With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, unmanned vehicle swarms have received great attention from both academia and industry due to their potential to provide services that are difficult and dangerous to perform by humans. However, learning and coordinating movements and actions for a large number of unmanned vehicles in complex and dynamic environments introduce significant challenges to conventional AI methods. Generative AI (GAI), with its capabilities in complex data feature extraction, transformation, and enhancement, offers great potential in solving these challenges of unmanned vehicle swarms. For that, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on applications, challenges, and opportunities of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms. Specifically, we first present an overview of unmanned vehicles and unmanned vehicle swarms as well as their use cases and existing issues. Then, an in-depth background of various GAI techniques together with their capabilities in enhancing unmanned vehicle swarms are provided. After that, we present a comprehensive review on the applications and challenges of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms with various insights and discussions. Finally, we highlight open issues of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms and discuss potential research directions.

翻译：随着人工智能与机器人技术的近期进展，无人飞行器集群因其能够执行人类难以或危险完成的服务而受到学术界与工业界的广泛关注。然而，在复杂动态环境中协调大量无人飞行器的运动与行为，对传统人工智能方法提出了重大挑战。生成式人工智能凭借其在复杂数据特征提取、转换与增强方面的能力，为解决无人飞行器集群面临的这些挑战提供了巨大潜力。为此，本文旨在对生成式人工智能在无人飞行器集群中的应用、挑战与机遇进行全面综述。具体而言，本文首先概述无人飞行器及无人飞行器集群的基本概念、应用场景与现存问题；随后深入剖析各类生成式人工智能技术及其提升无人飞行器集群能力的内在机理；接着通过多维度讨论，系统评述生成式人工智能在无人飞行器集群中的应用现状与挑战；最后，本文重点阐述生成式人工智能在无人飞行器集群中的开放性问题，并探讨潜在研究方向。