discuss its implications. We envision that conversations in natural language will become the primary communication channel during crowdsensing process, enabling richer information exchange and cooperative problem-solving among humans, robots, and AI.