Dear Colleagues,

The success of the MDPI Drones Special Issue “Urban Air Mobility (UAM)” led us to propose this new edition entitled “Urban Air Mobility (UAM) 2nd Edition”, for which we are pleased to invite you to submit original contributions.

The beginning of the 2020s finds connected multimodality at the forefront of urban mobility transformation. Cities grow larger (it is expected that the percentage of Europe's population living in urban areas will increase from today's 74% to about 83.7% in 2050 ^[1]) and increasingly face problems caused by transport and traffic (congestion costs nearly 2% of the EU’s GDP annually, while 85% of the EU’s urban population is exposed to fine particulate matter PM2.5 at levels deemed harmful to health ^[2]). To face this challenge, cities are increasingly striving to implement SUMPs (sustainable urban mobility plans) to increase the quality of life in their areas and encourage economic growth. Meanwhile, urban air mobility (UAM) offers a promising opportunity to mitigate road (surface) congestion by integrating an additional modality/dimension in the urban mobility landscape. Nonetheless, on the path to fully urban operations of capable automated autonomous aircrafts and integrated UAM services, plenty of questions still remain open. This Special Issue aims to provide a platform for bringing together research advances made over the recent years in the domain of urban air mobility, including aspects such as:

• Advanced air mobility (AAM);
• UAM operations planning and integration;
• UAM services planning and integrations;
• Path planning;
• UAV sensing (radar, lidar, camera, etc.);
• Digital twin for UAM;
• Virtual certification;
• Flight dynamics;
• Noise and emissions modelling;
• Emergency landing solutions;
• Autonomous flight control;
• UAM decision making algorithms;
• Emergency logistics.

[1] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018). World Urbanization Prospects: Ed. 2018.

[2] European Environment Agency, Air quality in Europe report (2016), Copenhagen, Denmark.

Prof. Dr. Ivana Semanjski
Prof. Antonio Pratelli
Prof. Dr. Massimiliano Pieraccini
Dr. Silvio Semanjski
Prof. Massimiliano Petri
Prof. Dr. Sidharta Gautama
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.

• drones
• urban air mobility (UAM)
• advanced air mobility (AAM)
• operations planning
• radar
• lidar
• camera
• digital twin
• virtual certification
• flight dynamics
• noise
• emissions
• emergency landing
• autonomous flight control
• decision making
• emergency logistics

• Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in Drones (11 articles)