Collaborative Mission Planning and Control Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Swarm Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Swarm intelligence technology is a new technology combining unmanned system technology, network information technology, and artificial intelligence technology, and it has become a research hotspot. Due to the large scale, diverse tasks, and flight uncertainty of unmanned system clusters, they pose great challenges to UAVS swarm mission planning and control. There is an urgent need to conduct technical research on collaborative mission planning and distributed cooperative control for UAVS swarm. Topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• （1）Swarm distributed situation awareness and cognitive technology:
• a）Modeling of distributed situation awareness capability of multi-agents in uncertain environments; 
• b）Cooperative situation awareness method under multi field coupling;
• c）Situation awareness consistency assessment method.

• （2）Swarm intelligent decision technology in strong confrontation environment:
• a) Swarm autonomous decision-making method based on a decision rules base;
• b) Penetration maneuver decision making of high-speed vehicle swarms;
• c) Intelligent decision making of high-speed aircraft cluster attack.

• （3）Swarm collaborative planning technology in a complex battlefield environment:
• a) Evaluation and system optimization framework design of swarm task planning;
• b) swarm collaborative dynamic mission planning technology in uncertain environments;
• d) Collaborative mission planning technology for swarm penetration.

• （4）Swarm strike cooperative task planning technology under multi constraint and strong coupling conditions:
• a）Autonomous control technology of high-speed vehicle swarms;
• b）Research on autonomous control method and control strategy of swarm;
• c）High-speed aircraft swarm control technology for topology switching;
• d）Robust adaptive control technology for high-speed vehicle swarms;
• e）Cooperative attack terminal guidance technology under multiple constraints and strong coupling.

• （5）Verification system of key technologies of swarm intelligent planning and autonomous control:
• a） Design and integration of full digital simulation verification platform for intelligent planning and autonomous control of high-speed vehicle swarms;
• b） Hardware in the loop simulation verification system of a collaborative planning controller;
• c） Verification of aircraft swarm flight test in typical scenarios.

• （6）Other relevant theories, methods, technologies, systems and platforms.

Dr. Dong Zhang
Prof. Dr. Wei Huang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• unmanned aerial vehicle
• swarm distributed situation awareness and cognitive technology
• swarm intelligent decision technology in strong confrontation environment
• swarm collaborative planning technology in a complex battlefield environment
• swarm strike cooperative task planning technology under multi constraint and strong coupling condition
• verification system of key technologies of swarm intelligent planning and autonomous control