Energy Efficiency of Small-Scale UAVs

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past few decades, interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been increasing significantly, with research efforts spanning commercial, industrial, and governmental domains. UAVs have demonstrated uses in but not limited to package delivery, surveillance, inspection, precision agriculture, border control, criminal investigations, search and rescue, weather measurement and forecasting, and disaster relief. The potential uses are remarkably diverse, and as UAV technology becomes more accessible, UAVs will continue to be used in new and surprising ways.

Unlike military UAVs, most commercial UAVs are powered on the on-board battery, which is extremely limited in capacity. Commercially available off-the-shelf UAV products can only fly for about half an hour. This prevents their usage in applications requiring long-time operations. Though improving the battery efficiency and capacity increases the flight time, the improvement room is small if there is no breakthrough in battery technology. Alternatives are needed to enable small-scale UAVs to fly longer.

This Special Issue addresses a broad list of topics related to the energy issue of small-scale UAVs. Papers related but not limited to the following topics are welcome:

• Trajectory planning and control of UAVs aiming at optimizing energy efficiency;
• Energy-efficient formation and coordination of UAV swarms;
• Deployment of charging stations;
• Collaboration between UAVs and ground vehicles;
• Design, flight test, and performance monitoring of solar-powered UAVs;
• Applications of solar-powered UAVs.

Dr. Hailong Huang
Dr. Chao 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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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. Aerospace 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 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.