Flight Control and Collision Avoidance of UAVs

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on flight control and collision avoidance in two scenarios. The first scenario involves small-to-large UAVs operating in airspace way above buildings and into airspace where manned aircraft operate. In such a scenario, UAVs need to avoid each other, tall structures, terrain, and even manned aircraft. The second scenario involves micro and mini UAVs operating among buildings and vegetation. In this setting, UAVs need to avoid static obstacles such as trees, vehicles, buildings, lamp posts and even other UAVs. In both cases, flight control and collision avoidance are critical for safe operations. 

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) that provide insights about the state-of-the-art in flight control and collision avoidance in enabling safe UAV operations in the above two scenarios. 

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that address the following themes: 

• detection of obstacles and other aircraft in challenging conditions. This covers very hard to detect objects like wires, small dynamic objects against cluttered background and poor visibility conditions like smoke, dust, rain, fog, low-to-zero light, and scenes with high dynamic range. It also covers situations where flight speed and rotation rates are high, causing motion blur
• prediction of other aircraft motion via determining attitude and flight direction of other UAVs
• multiple aircraft tracking
• precise maneuvering to avoid collision such as tight sensor–controller integration
• safety verification
• safe flight control decision under uncertainty from sensors, other aircraft actions
• achieving near human flight performance and safety

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Rodney Swee Huat Teo
Prof. Dr. Sunan 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. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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.

• artificial intelligence
• autonomous navigation
• collision avoidance
• guidance systems
• computer vision
• obstacle detection
• decision making under uncertainty
• safety verification
• robust control
• multi-object tracking and association
• visual servoing
• conflict prediction
• conflict resolution
• collision checking
• risk assessment