Distributed Multi-Agent Formation Control for UAVs

Dear Colleagues,

Distributed formation control is pivotal for scalable, robust, and efficient UAV swarms. Advances in communications and autonomy are shifting systems to decentralized architectures, where the synergy of control protocols and sensing enables autonomous navigation, formation keeping, and collaborative tasks, from search and rescue to monitoring and inspection.

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) to give insights into pioneering research and practical innovations in distributed multi-agent formation control for UAVs. We invite contributions addressing the latest control methodologies, theoretical breakthroughs, and real-world flight implementations.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes, including, but not limited to:

• Robust adaptive control for UAVs under aerodynamic disturbances, time-varying delays, and switching topologies.
• AI-enhanced UAV coordination: deep reinforcement learning and data-driven approaches for formation flight and trajectory tracking.
• Safety-critical UAV navigation: distributed collision and obstacle avoidance in dynamic, constrained, or densely populated environments.
• Resilient heterogeneous UAV systems: fault-tolerant formation control under actuator/sensor failures, and cooperative control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems

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

Prof. Dr. Zhenbao Liu
Dr. Zhen Jia
Dr. Jianfeng Lv
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-anonymized 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.