Advanced UAV Task Verification: Trajectory Generation, Planning, Control and Guidance

Dear Colleagues,

In the area of unmanned aerial vehicles, with the ever-increasing advent of more powerful digital electronics, controllers, sensors, and technologies as well as the access to cost reduction, advanced controls, and measurement strategies are becoming feasible and affordable for the civil operation managed by SMEs. This improves market penetration of their robotics version where tasks can be achieved autonomously. As we can appreciate the drone's ever-increasing application in more areas of civil operations, research has continued to examine the control methods to generate advanced trajectory generation. It is become essential to contextualize and specialize the control strategies in order to target and achieve the specifics of tasks requiring very specialized performance criteria. This leads to the very significant question of task-centered approaches which will require to be evaluated, verified, and certified.

From the robotics and controls point of view, trajectory generation requires examining and studying formal methods which allow for generating proper path planning, path control and path guidance. This will include and integrate a complete mechatronics emphasis where engineering meets instrumentation, computing, computer science and mathematics. This exemplifies the necessity for systemic approaches encompassing analysis including the outcome as a bland between hardware and software with theoretical and conceptual control.

This Special Issue aims at collecting new developments and methodologies, best practices and applications of UAVs in task verification related to trajectory or path analysis where generation includes.

We welcome submissions that provide the community with the most recent advancements in all aspects of UAV controls targetting effective trajectory production as applied to achieve improved tasks evaluated in terms of the required identified performance.

We are therefore inviting submissions on, but not limited to, the following subject areas:

• Navigation and position/orientation determination;
• UAV control, obstacle sense and avoidance;
• Autonomous flight and exploration;
• Trajectory optimization;
• Platforms and new sensors on board;
• UAV control methods issues;
• Classical and advanced control approaches for drones;
• Trajectory planning;
• Task specification, verification and certification;
• Advances in vision- and laser-based navigation;
• Sensor-based controls;
• Navigation aspects of a UAV traffic management system;
• Integrated navigation approaches for UAV operation in challenging environments;
• Intelligent control application;
• Pilot modeling and human-aircraft interaction.

Dr. Luc Rolland
Guest Editor

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