Resilient and Intelligent Autonomous Flight: Dynamics, Guidance, and Control Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Autonomous flight systems are increasingly required to operate in complex, uncertain, and safety-critical environments where robustness, adaptability, and intelligence are essential. Recent advances in aerospace engineering have highlighted the growing importance of resilient and intelligent autonomous flight, integrating flight dynamics, guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) to ensure reliable operation under disturbances, modeling uncertainties, component faults, environmental constraints, and dense and constrained airspace such as urban environments.

This Special Issue will focus on cutting-edge research in resilient and intelligent autonomous flight systems, with emphasis on the dynamic modeling, guidance strategies, and control architectures that enable safe, adaptive, and autonomous aerial operations across a wide range of platforms, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cooperative multi-agent systems, and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles. Addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach that integrates high-fidelity flight dynamics modeling—encompassing multi-modal configurations and flexible and morphing structures—with advanced guidance and control methodologies.

Topics of interest include AI-driven guidance and path planning, obstacle avoidance, real-time trajectory optimization in dynamic and uncertain environments, vision-based autonomy, formation flight, swarm and cooperative operations, and advanced control architectures for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. Special attention will be given to methods that enhance system resilience, such as real-time fault detection and diagnosis, reconfigurable and fault-tolerant control, uncertainty-aware decision-making, and safety-critical autonomy. The integration of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, and hybrid model-based/data-driven techniques with classical flight dynamics and control theory is strongly encouraged.

Both theoretical developments and experimental validations, including hardware-in-the-loop simulations, digital twins, and real-flight experiments, are welcome. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a comprehensive platform for researchers and practitioners to present innovative methodologies and practical solutions that advance the resilience, intelligence, autonomy, and safety of next-generation aerospace systems with particular relevance to Urban Air Mobility operations. Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Resilient Flight Control: Adaptive, robust, and fault-tolerant control (FTC) schemes for handling system uncertainties, disturbances, and component failures.
• Intelligent Guidance and Decision-Making: AI-driven path planning, obstacle avoidance, and real-time trajectory optimization in dynamic and constrained environments.
• Advanced Flight Dynamics Modeling: Modeling and analysis of complex systems, including morphing wings, multi-modal vehicles, and flexible aerospace structures.
• Integrated GNC Architectures: Holistic guidance, navigation, and control frameworks for autonomous takeoff, landing, docking, formation flight, and UAM operations.
• Vision-Based and Perception-Driven Autonomy: Computer vision, sensor fusion, and perception-aware control for enhanced situational awareness and precision maneuvers.
• Verification, Validation, and Safety: Formal verification, validation, and certification-oriented strategies for intelligent and autonomous flight software and systems.

Dr. Davood Asadi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• resilient autonomous flight
• intelligent flight systems
• flight dynamics and modeling
• guidance, navigation, and control (GNC)
• fault-tolerant and adaptive control
• learning-based and AI-driven control
• trajectory optimization
• UAVs and aerial robotics
• multi-agent and swarm systems
• vision-based autonomy and perception
• urban air mobility (UAM)
• safety-critical aerospace systems