  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.
